More people today are using various digital assistants created by the major players of the technology market, such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa.The development of these systems and the recent improvements in their ability to interpret natural language queries have made voice search easier and more accurate.
By examining the 2016 edition of Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report 2016, we can see an explosive growth in voice queries, according to Google Trends.
In her report, Meeker notes that queries associated with voice commands have risen more than 35-fold since the launch of the iPhone and Google Voice Search.
To adapt your digital marketing efforts to this trend, you should pay attention to how people are searching.
Recently, SEMrush had a roundtable discussion on voice search with three industry experts: Will Critchlow, Chris Marentis and Neil Walker.
During our talk, they shared some great insights into how voice search is shaping today’s digital marketing, as well as their own predictions for the next generation of search. Below you will find some new opportunities for capitalizing on voice search growth.
1) Voice search isn’t a big thing – yet
Mobile devices have already changed the world of search engine optimization in many ways. But now, there’s a lot of talk about the impact that voice search will have on the SEO landscape.
Some experts believe that the full potential of voice search has yet to be seen. “For me [voice search] is still in that uncanny valley where it’s not quite good enough to rely on,” Will Critchlow explains.
It’s still too early to tell how voice search has influenced SEO, but it’s constantly evolving. “We’re still in the very early days, but I can see voice search literally changing the search landscape in some way over the next few years,” says Neil Walker.
Chris Marentis points out that it’s really interesting how accurately artificial intelligence (AI) voice control interprets what users ask for. “I think it’s a conceptual framework that we are going to think about a lot, test and validate over the next few years,” he points out.
Nevertheless, voice search is on the rise. Its popularity is increasing, because providers are improving text-to-speech technologies. Will Critchlow believes that the quality of speech recognition is going from strength to strength.
Just in one year – between 2014 and 2015 – voice search grew from “statistical zero” to 10% of overall search volume globally, according to Timothy Tuttle from MindMeld. This shift accounts for the incredible number of voice searches per month – 50 billion.
Millennials and Generation Z are more likely to engage with voice search.
In 2014 a study from Northstar Research revealed that 55% of teens (age 13-18) use voice search more than once a day. And it comes as no surprise, because computers and technologies are quite indispensable to younger generations. They have grown up with these things, as Chris Marentis points out.
Takeaways:
Voice search is still evolving. One of its major problems is related to its ability to understand different users, including their accents and inflections. Nevertheless, digital assistants are getting better at understanding these differences, and search continues its shift towards mobile devices.
This will result in the further growth of voice search, and businesses can’t ignore it.
2) Voice search has changed the way people interact with search engines
Obviously, the human brain structures written and verbal information differently, which means that written search queries differ from verbal ones.
Today users expect to find exactly what they’re looking for on the first try, because Google is constantly improving its search capabilities.
Search engines today, especially Google, are working to align the process of online search with so-called “natural language,” or everyday speech. Voice-based queries are different in nature. They tend to consist of longer phrases, as well as complete sentences and questions.
It’s also interesting that experts are expecting another significant change that has nothing to do with voice search.
“Alongside voice search, we are going to see a huge growth in query-less search,” Will Critchlow says. Platforms like Google Now, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana are improving the way users interact with search in a predictive, query-less manner. This principle is based on a semantic prediction of needs.
In other words, search engines return results based on the user’s historical behavior and the current context. “I think that’s where voice search really comes into its own – when your device is saying to you some things you might want to know,” suggest WIll Critchlow.
The growth of voice search is leading to more natural language queries. These queries contain larger amounts of contextual information about users’ intent.
Takeaways
Will Critchlow told us how he was just searching “breakfast.” Years ago, this type of search would have probably turned up a Wikipedia article on the subject. But if you searched this term today, you might get a list of highly rated restaurants that are currently serving breakfast.
Also, AI technology is evolving to better understand user intent and context based on various elements, such as previous search queries, location, past user’s behavior and actions.
3) Google continues to learn
As we have already discussed, today digital assistants are more advanced. Although these systems might not understand exactly what we want at first try, they’re getting better, thanks to the improvement of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Neil Walker believes that voice search is just the beginning, and there’s no doubt that Google is always learning.
Voice-activated search systems, including Siri, Cortana and Alexa, are based on similar technology that provides searchers with direct results, rather than a search result page.
It’s interesting that today we can already get some information we need without actually visiting a website because of Google’s special featured snippet block at the top of SERPs, which shows a summary of the answer to a user’s question.
“We are already getting used to the fact that answers are being delivered straight to us without having to click on any sites,” Neil Walker explains.
Soon there will be no need for users to type blunt queries into their smartphone’s browser, because they will be able to pick up their phone and literally ask it what they want. And digital assistants will start focusing on the meaning behind a particular query, rather than a set of query keywords, and provide users with instant answers to their questions.
Because of the development of machine learning businesses will have to rethink their content, make it more conversational, focus on sentence structure and use natural phrases, rather than basic keywords.
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