Why Voice Search Is a Topic to Watch in SEO for 2016

While it has been on the cards for several years now, 2015 was the first year where mobile searches actually exceeded desktop ones. This is an interesting fact, given how much mobile has shaped the trends in search and online marketing over the past few years, with things like ‘mobilegeddon’ (where Google changed its mobile search so websites which weren’t responsive or designed for mobile would not appear on searches on phones or tablets) making for big stories in the industry that forced many businesses to make changes.

While we can see that the trend toward users searching more on their mobile devices is set to continue, or at the very least is not going to reverse, what we need to think about next is whether people actually behave differently when they search on mobiles.

The Rise of Voice Search

Voice search has been a ‘thing’ ever since Siri was first introduced on iPhones about four years ago. While other attempts at voice recognition in search had happened, none of them were reliable enough to really hit the mainstream, and tended to be regarded as specialist accessibility software until everybody’s favourite pocket comedian Siri came along. Now, voice search capabilities exist on just about all recent smartphones and tablets, and Siri is still going strong. Voice search isn’t just limited to mobile devices either, with things like the Xbox Kinect also allowing users to do web searches (admittedly on Bing) using voice commands.

Phrasing

It doesn’t seem that at present, voice searches behave any differently to typed searches in terms of what they return, so you may think it makes no real difference to SEO how your user base is conducting their searches. However, what needs consideration here is not what Google (or other search engines) returns when a search is done, but what search terms people are actually using. In short, do people phrase things differently when they use voice search? While research and analysis needs to be done in this area, it is highly likely that people tend to prefer question format searches when they feel like they are ‘talking’ to Siri or their other voice search assistant, rather than more shorthand search terms that are common in typed searches.

Keyword Strategies

Where this would begin to affect SEO is in terms of the keyword strategies businesses use in their content. It could be that the best approach would be to have separate lists of keywords to optimise for for voice and typed searches, or to favour one over the other. Alternatively, people may choose to simply have longer lists of keywords they want to target, to encompass the kind of phrases people use in spoken searches and the briefer phrases they type. It could be that it varies between industries and demographics whether voice search becomes the main way a given business’ target customers search, or remains a minority.

It will be very interesting to see how businesses and SEO Montreal companies specialising in search engine optimisation analyse, and respond to the changes the rise of voice search might introduce.