Voice search is an emerging technology that allows users to access Internet search results using nothing more than a smart device and their voice.
There are plenty of such services out commercial property owners database there, like the Google Assistant built into every Android phone or Apple’s famous SIRI. Even Amazon has jumped into this lane with the introduction of Alexa, a voice-activated smart home assistant.
This type of search is still in its early stages, but has been growing at an increasing rate.
web voice search
Photo by Buro Millennial from Pexels
We all know that “content is king” and this is precisely where your voice search optimization should start.
On average, voice searches are longer terms than the typical keyword. People in conversational mode tend to ramble on with voice search due to their conversational style, which has forced Google to understand colloquialisms and the use of prepositions.
With that, thinking in terms of super long tail custom keywords is the secret to optimization, but before we dive into that, there are a few important mini steps before you start adding content to attract these types of internet searches for your brand.
Decide who your audience is. Who are you writing for? Who is your Buyer Persona ?
You need to ask yourself, “What problems can I solve for my potential customer?” and then make a list of common customer service questions you receive.
Once you have this information at hand, you should have at least three types of buyer personas.
You should not forget about Rank Brain. Rank Brain is a Google machine learning AI that was developed by Google to try to understand never-before-searched queries that will tailor search results based on the end user. Hence the importance of creating customer personas when writing content and the reason why Rank Brain was born.
How does it work?
Voice search functionality is based on voice recognition technology.
The technology is based on sound packets that are projected when people say words. For example, if someone says the word today, the program would recognize “h,” “o” and “y” as separate sounds.
These sounds are individual letters and phonemes are blocks of sound from which words are built.
Speech recognition technology combines these sounds and phonemes to convert speech into a set of letters and words that can be put into context.
The human brain does this automatically in microseconds, but speech recognition programs must use algorithms and problem solving to perform the same understanding process.
This way, you can say to your phone: “What is the weather forecast for Madrid today?”, and the voice search program will use voice recognition to identify the words and then put them into its search database to provide you with the most relevant results.
This is why voice search is becoming increasingly important for search engine optimization, as people use their voice to search much more often because it is faster and easier.
In the past, voice search technology was limited as the recognition technology itself was not fully developed.
However, there is now advanced recognition technology that can easily identify what you are saying and even take into account accents and different speech patterns.
Gone are the days when you would have to repeat something at least five times before a device could understand what you were saying.