voice search case study

Find Keyword Ideas in Seconds

Boost SEO results with powerful keyword research

Voice Search: The Definitive Guide

Written by Brian Dean

Voice search is HUGE right now.

And it’s only getting bigger.

The question is:

How do you optimize your site for voice search?

Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to learn in this guide.

1. The Voice Search Revolution

2. SEO in a Voice Search World

3. Voice Keyword Research

4. Optimize Content for Voice Search

5. Advanced Tips and Strategies

6. Voice Search SEO Case Studies

Chapter 1: the voice search revolution.

Some people say that we’re in the middle of a “Voice Search Revolution”.

Is that true… or an exaggeration?

Let’s look at some recent stats…

41% of adults (and 55% of teens) use voice search daily ( Google ).

20% of all Google mobile queries are voice searches ( Google ).

Voice search has grown 35x since 2008 ( KPCB ).

The stats paint a clear picture:

Voice search isn’t “the next big thing”. It’s already here.

And when you dig deeper, things get even more interesting…

25% of all Windows 10 desktop searches are done via voice ( Branded3 ).

This stat surprised me.

Contrary to popular belief, voice search isn’t just for mobile devices.

More people are talking to their desktop computers and smart speakers. Speaking of…

65% of Google Home or Amazon echo owners “can’t imagine going back” ( Geomarketing ).

Smart speakers are the next refrigerator – every home will have one. And as more people search with smart speakers, SEOs will need to adapt (more on that in Chapter 3).

ComScore predicted that by 2020 50% of all searches will be voice searches. No up-to-date numbers have been published, but one study puts smart speaker ownership in the US at close to 90 million. ( Voicebot ).

Who knows if this prediction will turn out to be true. Either way, it’s clear that voice searches are eating into keyboard-based searches.

And as you’ll soon see, this trend impacts how we optimize content for SEO.

Now, you might be wondering:

Why is voice search growing so quickly?

There are 3 main drivers behind this trend…

First, searching with your voice is 3.7x faster than typing ( Bing ).

Faster searches=faster answers.

So it’s no surprise that more people are using their voice instead of a keyboard.

Second, voice is perfect for mobile searches. In fact, nearly 60% of mobile searchers use voice search at least “some of the time” ( Stone Temple ).

Finally, voice search is more convenient. That’s probably why more than half of respondents in one survey stated they use voice search so they “don’t have to type” ( Stone Temple ).

Typing “how tall is the tallest building in the world” on an iPhone is a huge pain. But saying the same phrase out loud is an absolute breeze.

To summarize:

It’s clear that voice search isn’t just hype. It’s a legit trend.

And it’s a trend that’s already affecting SEO .

Chapter 2: SEO in a Voice Search World

As it turns out, searching with your voice is very different than typing.

Specifically, voice search changes:

How people search.

When people search.

And what they search for.

In this chapter, I’ll break down these changes… and how they impact SEO.

#1: Voice Changes How People Search

Voice search changes how people search in two important ways:

• Searches are longer
• Searches are more conversational

I’ll explain…

Bing engineers noticed that voice search keywords are significantly longer than text-based searches.

And voice searches aren’t just longer… they’re less like “computer language”.

In other words: they’re more conversational .

(In fact, Google states that 70% of searches on Google Assistant use “natural language”.)

For example, let’s say you want to start making cold brew coffee at home.

A few years back, you’d probably type a short keyword like “make cold brew” into Google.

But when you search for the same thing with your voice, your query will be totally different .

Specifically, your search term will be longer. You’ll also use natural, human language.

Needless to say, this has a big impact on how we do keyword research and on-page SEO.

I’ll show you how to adapt to this change in Chapters 3 and 4.

But for now, let’s look at the second way voice search is changing SEO…

#2: Voice Changes Where People Search

Because voice search is so convenient, it’s being used more often and in more places than ever before.

In fact, Google reports that “____ near me now” searches have grown by 150% over the last two years.

And these searches are happening in places that you might not expect…

One survey found that people are significantly more likely to use voice search in public places (like a restaurant, at the gym…and even in a public bathroom) compared to last year.

