With the importance of SEO in a marketing plan, many businesses are now wondering how voice search will impact their reach.
According to a study by comScore, it is estimated that 50% of all searches will be done through voice by 2020. Tools like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant are becoming more widely used, and have the ability to connect users with information faster and easier than ever before.
According to Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020. CTA Tech found that 1 in 4 holiday shoppers used voice to help them make purchases in 2017.
With voice search expected to be the new norm, businesses need to consider how they can interact with consumers via voice.
Unlike traditional search, voice searches are more conversational, and often contain full questions instead of key terms. This means that businesses who want to attract voice searchers to their websites, need to create content that can be found, and digested within a conversational tone.
When businesses create content for voice search, they should be creating it in a natural, conversational tone that answers specific questions customers are asking. With voice search, content is not about keywords, but is instead about semantic search and building context related to answering questions.
It is more important than ever to understand the intent behind a question and to deliver an answer based on anticipated context. In order to do this you need to make use of structured data, as it is one of the signals used to power search results for direct answers. Using structured data can help search engines understand and crawl your website more efficiently and for your website to become a part of a search engine’s knowledge graph.
In short, the main differentiating factor between traditional search and voice search is the use of key term searches vs. longer more conversational searches. This means that as part of your SEO strategy you should begin to look at longer search terms, and creating more natural and conversational content.
TL;DR;
- 50% of all searches will be done through voice by 2020
- 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020
- 1 in 4 holiday shoppers used voice to help them make purchases in 2017
Last modified: December 31, 2019
