We are living in a voice-activated world. The trend for online search is changing. Now a day’s people use voice search to search online.
People use voice search on their smartphones, tablets or voice assistants like the Amazon Echo or Google Home devices to search for information on the internet.
Google voice search by Google, Cortana by Microsoft and Siri by Apple are most popular and useful on Android, Windows, and IOS (Apple) devices simultaneously.
Here are the top-four voice assistants and the devices they are compatible with:
- Google Assistant/voice search – Google Home, Pixel phone, Android 6.0+ Devices, iOS, and Android apps
- Apple Siri – Apple iPhone, iPad, iPod
- Amazon Alexa – Echo
- Microsoft Cortana – Windows 10, Windows phone, Xbox One, iOS, and Android apps
Before moving further let us know:
What is Voice Search?
Voice search is a speech recognition technology that uses voice command to perform an online search by saying terms aloud rather than typing them into a search field. In spite of the fact that designed to be a software application, a voice search also may be used as a service by smartphones and other small Web-enabled assistants/devices.
People use voice search because their hands are occupied because it is quicker to speak than to type, or because it does not require a keyboard or screen. However, it is about more than just convenience.
People speak differently to the way they type, and they expect different responses. It is critical that search engines have the capacity to understand the context and meaning of queries, beyond simple keywords.
Applications of voice search include:
- Voice dialing.
- Carry out search engine queries
- Launching programs or apps
- Option selection
- Illustrate the details of the request.
- Requesting specific information, such as nearby restaurants, etc.
- Searching for content in audio or video files
- Directory assistance or other local searches
In simple, voice search is just a question answering system. Rather than that voice search can also be called a Digital Personal Assistant.
They are designed to help end-users’ complete tasks online. These tasks include answering questions, managing their schedules, home control, playing music, make an online booking and much more.
As discussed earlier, the leading examples of personal digital assistants in the market are Google Assistant/voice search, Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana.
These new voice devices and technology make it easier than ever for people to simply ask a question and get information from their device. This allows for a more natural way to interact with machines using a conversational voice.
Voice Search Technology Is on the Rise
Voice search using digital assistants with new smart products and more refined technology of smartphones is becoming a more typical and frequently used household item. Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon all have their own versions of digital assistants that deliver information to users quickly and effectively.
Furthermore, the technology is improving all the time. With its improvement consumers are becoming increasingly interested, which means that voice search technology is on rising and it isn’t going anywhere. In the last couple of years alone, Google has increased its word recognition accuracy rate from below 80 to over 92%, and this means devices are getting easier to use and interact with.
So just as smartphones and social media have become permanent fixtures in the digital world, similarly voice search will soon be an important part of life. At the moment, there are already 45 million voice-assisted devices in use in the United States. One in every five searches done in the Android app in the United States was a voice search.
Businesses who want to remain visible to consumers in the coming years will have to find a way to incorporate voice search technology into their digital marketing strategies.
According to Bright Local’s Key Voice Search Stats
- 58% of consumers have used voice search to find local business information in the last 12 months
- 46% of voice search users look for a local business on a daily basis
- What consumers want most: to be able to use voice search to make reservations, to hear business prices, and to find out which products businesses have
- 27% visit the website of a local business after making a voice search
- 25% of consumers say they haven’t yet tried local voice search, but would consider it
- 76% of smart speaker users perform local searches at least weekly—with 53% searching using these devices every day
- Consumers are most likely to perform voice searches to find further information on local businesses they already know about
- Voice searches are most likely to look for restaurants, grocery stores, and food delivery
- Just 18% of consumers have used smart speakers for local voice searches
How does voice search affect your business?
Voice is the fastest growing form of search. As from the above key voice search stats, you might have come to know the importance of voice search for the business.
There are many reasons why it is becoming necessary for businesses to adopt voice strategies. Voice search is a popular developing technology that will only keep getting bigger and bigger.
Just as quickly as voice search is fastest growing among consumers, similarly it is driving a need among businesses to develop a voice search strategy to incorporate into their digital marketing plans.
