You can dominate voice search if…

Voice search as a marketing channel has begun its slow and steady assent toward dominance. According to the latest research, including research done at Google, more than half of consumers are currently using some manner of voice search with slightly over 80% of them accessing voice search from their cell phones. Voice search right now has about a 20% share of mobile search with ComScore seeing it go to 50% or so within the next two years. Manufacturers of electronics, as well as such things as ceiling fans and refrigerators, have already begun to integrate voice into their products. Your SEO and online marketing has to adapt or your company will get left in the dust.

  • Mobile devices have already begun to dominate search as well as everyday use. Data from Bing (Microsoft) indicates that major companies have increased their spending on voice search by early 25% over just last year. This should be a wake up call to small business to start investing in voice SEO if they are not already doing so.

  • Research is showing that the vast majority of voice searches are beginning with the words “how” or “what”. Other major long tail searches include such words as “best”, “buy”, “go” and “where”. These are keywords and long tail phrases your content and your SEO needs to begin to focus on if it hasn’t already.
  • This is where you begin with regard to understanding how voice search is currently being done by consumers. Voice search tends to be conversational so your long tail phrases need to reflect that both as a command and as a question. Consumers are using voice for most major buys of over $500 so your SEO must be able to translate such words as “best”. If you don’t, you will miss out on conversions that will just likely be going to your rival.

Graph via research from Google

  • Once again, listening becomes a major weapon for you. Listen to what people are saying. Listen to what they are looking for and adapt your content and SEO strategy accordingly. You can’t just guess; you have to know. Make your content conversational and work in those frequent key words so that a long tail voice search just may find you near the top of a SERP.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer