Google Voice search is one of the fastest-growing web technologies at the moment. It involves people asking their phone a question and receiving one single answer, rather than the traditional list of results that are presented on a normal search engine results page.
One of the main reasons for the increase in the popularity of voice search is the rapidly improving ability of artificial intelligence to recognise human speech and infer meaning. And since speaking is a lot easier than typing, people have begun to adopt the technology. With this in mind, voice search optimisation has become a key feature of most experienced web developers’ toolkits.
Why should I optimise my website for voice search?
By now you should be realising that you probably do need to do at least some sort of voice optimisation on your website to make sure that you’re taking advantage of the emerging market. Although we don’t have a lot of up-to-date facts about the voice search industry, here are a few of the facts that we do have:
- There were already 33 million voice-activated devices like Google Home and Amazon Alexa in circulation in 2017.
- In 2015 65% of all US smartphone owners used voice assistants regularly. One can only imagine that this number has grown rapidly over the past three years.
- Over 20% of Google’s search queries in 2016 came from voice searches. Again, one can only imagine that this number has grown exponentially.
To put it simply, voice search was becoming popular even a few years ago. It’s all around us today, and it’s therefore essential to make sure that you optimise your website for Google voice search.
How can I optimise my website for voice search?
Now for the hard question: what should you do to optimise your website for voice searches? Should it be a major part of your SEO strategy, or something that you spend a bit of time on when you have time?
Ultimately, I’d recommend asking your web developer to integrate voice search features into your core website design.
Similarly, you also need to make sure that your content is high quality, respected, and accurate. As search engine bots become cleverer, they are more able to match user intent with websites, so keywords are becoming less and less relevant all the time.
This means that you need to make sure that your context is right. Don’t be tempted to just stuff keywords into your article to try and get it ranking highly – this simply doesn’t work anymore. Instead, focus on answering popular questions that people might ask as a voice search query.
Final Word on Voice Search
To put things simply, voice search is here, and it’s here to stay. It’s therefore important to design your website with this in mind, and to take it into account when developing a content strategy. Make sure that you create authority content that’s tailored to the user intent rather than just keywords and you should already be well on your way. Good luck!
Read more here: VOICE SEARCH – The Definitive Guide
