Three-year-old Jia picked up her mother’s phone, unlocked it, then went on to Google voice search and confidently said, “Pikachu video”. In an instant, several of the popular Pokemon character’s videos popped up on the screen. The world of search just opened up not only to people who don’t want to type but those who can’t. And since search is changing, it is but natural that optimization will have to change too. How much, when and how is what we are about to find out. A lot of technology is about convenience. It works to make our life easy. Search allows us to find and connect with the things we seek out – be it businesses, products, services or just knowledge. From an optimization perspective, things seemed fairly easy a decade back. It meant we use a few keywords in the right places and things pretty much worked. With time, the algorithm grew intelligent enough to weed out those trying to game the system with keywords. And just as we figured that content and good links mattered the most, in came the smartphones which brought the shift to optimizing for mobile. As of today, optimizing for ‘search intent’ seems to be the most important factor in SEO. Historically, the way we optimize has changed when the medium for search changed. So it looks like optimization will undergo another change with voice search growing rapidly. Siri, Cortana, Alexa and now Google’s assistant are leading the way in which we use voice search. In 2015, search using virtual assistants went from zero to 10% of the global search volume. As of today, because the medium is slowly gaining adoption, 58% of adults who use it feel they look ‘tech-savvy’ when using it. Another interesting fact is that 28% of the people surveyed felt that voice search was more accurate than typed search. A Meeker’s report states that, as of May 2016, one in every five searches on Android devices is a voice search. Chinese market leader Baidu estimates that by 2020, 50% of searches will be over voice. Apple’s Siri handles more than 1 billion voice searches per week. Here’s another perspective from Google’s viewpoint who constantly seems to modify itself by intuitively sensing user demand. With people moving away from keywords and more towards search similar to the language we speak, Google focussed on answering the question. In fact, Google is providing a direct answer result on about 19.5 percent of total search engine queries. So, what does all this mean for us as digital marketers? How do we prepare ourselves for the future of search? We cover a lot of ground in this article – from what voice search is to what it can be and how we prepare for it. Let’s get started. What is Google Voice Search? Voice search, like many of Google’s products, saw its origin in the Google labs. Introduced in 2010, it’s raw avatar allowed users to call a phone number. After receiving a recorded prompt of ‘Say your search keywords’, an open webpage would be updated with the results. This wasn’t a user-friendly solution but it gave Google the understanding of the potential of the medium. Today, the voice search feature allows users to tap the microphone, speak a phrase or ask a question and directly be presented with the answers. Are Voice Search Results Different From Typed Results? Yes and no. A lot of results come out similar irrespective of how you search for it but with a few exceptions. If you search for directions to a place on mobile v/s desktop you may see slightly different results. But the differences are set to get widen in the future as the number of voice searches increase. But the fact remains that voice has brought a great degree of convenience to search. Let us put this to a small test We start by conducting a voice search for the query “Aishwarya Rai”, the Miss World 1994 winner and popular Bollywood actress. Google immediately tells us that the Indian actress and model also goes by her married name Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. Now that we’ve established the basics, we probe a little further to see how much Google understands if the question was complex. We asked, “Which was her last movie?”. This confused Google a little and instead gave results on the 2016 movie ‘Her last will’. Hmm… scope for improvement. But a lot of other queries came out fine. We asked, ‘What did she wear for Cannes last year?’ and the assistant said, ‘Check out these photos’ which had a few photos of her on the red carpet. Other simple questions like ‘What is her age?’ and ‘Where was she born?’ were also answered accurately. Here, Google assumed that the ‘her’ we are referring to was still ‘Aishwarya Rai’ and interpreted the search query accordingly. This wouldn’t work in a desktop search. Go Google! Incidentally, Cortana’s top voice search is “Who is Bill Gates?”. I think most people are expecting a joke for the answer. But you get a straight answer there. Instead, if you ask Cortana, “Who is your father?”, you’ll technically get a straight answer too! How is Voice Being Used Actually? So we may not typically be searching for Aishwarya Rai using voice, unless for the fun of it. What are people looking for? Turns out, teens and adults tend to use voice a bit differently. People of all ages generally tend to ask practical questions like asking for directions or checking the time or even “near me” searches. But one-third of the teens tend to use voice search to get help with their homework. The places where voice search was used also differed a bit. Most teens (57%) used it with friends while most adults (36%) used it while watching TV. Other common places to use voice search was in the bathroom, while cooking or exercising. Will Videos Be The Best Way To Capture Voice Search? You’ll notice that many of many
