The Future that is…. Voice search
The great thing about the future is that no-one can know exactly what’s going to happen, but you can have fun throwing out wild predictions, which most people will have forgotten about by the time we actually get there.
That’s why you get so many sweeping, ambitious, and often contradictory forecasts doing the rounds – especially with a futuristic technology like voice.
Voice search is undeniably growing at a rapid pace, and for good reason —it’s fast, convenient, allows you to search on the go, and it’s just cool. Even better, as the technology behind voice search services like Siri and Cortana improves, it’s becoming increasingly reliable.
The prediction by Com score that 50% of searches will be made through voice by 2020 has been widely reported.
Whether it gets there in this time frame or not, the growth stats to-date are undeniable Currently, smart devices such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home have their uses, from playing music or answering quick questions such as ‘what’s the weather?’ or ‘what time is it in Bangalore?’
We’re at a stage where it’s still largely a bit of fun. But for behaviors to really shift, it needs to go to the next level.
For adoption to become more widespread, voice search has to be more useful than what we currently have and one of the key reasons we’re seeing growth in voice queries is because it removes friction.
What can be done to be ready for the revolution?
Tips to optimize for voice search
It’s clear that context and conversational search will become more important as voice search continues to evolve. So how does that change your SEO strategy? Here are are some effective ways to optimize your site for voice search.
1) Mobile friendly site – This is an absolute must as the majority of voice searches start on a mobile device. Designing your website to be mobile friendly will also ensure that your pages perform well on all devices.
2) Keep all your resources crawl able – Make sure your mobile site doesn’t block CSS, JavaScript, images, videos, etc.
3) Avoid flash – Flash isn’t supported by most mobile browsers. To make sure mobile visitors can access all content on your site, it’s best to avoid the use of Flash on your mobile pages.
4) Optimise load time – Ensure you provide a quick mobile user experience.
5) Local intent – Voice search is becoming a fundamental aspect of local search. The very nature of local search is its local intent i.e. ‘restaurants near me’. You must rank high enough in local search to be selected by the digital assistant.
6) Call tracking – Consumers still regard the telephone as the quickest response method. For example, if a user has used voice search to find local restaurants, they’re going to find it much quicker and easier to call the restaurant from the results listed to book. For this reason, call tracking software will be crucial as it helps the business to identify which channels, campaigns or ads are generating phone call conversions. By integrating call tracking from suppliers, your business can also discover which landing pages aggregated in the search engine results are generating high volumes of phone calls, making it possible to monitor the date and time of a call and create detailed reports on the return on investment (ROI) for your individual marketing channels.
7) Add FAQs – Voice search users are normally looking for quick answers. The content of the FAQs is crucial in helping the search engines identify quick answers to common questions. With voice searches many queries begin with Who, What, Where, Why and How. Make sure you use the adverbs when creating questions for your FAQs page.
When you look at what happened with mobile, there are companies with billion-dollar valuations based purely on being an app on the platform (Uber, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tinder, Instagram etc).
Voice search queries are a big opportunity to capture organic branding – but the big winners will likely be those who build apps on the voice platform.
While the competition is low, now is the time to take advantage of being early. This is only just getting started.