Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa, Amazon Echo. These voice-controlled digital assistants are the future of how people will search for day to day questions on the internet. How people search online has evolved from using desktop computers, to typing searches into a mobile device, and now searching on their devices using their voice.
In voice search, users speak to a digital assistant like Siri to return search results for a query. It’s an incredibly quick way of searching that you can use hands-free. This is a huge bonus in our fast-paced, mobile world, especially since humans speak around 4 times faster than they type.
One reason for the rapid adoption of voice search is that people driving cars can now find out information without being pulled over by the police. Using voice search in the car is the second most common reason why people are using voice search, behind queries to do with the home.
Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, predicts that by 2020 50% of all searches will be made with either images or voice search. It is therefore vital that companies prepare for this growing trend of more conversational search practices. Websites should optimise their content to include long-tail phrases and they should answer common industry queries within the content of their landing pages.
With voice search naturally comes different pronunciations of your brand. These digital assistants are becoming smarter every day, and while they can accommodate for different accents and ways or pronouncing brands, they do sometimes make mistakes.
All Response Media Viewpoint
Voice search is still growing and developing. We advise clients to incorporate conversational optimisations into their content when voice is a more dominant search method. For voice search, long-tail keywords are preferable to overhead keywords. Getting ahead of the curve is a great way of driving traffic to your website, whilst your competitors aren’t preparing for the future of search.
