Travelling in a busy train, rushing into a crowded place, and strolling around during the pleasant morning, who would write a query on the search box to get a list of answers which would take 5 seconds? Apple’s Siri, Google’s Voice Search, and Microsoft’s Cortana- virtual assistants offering personalized recommendations to each of your needs in microseconds! You are being addicted to these already, aren’t you?
But these may spin your head if you are doing aggressive SEO of your website to rule SERPs. Till 2017, we saw all major and minor updates Google rolled out to effectively optimize your website for text-based queries using local listing, image Alt tags, keywords, and Schema Markup. But what we can expect Google to roll out the big news for optimizing voice search? Since the first month has already passed, what changes or updates in prevailing SEO trends in 2018 we observed?
Recent research reports that almost 93% of voice queries have been made in informal, and conversational tone as if a friend is asking for a great place to hang out! This means no keywords but only dialogues- incompleted! And such conversational queries are answered through featured snippets which might be catered through Schema markup or even not. With voice search functionality, it would be tough for you to understand the user’s search behavior.
Therefore, below are a few struggles you will face in 2018.
What’s in trend?
Be prepared for challenging keyword research. Because Google didn’t have any word on how the search rankings would be optimized for voice search yet, you might face troubles to use fixed set of keywords or pre-defined words to use in your website content. A user can speak anything like slangs (dude, I wanna know what’s goin near me)or short forms that would negate every sort of even 10% match to your content.
It is speculated that long and informal randomly asked questions can now replace long tail keywords. To rank your website in voice search, it is a must to brainstorm about the possible natural questions and language.
Conversation or story?
The tag “Content is king” might be taken off this year if voice search remains at the boom. Till 2017, content got you on top, but now it can make you sink because evaluating the content quality is cumbersome! For all these years, whatever is written had been counted, but now, the shift would be whatever is said will be counted. This would be a challenge for copywriters because the writing style, tone, vocabulary has to be selectively chosen for targeting the right audience. See how voice search impacts SEO!
The content should be carefully developed while maintaining the formal tone or informal slangs when targeting different age groups, region, and businesses. So, it would be problematic to decide on whether you need to write content as conversational or one-sided story in declarative writing style. So, you might think like “forget the quality of content as formal style having enriched vocabulary. Be informal, plain and simple now!”
Am I sifting the right audience?
Probably not! You might not know if you are being shown up to the right audience or not because the voice search favors the accent. It will be tough for you to define your target audience and optimize your website as the user’s speech recognition is more dependent on the accent. A US native’s accent might not lead him to your UK targeted business even when he is your prospective customer.
Therefore, you have to pay attention to vocabulary & sentences you write but serving different audiences with different languages and accents could be more hectic for you.
Does that mean Google’s Search Technology can be revamped ?
Not much! Where Google has introduced voice search, no significant progress in their algorithms for voice search is witnessed. The speech recognition feature is 87% successful only when the users search for local results such as “I want to eat pizza in 101 Street NY”, the local listing would help you rank in that. Writing content to improve voice search ranking is tough, but you can still manage it by answering the conversational queries through conversational content if not particularly informal. So, you can still focus on traditional SEO.
However, it is expected that website optimization for voice search might impact SEO and the current SEO trends in 2018 adversely.
Stay tuned to webgoka.com- one of the commendable SEO company in Bangalore for more helpful updates and useful insights.
