Today launched the first day of Search Marketing Expo in Silicon Valley and one of the early topics of discussion was Voice Search with Google Engineering Director Behshad Behzadi. We know that mobile search is on the rise and more and more of those searches are being done through voice recognition than conventional keyboards each day, but does that matter to SEO specialists and Digital Marketers or is it just something for Google to worry about?
Voice Search Should Be Part of Your SEO and Content Plan
If you want to be ahead of the marketing curve you need to develop an SEO plan with voice search in mind. Why you might ask?
Because Voice Will Change How We Search The Web
It sounds crazy. What’s the difference between conventional searches through your keyboard and through voice? They should be the same right? Well, they aren’t and here’s why.
Most people when searching with Google type in shorthand. We leave out a lot of words and try to get the most information related to our search with the least amount of keywords possible. If you are targeting longtail keywords for a search on “The best pizza in New York”, you would probably target “best pizza New York”, which would most likely be the user’s query.
Voice Search Is More Conversational
Now that a user is speaking rather than typing, they will have a more conversational and longer query for Google. Using the pizza example, they might say “What is the best pepperoni pizza slice in New York”.
The Disconnect Between Voice and Keyboard
If you want to thrive and continue great SERP rankings in the future, you need to begin adapting your SEO and marketing strategy with voice search in mind. What does that mean to your approach?
- Write content that is more conversational.
- Target keywords that are geared more towards what people say, not what machines think.
- Include more “stop words” in your keyword terms.
What are Stop Terms?
Stop terms are common words that search engines typically ignore. Words like “and” “this” “is”, etc. They are words Search Engines and SEO people ignore. With conventional keyboard searching it makes sense that these words are ignored as even the user will ignore them in order to type a quicker, more efficient query. But with voice search stop words may be a thing of the past.
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing has been around since 1950’s but is the future of voice search and search in general. Because users surfing with voice search results in more natural speaking sentences it’s only safe to assume search engines will move more away from machine like terms using stop words into something more human like. We have already seen Google talk about moving away from keywords and instead focusing on great content so it makes sense that natural speaking styles are reflected in future ranking results.
Summary
So if you are writing your content with machines and keyboards in mind it’s time to move onto creating more conversational content and keywords. The future is “hear” and it sounds good.
