Optimise your Content for Voice Search
In the US, 65% of smartphone owners now use mobile voice assistants, an increase in more than double since 2013. With this increase not looking to slow down anytime soon, it would be safe to say that your digital roadmap and content strategy should begin to account for voice search.
With figures like these, it is clear that developments in the accuracy of voice recognition technology are definitely heading in the right direction. Approximately 90% of words are now recognised “per Google” in “low noise environments” which is a 70% increase from 2010. Similarly, Baidu and Hound Voice Search boast impressive figures, with word accuracy pushing over the 95% mark.
With improvements in the accuracy of voice recognition technology, more and more users are beginning to use their smartphone’s voice capabilities to perform web searches. This means that it is now high time to ensure that your website is optimised for voice search capabilities.
What’s in Store for the Future of Voice Search?
It is more important now more than ever to ensure that your website content is optimised for voice search. Artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning, fortified by contextual information such as location and past user behaviour will only drive future developments in voice-activated search.
As voice search continues to increase in usership it is only obvious that organisations that pay attention to customer conversations will benefit greatly. Furthermore, marketers who are able to connect their websites with their local presence will benefit favourably from voice search.
Understanding your User’s Language
While at this time it appears that websites don’t require any special markup coding to surface in voice-activated search results, it goes without saying that your organisation should already have a mobile responsive website.
To produce successful voice-friendly content, first and foremost organisations need to understand their users’ style of conversational speech. There are many effective ways of researching and gathering this information, including asking your frontline team to collect common phrases that customers use when describing their issues, or by conducting customer interviews over the telephone. As a result of this research, you will most likely find that long-tail questions will be used and optimise your content to take these into account in one of the best ways to make sure that you rank for Google Now spoken searches.
Once you have gathered this first-hand knowledge your marketing team can use this to create website content that ensures that not only are you ranking high in voice-searches, but also delivering content to your users which addresses their queries in their own language.
Moving Forward
While we may still have some time before we see voice search reach its full potential before it becomes a prominent search tool, you can expect to see the evolution of the technology. Expect to see greater synchronization between voice and wearable technology; behaviour and pattern recognition; SERP evolution and improved accent and language recognition.
