When watching a sci-fi film, the amount of people who talk to robots is staggeringly high. It seems that in the future, everyone will be talking to either physical robots or artificial intelligence software.
Although this kind of interaction used to be relegated to the silver screen, it’s becoming far more commonplace today. With virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa always within reach, consumers are becoming conditioned to the idea of asking a machine for answers rather than typing them on a computer or mobile device.
This adoption of voice-operated technology is changing the game, but nowhere more profoundly than with search engine optimization (SEO). Now, instead of a user typing a query into Google, they may ask Siri or Alexa to conduct the search on their behalf. This shift has some pretty significant ramifications, so brands have to adapt or get left behind.
With that in mind, let’s power up our smart devices and see how leveraging voice search technology can improve your overall SEO strategy.
More Focus on Snippets and Fast Answers
Google Snippets are becoming more prevalent as the search engine strives to bring speed and efficiency to the search process.
A snippet is a small block of text that pops up on the search result page, often separated from its hyperlink. The purpose of these snippets is to allow a user to get an answer without having to leave Google and visit another site.
Since voice assistants are looking to provide quick and simple answers, snippets will only become more valuable in the future.
Overall, you can’t afford to take long-winded approaches to article content anymore. Get to the point and make it snappy.
More Stress on Reaching the Top Spot
When conducting a voice search, the program won’t give you an answer from the third or fourth search result. Instead, it will read whatever the first result is, even if it’s not entirely related to your query.
We’ve always known that the top search results get the lion’s share of web traffic. However, when users are conducting voice searches, almost all of the traffic goes to the first position.
Also, keep in mind that Google prefers to list Ads customers before organic search results.
This dynamic has led to a sort of new-age internet arms race, as brands scramble for position zero or pay extra just to get read out loud by Alexa. It’s a little odd, honestly—even the phrasing around “winning” snippets now feels more like we’re prepping for battle than just pushing a website live. But if you’re not visible, you pretty much don’t exist in voice land. We’re at a point where a slight slip in ranking can mean missing out on thousands of spoken responses, which most marketers didn’t even have to worry about ten years ago.
So, it’s often worth the extra money to invest in Google Ads, so you can be in the top spot without spending tons of time and energy on getting there.
More Room for Error
All of this competition, by the way, can be a little exhausting for smaller brands or solo creators. The major players have the budget to buy their way into the conversation, while everyone else has to get a bit scrappier—optimizing for conversational search, long-tail keywords, and sometimes just hoping for a lucky break with an emerging trend. There’s still room to punch above your weight, especially if you’re clever with your wording and can anticipate the strange ways people speak questions out loud. At least for now, the big guys haven’t totally locked down every quirky phrase a person might blurt at their phone or smart speaker.
Until voice recognition technology becomes perfect, it will always have significant limitations when trying to understand the context of a query.
So, when optimizing for voice searches, you have to consider how assistants like Siri may misinterpret what the user said or why they asked a specific question.
In some cases, you may be able to provide the correct answer, even if the assistant was technically looking for something else.
By understanding user intent better, you can create more valuable content that will show up in voice search results faster.
