Is the time of voice search officially here?

With digital assistant sales increasing by a huge 103% in the last year it is safe to say that smart speakers are soon surpassing their trend status and becoming staples in the everyday home.

A recent study indicated that the top uses for these speakers were listening to music, checking the weather, asking fun questions and researching. With half of the uses of these devices essentially being search it highlights the necessity for a shift to voice-centric SEO strategies.

Voice search is still relatively new, so there is no exact formula for what exactly we should be doing for optimisation, but a key point to consider is the language difference between search styles.

While majority of typed Google searches are succinct keywords phrases, voice search is slightly different. Rather than a condensed two or three-word sentence, voice searches are generally spoken style questions.

So unlike general searches such as “Fahrenheit to Celsius” a voice search would be, “what is the conversion between Fahrenheit and Celsius?” Because of this specific question-style search, the results must reflect answers to these searches, reflecting sentence structures rather than simple keywords.

The surge in digital assistants doesn’t mean that our laptops, desktops and phone are becoming obsolete, it simply means that we have to consider other platforms to include in our SEO strategies so we don’t get left behind.