For example…

Let’s say you’re visiting Boston for a big meeting. And on the way to your meeting, you spill coffee on your shirt.

A few years ago, you’d head to the closest place with Wi-Fi, whip out your phone and type “clothing store Boston” into Google.

But thanks to LTE, location technology, and voice search, you’ll do a voice search wherever you happen to be.

(And like I outlined earlier, the keyword you use will be very different than if you typed it out.)

#3: Voice Changes How People Get Search Results

Google is slowly changing from a search engine to an “ answer engine ”.

In fact, thanks to SERP features like Knowledge Graph and Featured Snippets, the number of organic clicks have dropped by 37% .

Why? You don’t need to visit a site to get your answer. It’s right there in the search results.

And Google is using this same answer-focused technology to provide voice search results.

For example, let’s say you wanted to know how many calories are in an apple.

Back in the day, you’d search for something like “apple calories”… and be forced to sift through 10 different results.

But with a voice search, you can get your answer read back to you within seconds.

Sure, lots of voice searches are done on the Google app (or by “typing” with your voice on your phone).

This means that you still get a traditional set of 10 blue links.

But this is becoming less and less common.

In fact, even when you get 10 blue links from a voice search, Google usually reads the Featured Snippet back to you.

So: what does this mean for SEO and content creators?

Our content needs to give people direct answers to their questions.

Otherwise, it’s going to be harder and harder to get your content in front of people.

That said, don’t stress. I’ll show you exactly how to create voice-optimized content in chapters 4 and 5.

But first, it’s time for me to show you how to do voice search-focused keyword research.

Chapter 3: Voice Keyword Research

In this chapter, I’m going to show you how to do keyword research in a voice search world.

Specifically, I’m going to give you three actionable strategies that you can use to find voice search keywords.

Let’s dive right in.

Look For “Natural Language” Keywords

Like I mentioned in chapter 2 , voice searches are more natural and conversational than text-based searches.

So robotic keywords like this…

…are slowly getting replaced with keywords like this:

And when you evaluate keywords, you’ll want to keep this fact in mind.

For example, let’s take this set of results from the Google Keyword Planner :

Most people would size up this list of keywords based only on:

• Search volume
• Seasonal trends

But thanks to voice search, you ALSO want to check to see if the keyword is conversational.

In other words:

Natural sounding keywords are going to get a big boost in search volume as voice search grows.

(And the opposite is true: if a keyword sounds robotic, expect fewer people to search for that term in the years to come.)

Don’t Avoid Insanely-Long Keywords

Most people completely avoid really long keywords.

It’s simple: VERY few people search for them.

But as more people search with their voice, “normal” keyword length is getting longer and longer :

So don’t be afraid to optimize your content around 5+ word terms, like these:

Now, to be clear:

I don’t think you should optimize an entire page around really long terms.

Instead, you want to sprinkle these long keywords in your content.

As you’ll see in Chapter 4, if Google finds a keyword anywhere in a piece of content, they’ll use it as a voice search result.

Target “Question Keywords”

Thanks largely to voice search, question keywords are up 61% year-over-year:

A few years ago, if you wanted to get higher rankings in Google, you might search for something like this:

But you’re probably not going to whip out your iPhone and say: ”Hey Google…SEO”.

Instead, when you search with your voice, you’re going to ask a question .

You can already find question keywords in any keyword research tool:

But it takes a lot of digging.

If you want to scale this process, I recommend Answer the Public …

…and BuzzSumo’s Content Discovery :

Now that you’ve found a handful of voice search keywords, it’s time to optimize your content around them.

Chapter 4: Optimize Content for Voice Search

In this chapter, you’re going to learn how to optimize your content for voice search.

And I have some great news:

You DON’T need to completely overhaul your site.

In fact, you can get your site ready for voice search SEO with a few simple tweaks.

Include Short, Concise Answers in Your Content

Few years ago we conducted the largest voice search SEO ranking factors study ever .

