Voice Search Optimization On The Bright Side for SEO Strategies
- With the rising usage of voice search and the ease it brings to the overall user experience, voice search has undeniably become an essential component of the search engine optimization that SEO specialist must look up to.
- Technology has been adding wheels to comfort, making lives more simplified. Various devices like apple’s siri, Amazon’s Alexa, google assistant and Bixby have made search experience a lot more user-friendly. while voice search can be considered as a great example of for this, it now plays a major role in mobile searches.
Statistics demonstrating the expanding numbers of mobile searches and mobile voice searches
- In the year of 2018, mobile devices constituted about half of the all organic google searches made that year.
- In the same year, almost 64% paid to google search clicks related to mobile searches, with mobile phones composing 56% of total clicks.
- As per alpine.ai. , as of January 2018, there were an estimated one billion searches per month.
- According to the official google report, about 55% of teenagers and 44% of adults use mobile search more than twice a day.
- This is expected to increase threefold by the year 2020.
- According to a report by Comscore, 50% of all searches will be by voice search by 2020.
- As per Gartner, about 30% of searches will be made without a screen by 2020.
“thus with the surging value for searches made through mobile devices particularly voice searches has made voice search optimization now an unskippable part of search engine optimization practices.”
When did it begin??
- Voice search is basically a process of feeding your inquiries to a device through speaking.
- It all began with the inception of voice technology in 1877, back then it was not very accurate as the devices could only read a few words.
By 2014, speech recognition constantly enhanced becoming available on a large number of devices, progressing day by day.
How actually does voice work
- Since decades scientists have dreamt of a device that can communicate just like humans do, this has been made possible through voice recognition.
- When humans listen to a voice they, it heard in the form of sound pockets called “phones”, these sounds then turn into letters and words that our brains can intercept.
- The parallel of “phones” is “phonemes” which is received by our brains.
- Speech recognition technology replicates this exact phenomenon, if “phones” are the inputs given to the device, “phonemes” are the equivalents taken by the devices.
These are the four stages by which a device converts a from different language and accent into the text:
- Matching: the words of speech are recognized by a device by comparing it with the ones stored in it.
- Pattern and feature analysis: each word id broken to bits and interpreted as vowels.
- Language modeling and statistical analysis: in this the grammar and sound patterns are analyzed to increase accuracy.
- Artificial neural networks: after immense training the artificial intelligence or so-called as voice search engine recognizes the voice and converts it into text.
Key points to consider for best voice search optimization results
- An understanding of what people search for:
- This is made possible by realizing the intent of the user as to what are the topics they search for through voice recognition.
- while 56% of consumers have a voice search to get local business info.
- 46% of voice searchers use it to find local businesses on a daily basis.
- The remaining proportion uses it to find locations, discounts and other offers.
- Hence local SEO concepts and local my business listing practices are of great importance in voice search optimization.
- Length of the query:
- Voice searches are usually long for the reason that when we speak we end up using more than when we type.
- For example, if want to know about a recipe, instead of saying “strawberry cake”, you would ask “how to make a strawberry cake”.
- Hence the use of long tail keywords is the key.
- Building an faq’s page:
- When you ask questions like “ where can I find ac services store in my locality” “ how to prepare pasta” or “ when does a particular festival begin” if you have ever observed there is an answer box that pops up on top of the SERP( search engine result page).
- This answer box consists of featured snippets from a site and so the users wouldn’t have to scroll down for getting the answers.
- Hence to get featured at the top of the SERP, all you need is not even a page 1 ranking but an faq’s page customized with potential keywords.
To get a list of the commonly posed faq’s one can use the faq fox and then enter the relevant keywords based on the topic.
