Voice Search – The Statistics
Voice search has been around for a long time. It started as a fad with Apple introducing Siri in 2011. Since then, it has moved past the conceptual stage with big players like Google, Amazon and Microsoft also jumping onto the bandwagon.
Voice search has gained popularity amongst consumers due to its ease of use. It’s way easier to speak with an assistant than to type out your search query. The results for voice queries are also more instantaneous – a rapidly popularised trend whereby users want results fast and efficiently. Think Uber, where you can get a car for transport within 3 minutes.
Here are a few statistics that will convince you that voice search is the future.
- Google announced that 1/5 of their searches are voice searches.
- It’s been reported that 50% of all smartphone users use voice search in 2020.
- A 2018 studying reveals that 58% of users used voice search to search for a local business.
- 65% of Amazon Echo or Google homeowners said that they would not want to revert back to keyboard searches.
- According to a survey conducted by Adobe Analytics, the most common voice searches on smart speakers ask for music (70%), weather forecast (64%), fun information (53%), online searches (47%), news (46%) and directions (34%).
SEO Voice Search Strategy #1: Claiming Your Business
If you’ve seen Part 1 of our article on getting your website’s SEO optimised for voice search, we introduced you to the “Organisation” Rich Snippet and some Rich Snippet tools we recommend you use.
So you might be wondering – what the heck is this Organisation Rich Snippet you spoke of? Well, here it is.
Since your customers are searching for you via voice search, you’ll want to make sure that your business is optimised and visible in voice searches. This can be easily done by registering your presence online.
We recommend registering your business on as many platforms as you can. Different voice search assistants take data from different platforms to generate their results. The top 3 most used voice assistants are as follows:
- Google Assistant, which draws their data from Google My Business.
- Apple Siri, which draws their data from Apple Maps Connect and Yelp.
- Amazon Alexa, which draws their data from Yelp and Yext.
SEO Voice Search Strategy #2: Make Sure your Website is Mobile-Friendly
Have a mobile responsive website
Since most voice searches take place on mobile devices, it’s fundamental that your website also needs to be mobile responsive. It wouldn’t make sense for search engines like Google to divert the user to a non-mobile responsive website when your users make a voice search on mobile, would it?
A simple way to find out if you webpage is mobile-friendly is to use Google’s Mobile Friendly Test Tool.
With this free tool by Google, you’ll get a little memo telling you if your page is mobile-friendly. If not, Google will tell you the steps that you need to take to make that specific page mobile-friendly.
We ensure that all our websites we build for our clients are fully mobile-friendly, with the website being both fast-loading and mobile responsive on smart devices. If you want to pick up a few tricks and a consultation, check out our web design service here.
Make Your Website Fast-Loading
Are we done? Not quite. Your website also needs to load fast. Users expect your website to load instantaneously, and so does Google.
Since 1 July 2019, all new websites have been indexed using Google’s mobile-first indexing. Basically, Google has realised the importance of optimising websites for mobile and will index your website based on its mobile mode.
Google has long given fast-loading websites an advantage in search placements, and they do so by penalising slow-loading websites in search results. What’s worse is that because of the natural lower processing power of mobile devices as compared to a desktop, webpages tend to load even slower on mobile devices.
Google announced a plan to identify and label websites that typically loads slowly. The company says it may later choose to identify sites that are likely to be slow based on the user’s device and current network conditions as well.
Worried that your website might not be up to speed? There are multiple free tools available to test the speed of your webpage.
With GTmetrix and Pingdom, we recommend that you select the test server that is closest to your location. If you’re using Google PageSpeed Insight, You don’t have to select the test server as the selection is automated.
Note that results may vary every time you test the speed of your website. To be fair, we highly advise that you test your website several times and take the average reading.
We’re proud to say that our websites excel in these tests, and we’ll be happy to implement these best practices on your website as well when you engage us!
SEO Voice Search Strategy #3: Creating Blog Posts That Directly Answers Queries
The behaviour of users when they type a search and when they use a voice search is different. When users type out their search to look for a florist, they might type “florist near me” or “florist Singapore”.
Meanwhile, voice search queries tend to be different. Instead of “florist near me”, users will say “where is the nearest florist?” The keywords used are different.
Listen closely to your customers and potential queries, then curate a list of what users ask about your business. By creating content to specifically address this list, you’re increasing your chances of appearing on your viewers’ search results when they ask those questions. Nope, by content, I do not mean making an FAQ section. I mean creating an entire blog post to address that query.
Here’s a good example by Cleveroad.
We asked, “How much does it cost to make an app?” They responded with a rich snippet, with an entire blog post to support it.
In Summary
As we dive deeper into SEO Optimisation for voice search, we realised that, at the end of the day, what search engine wants is for the best and most accurate be given to the end user. In summary, here what we’ve covered:
- Voice search is the future of search. Voice search enabled devices are all around us and it is gaining massive popularity.
- Do claim your Business on as many platforms as you can.
- As the world goes mobile, so did Google, and so must your website. Optimise your website for mobile responsiveness and speed.
- Curate a list of user queries and write a blog about the query individually.
We think voice search is the future of search. Get an immediate advantage over your competitors by SEO optimising your website for voice search.