And one of our most interesting findings is that Google tends to answer voice search queries with short, 29-word results:

For example, the Google Home results for the query “are figs good for you” is:

(That result is 28 words.)

That’s why it’s important that your content answers someone’s query in 30 words or less .

It doesn’t make sense to write a 30-word blog post.

That’s why you want to…

Create Voice Search FAQ Pages

FAQ pages are PERFECT for voice search.

Well, as I mentioned earlier, question keywords are on the rise.

And you just learned that Google wants to give their users 30-ish word answers.

FAQ pages check both of these boxes.

That’s probably why voice search results are 1.7x more likely to come from an FAQ page compared to desktop results.

For example, if you do a voice search for “how do car insurance claims work”, here’s what you get back:

Sure enough, Google pulled that answer from a FAQ page:

And that’s just one keyword. FAQ pages can rank for hundreds of different voice search queries.

For example:

If you do a voice search for “how do home insurance claims work”, the result comes from that same FAQ page.

Optimize for Featured Snippets

Getting in the Featured Snippet is like a voice search cheat code.

In fact, 40.7% of voice search answers come from the Featured Snippet:

For example, if you do a voice search for “Is ice water bad for dogs?” with the Google iPhone app, the answer you get is:

And if you look at the search results, you can see that Google just read the first result.

And keep this in mind:

Getting in the Featured Snippet is even more important for Google Home and Alexa search results.

These devices only give you ONE answer.

So if you don’t rank in Featured Snippets, you’re going to be invisible on those devices.

Write Content With Natural Language

Voice searches are more natural and less robotic than keyboard searches.

And you want to write your content the same way.

That way, when someone searches for…

…Google will find a “match” in your content:

(A match that wouldn’t happen if you used a robotic phrase like: “how to dm on Instagram”.)

Embed Long Tail Keywords Into Long Form Content

Yes, voice searches are significantly longer than keyboard searches.

But that doesn’t mean you want to create 1000 pages optimized around 1000 different voice search terms.

In fact, one of the most surprising findings from our voice search ranking factors study was that less than 2% of all voice search results had the exact keyword in their title tag:

Instead, Google will pull an answer from a page…

…even if that answer makes up a small section of the content.

For example, I just did a voice search for “do post offices accept credit cards”.

And the result came from a page that only answered that question halfway down the page:

But because the answer was short and sweet, Google decided that it was the best result for that query.

Bottom line?

Embed lots of long tail keywords in your content.

When you do, your single page can rank for lots of different voice search queries.

Chapter 5: Advanced Tips and Strategies

This chapter is all about teaching you advanced voice search SEO tips and strategies.

So if you’re going “all in” in voice search, you’ll love the actionable advice in this chapter.

Let’s get started.

Include “Filler” Words in Question Keywords

You already learned that question keywords are on the rise.

(Mostly driven by an increase in voice search.)

And when you optimize for questions, make sure to include “filler words”.

Well, Bing’s Purna Virji states that :

The more matches you have, the more likely your ad will show on a voice search that includes words like “a” and “me” and “for.”

Write for a 9th Grade Reading Level (Or Below)

The average voice search result is written at a 9th grade reading level .

This means you want to AVOID jargon and fancy words in your content.

(To be honest, you should avoid this stuff anyway. But it’s nice to know that clear writing also helps your voice search rankings.)

Improve Your Sitespeed

The loading speed of a voice search result is 3.8x faster than your average website.

Again, you want to have a fast-loading site anyway.

(Especially considering that Google’s Speed Update is now live.)

This leads us to…

Beef Up Your Domain Authority

Did you know that sites with lots of links rank more often in voice search?

In fact, the average Domain Rating of a voice search result is nearly 77 .

(Which is high.)

And unlike traditional SEO, the authority of the page doesn’t seem to be an important voice search ranking signal.

This data is from our voice search correlation study. So it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on using our data alone.

But my theory is this:

Many voice search “results” are actually just a single result .

And Google needs to know that they’re giving you an answer from a trusted source.

(In other words, a domain with lots of trust and authority.)

So they lean on domain authority over page authority.

