Voice search has become a highly-utilised tool for many people who use smart devices. It became famous when Apple introduced it with Siri. After this, Microsoft created Cortana for Windows, and now Google has its voice assistant too. It’s all based on artificial intelligence, allowing you to control and command other devices and even your home, as well as look for anything you want on a search engine via voice command. Voice search is becoming more and more prevalent and now that we use it for almost everything, where is it going and how will it change how businesses approach SEO?
How Voice Search Is Changing
When Siri was first introduced, it was meant to be an assistant who could set your calendar, reply to messages for you and check the weather or the news. However, now you can queue up music, place phone calls and translate sentences into other languages.
The growth we see in artificial intelligence means that searching for anything online now is more streamlined, straightforward and easy. Voice search technology not only understands words but the meaning behind them. Asking for a weather report and if you should bring an umbrella will result in the same answer – a weather report with temperatures and weather patterns for the day. Cognition systems are being improved, making users try voice search technology more often, with more reliable results. Eventually, users will only use voice commands to get the answers they need, instead of searching online manually.
How Voice Search Is Changing SEO
As voice search becomes more popular, how we use keywords will change. Google’s algorithm is so complex and intelligent that people don’t have to list keywords to get the search results they’re after; they can ask a question in a complete sentence which anybody would understand. If you say, “Japanese food,” the words used don’t mean much on their own. However, Google’s algorithm will bring up results for Japanese restaurants nearby, not recipes for Japanese food, or the origins of sushi. Google can interpret the questions we ask via voice search and can differentiate whether someone wants to order Japanese food, or if they wanted a recipe, and which result would be more logical and helpful.
If you were typing in a search bar, you would type something along the lines of “Japanese food” and the area you live in, which would bring up restaurants in your area. However, with voice search, you need to consider that long sentences – and questions – are being searched. SEO will have to be optimised to recognise natural, conversational words and sentences, instead of only keywords. SEO will also have to become more tuned to identify queries and longer sentences.
The future for voice searches will only become more advanced as time goes by and businesses need to have a better understanding of how people interact with it to make sure they can keep up with it in the future. To make sure that your SEO is heading in the right direction, pair up with a forward-thinking agency that will move with the times as you do.
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