Voice search isn’t a new concept to any of us. We are familiar with the artificial intelligence (AI) assistants like, Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, and more. We are aware of their capabilities as well as their sassy personalities. In this article, we are going to be looking at one functionality.
Voice search, and how it impacts SEO.
Table of contents
- What voice search is.
- The top 3 benefits of voice search.
- The top 3 challenges of voice search.
- How voice search impacts SEO.
What is voice search?
Voice search is essentially search made with your voice. Instead of typing out your query manually, you tell Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, or Siri to look something up for you.
Using speech recognition technology, spoken words can be converted into text to carry out searches or do certain jobs. It allows you to find the information you need by requesting it in a more natural way. That is only one of the many benefits of voice search.
What are the top 3 benefits of voice search?
There are many benefits to voice search, but listed below are three of the most important.
Convenience
This is a big plus for voice search. You are still able to do searches without having to use your hands. Not only is it more sanitary, but it is also helpful in situations like driving, where you need both hands on the wheel. Voice prompts can also be quicker than manually inputting your request, adding another element of convenience.
Natural Language Interaction
With voice search, we can communicate what we need in a much more natural way. Our searches can be less robotic and more conversational to get the same search result. As speech recognition improves, the easier it would be to recognize spoken words.
Accessibility
This method is also beneficial to those who have a disability that prevents them from using traditional methods like typing or texting. Voice search gives them an alternative and more intuitive way of getting information.
The ability to perform tasks from multiple language queries is also a big plus. It makes room for the opportunity to communicate with people from a different country or culture than yours. I don’t think it can do anything about translating the cries of a baby, because it isn’t perfect.
Nothing is, which leads us to the challenges of voice search.
What are top 3 challenges of voice search?
We could chat about the benefits and challenges all day, but we do not have all day. This is why you will find the top three most important challenges of voice search.
Accuracy and understanding
As mentioned above these (artificial intelligence) AI assistants can be hard of hearing sometimes. Understanding different accents, dialects, or asking difficult questions like, “how are you, Siri” is still a work-in-progress.
Understanding context still proves to be a challenge for virtual assistants, causing them to return inaccurate results. We expect to see improvements as AI evolves and more people continue to use them.
Lack of privacy
Always a concern in the digital space, is privacy and security. Users may be worried that their voice is being recorded and stored to better understand your query due to your accent or other voice patterns. This is why it’s important for companies to be transparent about the data they’ll be collecting when performing these actions.
Lack of visual feedback
For those seeking a visual representation of data, having information yelled at us is useless. The effectiveness of a graph being read to you isn’t very high. Fortunately, some virtual assistants understand this, and a lot of the time will give a form of visual feedback.
3 Ways voice search impacts SEO
Voice search would have a direct impact on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Listed are the top three.
Conversational queries
The types of queries will be less robotic and more conversational. This means that optimising for long-tail keywords would be key. Your SEO strategy will need to be geared to benefit more from conversational search results.
Mobile SEO
A lot a voice searches are made from a mobile device. Enhancing your website’s mobile version is paramount to exploiting the benefits of voice search. Your website’s performance, like site speed and mobile usability are areas you’re going to want to look at thoroughly.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Writing content to match user intent will become even more important. You would need to write content that directly answers a question, and curate it for a conversational input.
Final thoughts
Voice search has got its perks, but still isn’t perfect. That is why most of prefer manually searching things up. With the rise in artificial intelligence, we’ll see this feature improve over time. Then SEO strategies would have to adapt to that search method.