For example, here’s a Google Home voice search:

The answer comes from an authoritative domain (speedtest.net).

But the page itself has a pretty low Page Authority (13).

The bottom line is this:

If you want to rank in voice search, focus on building up your Domain Authority.

When you do, Google will want to use your site as a source… even from pages on your site that don’t have a ton of links.

Longer Content=More Voice Search Traffic

You might have heard that the average word count of a first page Google result is approximately 1,447 words :

But what you may not know is that voice search result pages tend to be even longer (2300 words).

To be clear:

I don’t think Google’s voice algorithm has a sweet spot for long content.

Instead, this is just a numbers game:

A page with lots of content is more likely to “match” a voice search query.

Optimize for “___Near Me” Searches

Back in the day, “local” searches meant city and state .

So if you wanted to find a dry cleaner in New York, you’d Google something like this:

Over the last few years, local searches have gone from “city”… to “block”.

(Mostly thanks to an explosion in “___ Near Me” searches.)

So if you run a local business, you NEED to optimize around terms that voice searchers use.

For example, the other day I was looking for a salad place. And I happen to be near Fenway Park.

So I used the Google app to search for: “salad near Fenway”.

And I got a list of salad places near Fenway Park:

Businesses that optimize for “near Fenway” or “in the Fenway area” are going to rank best for hyper-local searches like this.

(Which means more customers walking through the door.)

Rank Videos in the Search Results

You may have noticed that Google recently rolled out what I call “Video Featured Snippets”.

As you can see, it’s a video result.

But instead of a link to a YouTube video, Google pulls out the section of the video that’s relevant to your search.

And from my informal testing ( and data from Bing ), these types of video results tend to pop up more often for natural language queries.

(The type of natural language queries that people use in voice searches.)

Here’s a perfect example of what I mean…

Let’s say that you want to rank your videos on YouTube. So you decide to search for some video SEO advice.

If you use a keyboard, you’re probably going to search for something like:

Sure, there are videos in the search results. But they rank near the middle of the page.

Look what happens when you search for the same thing using the natural language keyword: “how to rank youtube videos”

You get a video result.

The takeaway is this:

Video is a BIG part of Google’s strategy for answering voice search queries.

So if you want to get your content in front of voice searchers, you need to rank your videos in Google.

Chapter 6: Voice Search SEO Case Studies

In this chapter, you’re going to see real-life examples of voice search results.

I’ll also break each page down so you can see why it’s ranking so well.

That way, you can apply these strategies to your site.

Case Study #1: “What are Channel Keywords?”

A while ago I launched The YouTube Marketing Hub .

And when I wrote the content for the hub, I made sure to optimize it for voice search.

Specifically, I included a mini-FAQ section at the top of almost every page:

And it worked!

When you do a voice search for “What is a YouTube channel description?”, you get this answer from Google:

Let’s break down some of the factors that went into this result:

First , the answer was part of a mini-FAQ section. As I showed you earlier, Google loves pulling voice search answers from FAQ pages.

Next , the result shows up in the Featured Snippet spot:

Third , the reading level of my answer is 9th grade, which is in line with most other voice search results.

Finally , Backlinko’s Domain Rating is 85. That’s higher than the voice search average of 77.

Again, the authority of the page doesn’t seem to be super important for voice search SEO.

(That page’s authority is only 12.)

Let’s look at another example…

Case Study #2: “What’s the Best Way to Peel Garlic?”

The answer to this one comes from Lifehacker:

This is one of the cases where Google still gives you 10 blue links.

But unlike a traditional set of search results, Google points you to a specific result by saying: “Here’s information from Lifehacker:”

So what helped this page rank for this voice search keyword?

First off, Lifehacker is a super authoritative site (Domain Rating of 91).

The page also loads lightning fast (it has a 97/100 mobile speed score from Google PageSpeed Insights ).

The answer is also written in a way that’s easy to understand (it’s written at a 7th-grade reading level).

Last up, the answer is in the Featured Snippet spot, which increases the odds of ranking in voice search:

Let’s wrap things up with one final mini case study…

Case Study #3: “How do you access the Google Keyword Planner?”

