Voice Search is Skyrocketing

The use of voice search has skyrocketed recently, after ten years of steady growth. This means SEO for voice search should be an integral part of your SEO strategy – and we can help you do this. But it’s also important to understand why voice search is suddenly growing exponentially and why it matters for your brand or business online.  

The rise in voice search represents a shift in consumer behaviour and it’s essential that our SEO strategies meet consumers where they are online – and for now, that’s via voice search. 

The simple answer is that SEO for voice search allows your business to connect with a broader range of consumers, who are looking for what you are providing – so let’s dig in to how you can best do this.  

The best SEO for voice search is developed with consumers in mind; what they are looking for when they use voice search, and how their prompts differ between voice and text searches. To deliver the best SEO for voice search, we must understand what is driving the (seemingly rapid) rise of voice search.

Voice search is convenient and we’re getting used to it

Voice search technology is not new; we’ve had Siri on Apple devices since 2011, and Alexa since 2014. While it’s not new, consumer use of voice search has skyrocketed recently. There are two key things driving this: 

1. Consumers are getting used to voice search: while we are used to the fast moving world of digital marketing, it can take time for a trend to solidify and transform from a trend to common place behaviour. This is what has happened with voice search; since we learnt we could ask our phones questions back in 2011, we’ve started doing it more and more and now most of us do it at least once a day. 
2. AI technology is making voice search smarter: OpenAI burst onto the scene in 2022, and brought AI to the masses. While OpenAI is not a search engine, it democratised AI and we’ve seen an uplift in AI capabilities since. What does this mean for voice search technology? It means when consumers ask a question, they get better answers faster. The rise of AI is intrinsically linked to the rise of voice search and the improvement in the results it delivers. You can read more about the best SEO for voice search on our blog. 

Understanding why people use voice search is the key to delivering what they need using SEO for voice search

Convenience drives most things we do as humans, and the rise of voice search indicates that searching for things on the internet has also become convenience-driven. Voice search allows us to quickly and easily search for what we need, usually while we are doing something else; find a restaurant while we are driving; look up an ingredient while we are baking; fact check our friends, while we are in the middle of conversation. 

By considering why and when people use voice search we can best answer their queries using SEO for voice search. Some of the most common things people search for with voice are:

• Investigating a local restaurant, shop, or service
• Looking up a fact or piece of information 
• Finding basic information about a business, like when they’re open or a phone number

With this in mind, you can start to incorporate SEO for voice search into your broader digital marketing plan, by catering for local SEO and creating conversational content. 

Voice search isn’t new, but it’s getting smarter

Like most technology, voice search is constantly improving. The most influential improvement in voice technology is the rise of AI technology. 

Previously, search was mostly text based and the algorithm learnt to pick up what users wanted from a search, and their location to provide results. Now, with the rise of AI, algorithms are learning to understand our voice queries, which are far less formulaic, and far more varied in content. 

SEO for voice search also has to get smarter

Your SEO strategy needs to consider voice search. There are three key elements to voice search optimisation:

1. Answer specific questions: FAQ pages are great for this, but also consider what questions users might be asking in relation to your business. 
2. Write content as you’d speak: use conversational language to answer these questions 
3. Include long-tail keywords: conversational language is usually more flowery, and so factor this into the key words you use – longtail keywords are usually phrases made up of three to five words. 
4. Optimise for devices: we know that most people use voice search with their mobiles and an essential element of optimising for voice search is ensuring an optimal user experience across all devices – you can start by improving your site loading speed. 

Optimising for voice search is not going to overtake or solve all of your SEO strategies. SEO for voice search is a multifaceted element of SEO that sits alongside your existing SEO plan. SEO for voice search needs specialised skills and planning to be successful. 

At Perfect Link Building we provide SEO for voice search and other strategies that deliver results for our clients. We have over 15 years’ experience delivering the best SEO performance across industries and countries. If you’d like to learn more about our SEO services, get in touch.