Those of you who have teenage children will be familiar with the speed at which they do everything on their phones, tablets and laptops (desktops are for dinosaurs).
Yes, typing with their thumbs they’ll leave you for dead, but even that’s pedestrian these days as voice has become their search method of choice.
“Dad, what are you messing about with text for, just ask Siri (or Cortana or Alexa…).”
So, if you still think that voice search is the novelty it was in old sci-fi movies and comics when characters talked to their watches, you need to get with the programme.
Google reports that 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile.
So what does this mean for your business and more importantly, your company website and SEO?
The ultimate aim of search engines is the same whether a query is delivered by voice or text – they want to deliver the most relevant and useful results. The differences between voice and text searches, however, can have a major impact on what those results look like.
Google remains the search engine of choice for most people, but voice search is impacting this. Why? Because Amazon’s Alexa (a voice-controlled intelligent personal assistant) uses Bing by default and so does Microsoft’s Cortana. As Alexa and Cortana account for over half of all smart assistant use, it means the majority of voice searches from smart speakers actually use Bing, not Google.
It won’t have escaped your notice that people don’t talk the same way they type. The biggest difference between voice and text searches is that with voice, searchers are more likely to phrase the query as a question. They pose such questions in a natural, conversational style and they expect quick answers to specific questions.
Ranking for voice search queries will require businesses to focus not only on long-tail keywords that feature in these queries, but also on direct answers to customers’ and prospects’ most common questions.
Voice search is all about natural language and the intended meaning behind the searcher’s query, rather than the query itself.
To optimise your website for voice search, you will have to listen to, understand, and have a feel for, the tone, phrasing and language your customers use when they pose a query.
Voice search, which is on an almost rocket-like trajectory, is going to shake up your marketing strategies and how you achieve search results. It’s more important than ever, therefore, to adopt a human ‘conversational’ style language in your website content.
For example, using text a searcher might type a query as: ‘SEO agency in the Midlands’; whereas using voice, the question might be phrased as: “Which are the best B2B SEO agencies located in Leicestershire who have experience of the materials handling and logistics industries?”
For example, questions that start with What, Who, How and When, indicate searchers are in the early stages of considering whether or not to hire an SEO agency. If, on the other hand, they use, ‘Where’ or ‘Which’, they are far more likely to be at the point where they are ready to buy.
Possibly the most important purpose of your website is to be a place where customers and prospects can find answers to their problems. You need to think about all the different things that keep your target market awake at night. What issues cause them headaches in their day to day work? What are the best solutions to these issues and how can your business help?
Your website needs to provide direct and concise answers. Quality content will include relevant long-tail keywords, but it must also take into consideration how questions will be phrased and answer them in a conversational style. If you can do this you will be well on your way to improved search engine ranking positions (SERPs).
For this to happen, however, you have to make sure you do everything possible to make your website friendly to the search engine spiders.
One way of improving your website’s readability by the search engine spiders is to include ‘structured data’ in your site. In an SEO context, structured data refers to implementing some type of markup on a webpage which provides additional detail around the page’s content.
This markup improves the search engines’ understanding of that content, which can help with relevancy signals and also enables a site to benefit from enhanced results in SERPs.
When talking about structured data for SEO, people are usually referring to the particular vocabulary known as ‘Schema.org.’ Schema.org is the most commonly used approach to structured data markup for SEO purposes. It isn’t the only one, though. Some websites use the Microformats.org, most often for marking up product reviews or defining a physical location.
Implementing structured data on your site is also a way to prepare for the future of search as Google, in particular, continues to move in the direction of hyper-personalisation, solving problems and answering questions directly.
To explore your options about how to improve your SEO and website performance, call Alan Myers: 0116 278 7788 or email: ideas@leapfrog.uk.com