A while ago I updated my guide to getting the most out of The Google Keyword Planner .

Specifically, I added a bunch of snippets that would work well as a Featured Snippet or as a voice search result.

And sure enough, my page “ranks” #1 when you voice search for: “How do you access the Google Keyword Planner”.

Let’s break it down:

First , Backlinko’s Domain Rating is 85. That definitely helps.

But links aren’t nearly as important as formatting and language .

(After all, 3 of the other 10 results on the first page are from Google.com.)

Second , even though the guide was on a technical subject, I made it easy to understand:

(It’s exactly how I’d explain the Google Keyword Planner to my non-tech savvy mom.)

In fact, my page is written at an 8th-grade reading level.

Finally , the word count of my page is 2,497 words.

The average voice search result is approximately 2,300 words. So my content is pretty close to the “ideal” length for voice search SEO.

Now It's Your Turn

Now I’d like to hear from you:

Which technique from today’s guide are you going to try first?

Are you going to target more Question Keywords?

Or maybe you’re ready to start publishing FAQ pages.

Either way, leave a comment below right now.

Wow wow wow. Super killer post, Brian!! You keep pushing things to the next level. The design is awesome too!!

I really enjoyed the Advanced tips in Chapter 5 but, I’ve bookmarked this and are going to have come back and re-read this post a few times to digest it fully, lol.

Thanks Darren. Glad you learned some cool new stuff.

I always learn when I get these emails. Thank you Brian!

You’re welcome, Logan.

I’m really happy with how this one turned out. There’s some scattered information out there about optimizing for voice search. But no single go-to resource… until now 😀

Nice post again, Brian!

Another well defined article. I’m always excited to read your articles that pop up in my email. Great post!

As usual, a great guide! This time, I have a different question. Your blog post/webpage looks damn great! Is this totally designed by yourself, or you have used any page builder plugin for this? If you have used any page builder plugin, then please mention its name! Thanks! Rushikesh Thawale 🙂

Thanks. This guide is actually custom designed and coded.

Okay, Got It! Thanks, Buddy!

Great guide as always! Amazing info and one I’ll definitely be coming back to. Constantly trying to apply what I learn here and funnel it into my own business. So many gold nuggets of info!

Thanks Dave. The entire Backlinko team put A LOT of work into this one. So I’m glad to hear that you learned some new strategies that you can use to optimize for voice search.

This is a wonderful resource. Thanks Brian!

You’re welcome, Kaitlyn. 👍 👍 👍

Your guides are always incredibly comprehensive, Brian. Admittedly, I didn’t know much about voice search because I rarely use it so this was very helpful. Applying it to my SEO strategies is yet another fish to fry, though. Can the web stay static for at least a year or two? Sigh… 😉

Hey Wes, thank you. I’ve actually been using voice search more and more (it’s faster and easier). I hear you on that. It’s hard to keep up with all the changes. On the other hand, that’s part of the fun.

(At least for SEO nerds like me 🤓 )

As always. Really great content.

Thanks Karla. 👍👍👍

Thanks for the updated content, Brian. I was wondering: Ok, let say someone finds my content via voice search, how are they going to understand that this is my site? You mentioned that only if my site rank is really high I will be mentioned by the voice machine. Is there another way?

You’re welcome, Ivaylo. Google usually references the source of the answer (“According to Backlinko….”). Even so, like I mention in Chapter 2, voice search affects how people search. So even for traditional desktop searches, it makes sense to optimize for voice search.

Great content as usual! I’ve been looking for an indepth guide about voice search for a very long time – great to finally see something all in one place.

I love the FAQ’s page idea. I always thought they were a little too 2015, but voice search gives us an excuse to start using them again. We’ve been ensuring that we head up content with a question to cover long tail keywords for voice search.

You mention a lot about content optimisation however, I’m curious if on-page optimisation affects your ranking positions for voice search. Would you say that site owners would still need to take care of the basics, such as metas, h tags and internal link structure to rank for voice search, or would content be sufficient enough?

