Talk to your Phone!
The internet has changed a lot over the last few years, and webmasters are struggling to keep up with the ever-changing rules of search. Luckily, the major change that people feared was coming with mobile search never actually happen. Instead, regular search optimization seemed to work for mobile search just fine. However, there is a new type of search engine optimization that you need to be aware of and optimizing for. It is Google voice search; a tool that is being utilized by mobile users for a significant portion of their Internet searches.
When people are on the go, it is a lot easier to press the voice button on your phone and make a search query that you can look at on the next red light or as soon as you have a free moment. This happens more and more often, and while mobile users are still using manual entry for most of their search queries, especially when they are entrenched deeply into their phones, it is likely that voice search is going to become even more popular than it is now. That means that the smart webmaster is going to be optimizing for it as soon as possible. Let’s look at a couple of benefits of optimizing for voice search.
The first benefit that voice SEO provides is more visibility on the featured snippets that you see on the Google page when you type something in. Google wants to answer people’s questions. That is one of their stated goals. So when someone types in something that seems like a question, they try to pull a snippet from the website they feel answers the question best. With audio, the person asked the question with their voice button and the Google assistant reads it off to them. That means that the snippet needs to answer the question the best and it needs to be short enough to fit into one of those snippet boxes that Google provides.
In addition, optimizing for voice is simply a better way to answer the demand of your customers. When a customer wants to buy a product, and they ask a question about that product, they are going to visit the website that gave them the answer that they needed. There is a level of trust that is already been billed because you were able to answer their question right the first time. Searchers use certain terms when they are on mobile more often than they do on their desktop, and the same goes for using voice on mobile rather than typing in manually.
The bottom line is that voice search is definitely happening, and there is every reason to begin thinking with voice search in mind when you start to optimize your site. If you make sure that your website attempts to solve the searcher’s problem as quickly as possible, whether that is answering a question or providing a product, then you will be moving in the same direction Google wants you to go.
