Reliable voice recognition solutions are changing the way people search for things on the internet. There’s no need to totally rework your pages to take advantage of this development, but there are a few simple ways that you can incorporate voice search into your content creation strategies.
How Does Voice Search Work?
When conducting voice searches, users simply speak their queries into their smartphones or into microphones attached to their computers. The convenience offered by using the spoken word to interact with machines makes it no surprise that voice’s share of total search traffic is increasing markedly.
In its “2016 Internet Trends Report,” venture capital firm KCBP states that 1 in 5 searches by Android users in the United States is powered by speech recognition. Bing has also revealed that one-quarter of all searches made through the taskbar in the latest version of Windows are spoken aloud. Both figures are up from virtually nothing five years ago.
Catering to Voice Searchers
When people chat with Siri, Cortana and other digital assistants, they tend to ask a lot of questions. This means words that typically begin a question such as “who,” “what” and “where” will appear more heavily in search requests.
You can alter your content to include some of the specific questions that potential visitors are likely to pose. If you run a sports equipment distributor, you could include, “What equipment is needed for” followed by the name of a sport, repeating this phrasing for each type of goods you stock. FAQs and 
other Q&A-style documents should see a healthy boost in search rankings from voice sources.
Search entries of longer-than-average length are expected to trend since people are speaking in whole sentences for voice search instead of just typing short phrases. Long-tail keywords, already an important part of SEO, will assume even greater significance as this tendency continues, so you would do well to improve your grasp of them.
One thing to watch out for is the possibility of your website’s name not being recognized correctly in voice search, especially if it has an unusual spelling or pronunciation. Little can be done about this apart from using misspellings on purpose within your site, but if you’re thinking of launching a new brand, you can choose its name carefully to make sure it’s not susceptible to this problem.
The Future Impact of Voice Searches
The software that parses natural conversations is getting better and better all the time. Expect upcoming voice recognition systems to display a keener awareness of context-specific cues and individual users preferences. They’ll be able to more accurately direct potential buyers and readers to your online resources as long as you’ve adjusted your text to honestly address their questions, concerns and needs. Assuming you’ve done your homework, conversions should increase while bounce rates drop.
There have been numerous shifts in the search landscape over the years, and each time, they’ve wrong-footed the unprepared. Show a healthy respect for voice search when refining your SEO strategy, and you’ll be ready for this game-changing advance.
