Don’t buy the hype: Voice search won’t change SEO
Despite the stream of articles to the contrary, Bruno Rodriguez doesn’t think SEO marketers should drop everything and focus solely on targeting Google Home and Alexa. On the contrary: focussing on plain old SEO techniques is the best way to win the voice assistants around.
Voice search has been framed as the next big thing in the search industry. According to headlines, it will be ‘more disruptive than mobile’, ‘more important than millennials’ and it makes the list for top 2018 SEO trends in Search Engine Land, Forbes or The Next Web.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise. ComScore estimates that 50% of searches in 2020 will be voice-based, there will be 53.6 million smart speakers shipped in 2018 and virtual assistants are becoming one of the most salient aspects of smartphones.
But here comes the twist. It’s very likely that voice search won’t impact a brands’ SEO strategy at all.
Perfect. This now I know who NOT to send my SEO business… Real forward thinker this one.
You’re welcome to explain why the quoted studies are wrong.
Your quoted studies may be correct, but you haven’t mentioned anything about how these devices are impacting the search landscape in terms of queries and volumes.
You stated that “It’s very likely that voice search won’t impact a brands’ SEO strategy at all.” but as queries are evolving due to voice assistants, so too should your SEO strategy. And sooner the better you adapt will only benefit in the long run.
No wonder an article like this appears on Mumbrella and not on any reputable Search industry site.
When will I get to add a jingle to the beginning of my YouTube videos, so that when they are returned in voice results, my jingle: ‘another wacky string song from Banjo player [my name here] helps to elevate my brand. – Perhaps this could be paid jingle…? Youtube would earn a small fortune…
Hmmmmm?
As for SEO. Remove ‘SEO’ with ‘relevance’ and ‘useful’. You want to return really amazing results to help users find their thang? Well think what might be different for voice vs text. I can think of a gazillion things that many brands do not harbour for voice and they are already missing out. White space – people will clean this up.
Hi!
Content for voice search will definitely be different than content for reading. As for now, content for voice is mostly made up from content taken from knowledge graph. In the future, this will most likely change and we’ll need to adapt. You can try to predict these changes and make a bet, you can try to adapt your strategy to what’s working today until we all have a better understanding of the voice eco-system. Both options can work, it’s a matter of how sure you are about being able to predict future trends and how risk-averse your organisation is.
If you get voice search right with voice-oriented content, I’d like very much to read a piece on your experience!
Thanks!
Hi Al,
Happy to join the conversation.
There are bazillions of articles -this very piece references 2 Mumbrella articles and many external ones- talking about how voice interfaces have revolutionized SEO. My point is exactly the opposite, so I didn’t consider it necessary to highlight the ways in which search is changing, but we can go through it.
– Contextual search: Yes, users are starting to ask their voice assistants for a “pizza place near me”. These contextual searches rely on external sources (e.g. an optimized and coherent GMB strategy among others), semantic information on your page and structured data. If you’re not doing this at the moment, you’re not doing good SEO. So what changes?
– Voice search means longer queries, making long tail even more important. For capturing this long tail you need to write longer content, focusing on the topic, not on the keywords, and in a way that the content is easy to break into smaller bits so that it can be to be used for featured snippets. Again, this trend was already happening, and if you were not writing this kind of content, you were most likely doing SEO wrong. So what changes?
– Voice interfaces work differently than visual interfaces. Generally, voice interfaces prioritise one single result so you don’t have to choose between several. Therefore, pages that rank very high and are prominently featured in rich snippets (pages with tons of links, very well optimised and with great content) are more likely to be the result chosen by Google in voice search. For being featured first you need to do good SEO today. So what changes?
Again, my point is not that you shouldn’t prepare for the future. My point is that the best way to prepare for the future is doing good SEO today.
Regarding the comment about the article appearing in Mumbrella, I think you’re both overestimating the how hard it is to publish in niche SEO sites and underestimating the quality of Mumbrella SEO articles, despite being necessarily accessible. Nonetheless, drop me a line with your email and I’ll send you one of our articles from SEO niche sites like MOZ or Search Engine Land.
With this article, I articulated several points based on data. Happy to continue the conversation if you have proof challenging it.
Wish you the best.
xoxo
Bruno.
Having read the thread — Bruno, you’ve sold me. Great piece and great response.
Thanks Henry, glad I sold it to you!
Appreciate you took the time to comment, it’s just my opinion, but I think there’s enough evidence to support it.
Cheers!
You’ve made some great points and thanks for sharing. I don’t necessarily feel that they must all have tons of links because location-based search results are also in play. Also, other factors are being used too but links are arguably the strongest in most industries.
Hi Gabriel,
You’re exactly right, local search is not so link-focused as other parts of SEO (which doesn’t mean links are unimportant).
If you want to rank for “best pizza near me” your game is different: presence in relevant local avenues (google, yelp, yellow pages, white pages, one flare, etc.) with cohesive information, well-structured on-page data for local, contact and business info, and trying to get as many reviews as possible, probably incentivising them in-person and with promotions.
There are shortcuts (hosting a Yelp event will grant you a lot of good reviews in no time, hosting an action with bloggers and journalists can grant you some links and mentions in pages locally relevant for Google), but in general the game is slightly different and not so focused on links.
Still, everything I said and more is what you should be doing if you have SEO as a priority for your local business. And that is what will make you succeed in voice search, so it doesn’t require you to adapt your strategy, at least right now.
Thanks for your message!
Some good points raised. I agree with you – earning that authority is critical.
That said, voice search appears to be selecting answers from the ‘answer box’ (knowledge graph) consistently – which is something I feel brands are absolutely terrible at scaling. In fact, this ability to answer intent as a brand is exactly why publishers and affiliates exist. How tragic.
P
Also.. to the other comment authors, you have zero credibility when you hide behind a fake name.
Some good points raised. I agree with you – earning that authority is critical.
That said, voice search appears to be selecting answers from the ‘answer box’ (knowledge graph) consistently – which is something I feel brands are absolutely terrible at scaling. In fact, this ability to answer intent as a brand is exactly why publishers and affiliates exist. How tragic.
P
Also.. to the other comment authors, you have zero credibility when you hide behind a fake name.
Agree, brands are awful at scaling knowledge graph presence, in part because it is awfully difficult to scale.
There are ways for leveraging it, but all of them still require some SEO basis (good content, good authority, thinking about user intent).
Still, if brands want to really be future proof for voice, they shouldn’t be looking at their text-based content, but likely, to their audio-based assets: https://mumbrella.com.au/how-does-googles-new-podcast-strategy-work-517325
It’s interesting to consider the developments in voice search. On a slightly seperate note – Google is testing facial recognition to scan a person’s facials after they perform a Google search. Smiles and raised eyebrows equals good result. And frowns and squinted eyes equals bad results.
I’m sure the two could be incorporated? User performs voice search then the camera reads the users facial expressions. Very early stages obviously, but still very promising. We wrote a detailed article about this on this on the SEO Advantage blog. The next 10 years of search developments will be very interesting indeed!