Thanks Curt. I’m with you: I’ve been interested in voice search for the last year or so. But most of the info was pretty scattered around.

To answer your question: From my own experiments, I’ve found that traditional on-page SEO stuff helps A LOT with voice search rankings. Specifically, how your content is structured. For example, if you have “What is X?” above an answer, it’s more likely to rank in voice search if “What is X” is an H2 or H3. That structure helps Google understand your content a bit better… which makes it more likely to rank for voice searches.

WOW! Thanks for this amazing article. I was tired of all those “useful” articles that show up on Google. Your article is the real deal.

I think voice search is going to be more significant in the coming years as more and more people get access to superfast internet connections.

In my country, India, Google even appears on the T.V. This alone is more than enough to encourage people to rely on voice search for day to day questions.

You’re welcome, Mithun. I’m with you: voice search is becoming more popular every day. The big sticking point is the social stigma of doing voice searches in public. But as some of the data I shared from Stone Temple Consulting showed, that’s fading fast.

This is one of most insightful things I’ve read in a long time. Mandatory meal time read at the office today. Search Experience Optimization is around the corner if not already here. Thanks for the information Brian.

You’re welcome, Ryan. I’m with you: SEO is definitely moving in that direction.

My first thought… WOW WOW WOW and WOW! Okay… the guy, hi Darren, with the first comment said the same. But there can’ t be another word!!! How many hours are in this text? Or month or years! ;-)))) Thank you so much for this, your researches and all these information. You saved me and the others so much lifetime;-)))

You’re welcome, Petra. This guide was definitely a lot of work. But I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Crazy that you offer this content just for free!

Crazy like a fox 🙂

Best Article on the new concept of SEO of voice search. Details about long tail keywords and 9th grade content writing is really informative.Thanks

You’re welcome. Yeah it’s interesting how voice search has made long tails more important. Like I mentioned in the post, though, this isn’t like 2009 where it made sense to create 1000 pages around 1000 long tail keywords. Once long piece of content can rank for thousands of long tail keywords.

First I will try to implement writing short and precise Answers. And even paragraphs too. 🙂

Amazing Brian! Can’t wait to dig in on this article & absorb all the goodies. Thank you for making it all easy for us!

You’re welcome, Darshana. Let me know if you have any questions.

Great post!! Really in-depth!!

But I don’t like where the google is going with this.

The google voice will read the answer of about 30 words. Minimising the amount of information that can be returned to the searcher.

So someone asked “How many calories are in apples?” And lets say that someone is diabetic but forgot to ask how much sugar is there and in what way will which apple influence his/hers health.. Google will not provide more than 30 words and if someone asked their amazon echo device lets say, they will be satisfied with their answer and thats it. On another hand if they manually opened the article by keyboard typing they would read 1000-2000 words article about apple and its effect on the health while also possibly mentioning its effect on diabetic people.

I am just giving a lame example but you get what I mean. This will affect the information age as people no longer have to read in depth and will only get the answers they can think of they need, when in fact they may need more than they asked for.

Logan, you raise a good point. And I agree with you on that. My guess is that the traditional “search for a keyword and click on 1 out of 10 blue links” is very much here to stay. There are LOTS of keywords where people need and want context and nuance. But for lots of others, people just want a quick answer.

That said, voice search affects ALL searches because it changes how people search and the keywords that they use.

I agree with you but I am just afraid that this new change will not promote learning in peoples lives.

I am very young and luckily for me I was always intrigued to learn more about any topic but not everyone is like that. This may negatively impact people by reducing the overall knowledge of people on any topic they are interested in because they will be drip fed the knowledge and only if they ask.

From what I noticed by observing friends of my age, they are simply impatient and want to get everything they need to know asap but we all know that this is not how the world works. There are no shortcuts to knowing things.

Sure some people will take a long way and read all of the 10 results but not everyone. Those who do not will not learn more but will usually get 30 word answers on the questions they remembered to ask.

The real problem is if there are downsides to something which they asked. Something that may seem insignificant or innocent but they just forgot to ask if there are downsides. Once something takes a turn for the worse there is no back button IRL.