Also, it can help you improve the customer experience and drive more traffic to your site, and help you stay ahead of the competition. Besides that, voice search is changing the way people search for and find businesses to interact with.
Importance Of Voice Search for Businesses
Voice search is immensely important for local businesses. People are now shifting to voice search more often than typing out their queries. Therefore, marketers will need to adjust their keywords to include question words such as “when, why, how, what and where”. While these questions are usually excluded from a typed in search or traditional search. They are more often present in a voice search.
Marketing specifically for voice search with these terms will mean that your business will be available as one of the results when someone asks their digital personal assistant for a product or service related to yours.
That means that the SEO strategy of your business will need to keep up with voice search components to continue to attract the consumers who are now using voice search for searching queries across the internet.
Content needs to be optimized to be more direct and conversational to match the search results for the types of search queries.
Traffic is an important feature in an online business. The only way to boost traffic is by becoming more visible and credible. Besides that, this both can be accomplished by optimizing your site and content for voice search queries ahead of competitors.
Impact Of Voice Search On SEO trends 2020
From the insight of the current SEO trend, it may not be surprising to know that a survey of top SEO experts revealed that voice search SEO is among the top SEO trends. People are putting in money to optimize their site, based on the keywords that are not typed but said.
For more information read What is Search Engine Optimization?
One of the main reasons for these changes is the fact that people interact with search queries differently. They are posed vocally rather than textually. Besides that, voice queries tend to be slightly longer than text searches, and you can address this by incorporating some longer keyword phrases into your content.
According to Campaign, “Voice search queries are usually longer than text searches and characterized by a question—typically three to five keywords long and starting with who, what, when, where, why, and how ”
The working of voice search works is very simple. The voice command is first fetched and then recognized. The recognized speech is then converted into text. The text so obtained becomes the keyword input for SEO. The later part then works similar to what SEO normally works.
To know more read How is SEO Useful for Branding?
Here are some ways voice search affects SEO:
- Importance of informative and authoritative content
- Use of conversational language
- The significance of featured snippets
- Transformation of text searches into long-tail question queries
Another way that voice search is going to impact SEO is through the increasing importance of local SEO because many mobile voice searches have a local target, such as locating a nearby business.
Besides that, with voice searches, users do not see a full search engine result page to decide which link to click, but rather are presented with the top result or answer. Therefore, businesses will no longer be competing for a place on page one, but rather for the top result every time, for every search term.
Voice Search helps you being Available to Customers
The great thing about voice search is that people tend to use it when they need something specific and speedy. Moreover, people use a desktop search for something that they want to research and spend some time looking into.
A voice search is very helpful for people to make a quick decision about an item or service they need to buy or to fetch some relevant useful information.
Consumers are looking for products or services that they need at that moment. For businesses that are enhanced with voice-optimized SEO, it means that the business will be at the top of the results when customers want to make a purchase and receive great traffic.
Voice search is continuously growing and become more popular among consumers, it will become increasingly important for businesses of all shapes and sizes to include a voice search strategy in their overall digital marketing plan.
If you are optimizing your website for desktop keywords only then you are missing a noteworthy portion of the searches that could potentially bring customers directly to you. You need to focus at least some portion of your marketing strategy on voice search. This could help increase your traffic by bringing in new customers on a regular basis.
In today’s competitive online marketing, you need to stay ahead of the competition. If you want to keep ahead of the competition, voice search technology is something you cannot afford to ignore.
Voice search gives businesses an opportunity to create an enhanced customer experience. Besides that, brands that want to compete and stay relevant will have to get on board. Voice searches are the newest trend that is likely to become an important part of internet advertising.
According to ComScore “Up to 50 percent of a search may be driven by the voice in 2020”. Therefore, optimizing your website for voice is vital in 2020
Voice search is, however, just one of the trends that you need to take note of in 2020. Investing in voice search optimization will help you reach more people and gain more loyal customers. When your company comes up with the voice search results, you will be able to quickly increase brand recognition, increase traffic to your website and sales as well.
Above all, voice search might also be a great tool for increasing web traffic and beating the competition. New technology brings new opportunities for growth.