Have you ever tried to search for some data online when you were multitasking and couldn’t type the text? It would be quite challenging without the opportunity to conduct voice search.
According to PWC report, 71% of respondents would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than physically typing their queries.[1]
And what’s most important is that the differences between spoken and typed queries may cause different SERP results. Which in turn means that your competitors’ voice search optimized websites have better chances of engaging your potential customers or subscribers.
Want your website rank as high for voice queries as for the typed ones? This article will give you the six key steps to undertake for 2019.
Voice search evolution
Remember when voice search required calling a phone number from your mobile device and saying your search query?
That was what voice search looked like in its infancy (to be more precise, in 2010). And to little surprise, few people actually used it.
Since then, voice search has improved significantly.
On June 2011[2], Google announced they were starting to roll out voice search on Google.com.
At first, the feature could be accessed only in English. Today, we have a choice of about 60 languages[3] supported by Google Voice Search.
With the Hummingbird[4] update in 2013, the concepts of typed and spoken search changed a lot.
The updated algorithm emphasized natural language processing and was aimed at considering the users’ intent and the context of the query. From then on, search questions structured in sentences have returned more relevant answers.