OK Google, will Google Voice Search dominate the world in 2019?
According to Fast Company interview in 2014, Andrew Ng, a chief scientist at Baidu, predicted that in five years time at least 50 percent of all searches are going to be either through images or speech – and the five-years he mentioned back then is now, 2019.
Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal, did agree with Ng’s statement. Mr. Bengio said that “replacing text search by voice search is clearly to happen more and more, as speech recognition improves.” Thus, voice search will likely to dominate in 2019 than before. It is also estimated that by 2020, 30 percent of browsing will be done without a screen and 50 percent of all searches will be conducted by voice.
See also: How to Think Like a Futurist
To support the data, Alpine AI conducted a research regarding voice search. The findings suggested that by January 2018, there were an average of one billion voice searches per month. Hence, it proved that voice search is on the rise. Likewise, searching via voice is more effective than long typing.
Then the question arises, how do you optimise your SEO for business in the era of voice search? Be it traditional search or voice search, SEO is still the number one measurement to gain traffic. And there are ways to optimise your search listing using voice search. Here are 4 tips from Gabriel Shaoolian:
Tips 1 – Make sure that your website loads fast
Same as traditional SEO, voice search loves websites that load quickly. Therefore you should ensure that:
Tips 2 – Write the way you speak
If you usually write bullet-point and short title to make the content looks concise and good, voice search will demand conversely. For example, you might write “Top Tools to Improve Website” into your article’s title, and people might “actually” type the same. However, if they use voice search, a user might say, “What are the best tools to improve websites?” Therefore to ensure that your SEO is optimised, you should use the long-tail keywords that sounds natural than the short one.
Also, you should keep the phrases short and simple. Usually, voice search result is written at a 9th-grade reading level at most. Although your information might be high-level, you should break it down to sentences that are easy to comprehend.
More tip: Even though the phrases should be short, long-form one still ranks better. So, aim for web page content that lays between 1850 and 2500 words.
Tips 3 – Include featured snippet of content
A featured snippet called as position zero, answer box, or quick answers is an essentially answer summary from a web page. For identifiable featured snippet, you should include a concise summary of your main content above the fold under 29 words. Sections that use bullet point, list, and H-tags are easily read by Google and so, it performs well. Also, be sure to include your long-tail keywords within featured snippet.
Tips 4 – Concentrate on local searches
Voice search queries are looking for location-based content. Thus, try to use phrases that invest in local content such as, “What are the best tools to improve my cooking websites?” It probably will not result directly on your Google Analytics reports, but still it drives traffic to your web.
For example, at first Google will read result from voice search listing such as, “According to….” This of course will increase brand awareness. Then, users can scroll through written dictations of search result. This will enable them to navigate to site. Thus, it will increase organic traffic.
Read also: SEO Writing Tips in 2019 & How to Actually Rank on Google
