How to Get the Most Out of Voice Search
The world of search engine marketing is a constantly and quickly evolving one. Just a few years ago, when Apple debuted Siri, audiences were blown away by the application’s ability to help streamline their offline and online workflow through speech. Now with similar apps—Cortana on Windows and Google Now on Android, in addition to Siri on iPhones—becoming more omnipresent than ever before, search engine marketers are now looking to see how these devices will effect the way people search.
With Microsoft recently announcing that Cortana will be included on the desktop of Windows 10, hundred of millions of other PCs planning to have voice-activated search by the year’s end, and the ever-growing reach of mobile, now is a great time to look at how voice search will change the search landscape.
Firstly, in looking at the differences between text and voice search, one key distinction to look at is the fact Siri, Cortana, and Google Now all use Question Phrases. So, when typing, you might enter the word “Lowe’s” to find the closest Lowe’s in your area, when using voice search, you’d say “Where is the nearest Lowe’s?”
A study conducted by the agency Rosetta recently found that “what” and “who”-led questions are the most common search phrases in voice search. Therefore, when putting together your target keywords for voice search, be sure to put your keywords in question phrases.
Secondly, it’s important to know which programs are using which search engines. Google Now of course uses Google while Siri and Cortana use Bing. Thus, it’s important to keep your Google and Bing best practices in mind when developing your voice search strategies.
Thirdly, voice searches typically use more words per search, whereas text search tends to use two-word queries. With voice, the most commonly found query is three or four words in length. Therefore, the importance of long tail keywords—keywords with three or more words—becomes all the more important. Study your longer tail keywords to find patterns and determine which long tail phrases are drawing the most traffic. Sart to reword them as questions and then add positive or negative qualifiers to optimize your long tail phrases for voice search.
While we’re still in the very early stages of voice search and lack the substantial data we have with text search, by keeping the above advice in mind, you and your company will be in a much better situation when voice search starts to rival text search, something that will likely happen much sooner than later.
