A guide to voice search: For Beginners

If you’re unsure what voice search is or how it works then you’re in the right place. This is our beginners’ guide to voice search.

Voice search is the buzz term of the moment in the tech and search engine optimisation (SEO) industry. The merits are continually being debated, and lots of questions asked:

1. What exactly is voice search?
2. Is voice search here to stay?
3. Should you be optimising for voice search?
4. How do you optimise for voice search?

What is voice search? 

Techopedia defines it as the following:

“Voice search is a speech recognition technology that allows a user to perform a search via a voice command. Although designed to be a software application, voice search also may be used as a service by smartphones and other small Web-enabled devices. Voice search is also known as voice-enabled search.”

Put simply, you ask your voice-enabled device, such as your smartphone or smart speaker, a search query and it scours the internet for the best answer and speaks it back to you.

Is it here to stay? 

In short, yes! Voice search is not a fad. The following are a few statistics to prove that voice search is here to stay:

• There were over a billion voice searches per month in 2018
• 41% of adults and 55% of teens are using voice search daily
• Smart speaker sales reached 75 million in 2018
• More than half of searches were voice searches in 2020

There’s no doubt that tech is on the rise, with the help of digital assistants in mobile phones such as Google’s Assistant, Apple’s Siri and now with the increase of smart home hubs such as Google’s Home, Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s HomePod to name a few.

Should you be optimising for voice search? 

Given all of the evidence above, yes!

Marketers are now slowly starting to understand that they need to make sure to consider voice search when planning and creating content. By embracing voice search now, you can start to gain a competitive edge over your competitors.

How Do You Optimise Content For Voice Search?

Ah, the golden question. We already know that voice search takes information from a website and relays it back to the end-user. 

That’s why the content on your website needs to provide the best answer to the users’ search query for it to be chosen as the featured result. As you can imagine, the competition can be quite fierce.

So, where do we start?

Our team of experts have all the expertise to guide you through voice search optimisation.

By contacting our team, you will discover the following:

• Understanding how voice search works.
• Essential voice search keyword research, including examples.
• Suggested keyword research tools – use the tools the professionals use.
• How to optimise for featured snippets.
• The importance of site speed.
• The impact of local search.
• Helpful key takeaways from each section.