The rise of voice search technology like Google Voice Search on mobile devices is having a growing impact on the value of publishing regular content like blog posts for gaining targeted brand exposure online. Media measurement and analytics company comScore revealed that “50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020” – a pretty wild transformation. As a result of this search divide, there’s been an increasing number of newly voiced queries submitted to the search engines of Google and Bing, many of them local-based queries. This is the perfect opportunity for companies to improve their output of helpful and localized content, for better search result coverage and brand visibility.
Rapid Voice Search Growth
A distinct voice search audience is emerging, approaching search engines for answers and content served by websites in a whole new way. Already, “1 in 6 Americans own a voice-activated smart speaker” as reported by Edison Research and NPR. Much of this growth in voice search has occurred over the last couple of years and is continuing at a fast rate, changing the way many consumers search for relevant results. How do you make sure your website and brand are being served as priority content for a user’s voice search query? Consistent publishing of well-linked, quality website content will help you get there.
Website and Blog Exposure
Back in spring of 2016, Bing stated that “25% of searches are voice search queries” through their search engine. A surprising fact! The increase in Bing use to find answers is likely to grow quickly – Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri all rely on Bing to power their voice search functionality. The combination of these search channels alongside Google Voice Search makes building a strong collection of helpful website or expanding your blog much more important, as you can count on gaining more search visibility from relevant queries, and traffic from not just Google, but Bing and other search result channels.
For mobile devices in general, voice search is rising. Google shared this year in 2018 that “20% of all Android searches are coming from voice”, with Google Voice Search queries growing in the process.
How to Adapt Your Content for Voice Search
Here are ten things to keep in mind when optimizing your content for voice-searched queries:
- Incorporate more answers to questions to increase your reach in search results.
- Understand the intent behind voice search queries to provide targeted, relevant content.
- Provide content that’s in-depth, for the potential to rank for more related search queries.
- Incorporate images and video with optimized titles and tags if helpful to your content.
- Link between related content pieces to improve user experience and search bot crawling.
- Mark up your blog content with structured data to give search engines more context.
- Make sure blog URLs are in your sitemap and submitted to Google & Bing for indexing.
- Continue optimizing your content for SEO and engagement.
- Read your content out loud to see how it sounds by voice.
- Test out voice search to analyze the results of queries related to your content.
- Localize your content, as voice search sees a high number of local queries.
Voice Search Explosion
To put simply, voice search use is exploding. Many users have only just begun voice searching regularly – a fundamental shift in the web search habits of the public. Companies who capitalize on adapting their blog content for voiced queries will reap the rewards of improved brand visibility, user engagement, and business opportunities.
HONE Digital Marketing is a digital marketing agency based in Texas.