I hope I am making myself clear. Thank you for your reply Brian and once more thank you for this post because it really is amazing!

I totally see where you’re coming from, Logan. With every new technology there are upsides and downsides. And voice search is no different.

Either way, as marketers, we need to be prepared for it.

Wow… This is another interesting update with Google.

However, isn’t this is going to affect niche websites with less Domain authority? I think it will

But anyways, you made it super easy to understand!

You’re right: niche websites aren’t going to perform as well. Google is trying to develop ways to bubble up trusted sources of info. So the higher your domain authority, the better you’ll do in voice search.

Just read Brian voice search post. Excellent coverage “Long Tail Keywords Into Long Form Content”

Thanks Derek

Wowww… Whenever i read your post, thats my expression. All things you mentioned reagrding voice search are very helpful. Now on i will target the question keywords.

Excluding “near me” search what is the value of ranking for voice search? Most of your examples, have little to no commercial intent.

From a local/affiliate SEO marketing prospective, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the value of having Alexia/Siri/Google Assistant read back parts of my web page.

With voice search increasing, I would love to know how to monetize this.

Jason, you raise a really good point.

That said, voice search impacts pretty much every keyword out there. Even commercial searches. For example, a few years ago someone might search for: “attorney SEO agency.” But with voice search they might search for: “What SEO agencies out there specialize in helping law firms?”. The intent is the same but the keyword has changed.

This is a great post – but I also wondered about the best way to utilise this for non-retail products. Thank you for addressing this too. I will have to spend some time getting my head around this on our site.

Thanks Rachel. Glad you found it helpful.

Wow, thanks for this super-detailed post. Did you have any experience how voice search works with recipes?

You’re welcome, Chris. Do you mean looking up a recipe using Google Home or Amazon Alexa?

Hi Brian, great guide as always.

I have a question.

You mentioned that only 2% of results have exact keywords in the title tag.

What does that mean?

Is Google somehow suppressing those results because they deem them too robotic for voice search (which probably runs on a different algo)?

Do you recommend that we still follow best on-page practice (keyword in the meta title, exact match and at the beginning when it makes sense); or should we try to include keywords within the meta title while also making sure to use filler words to make it more natural sounding?

I guess my question is: Is only the content body reserved for embedding long tails, or can we get creative with the meta information (without damaging our overall SEO) Thanks for your reply, once again great guide:)

Have a nice day.

P.S. I spotted a small typo. At the beginning of chapter 4 you say: “you get your site ready for voice ”

You miss one “will”

Hi Nikola, thank you. My take is that Google is grabbing voice search results from anywhere on a page (not just pages that are specifically about that term). I don’t think they’re suppressing robotic sounding title tags (after all, users aren’t even read back the title tag). Does that make sense?

And thanks for the typo heads up.

Great post Brian! There is a problem in one of your links (Google’s Speed Update). I get: Missing permissions You do not have access to the account, property, or view. Contact an Analytics administrator who has the Manage Users permission.

Thanks Manos. Glad you liked it. Checking out the broken link now.

As a new blogger (Started in February of this year) I can’t even begin to tell you how invaluable your blog has become to me. You always put out the most common sense information and timely as well.

I actually blog about smart home products, so I’m very VERY familiar with voice search and it’s importance. But this post just took my knowledge to a whole new level!

Thank you so much again for putting in the time and research and taking the time to pass on your knowledge to all of us.

Best Regards,

You’re welcome, Kevin. And congrats on the new blog! You’re in an awesome, growing niche. Must be fun!

You never know what’s next! Kind of like SEO…lol

LOL exactly.

Agree with Darren’s wow wow wow. Great Info. I will be updating and using this on my next sites more long tailed search words in articles and a FAQ page. Thanks very much

You’re welcome, Paul. I’ve already started adding FAQ sections to some of my content. It’s a great way to rank for more question keywords and hit a few long tails automatically.

Really love the design of post! In fact, this awesome design attracts readers to read the complete Guide. At the starting of my blogging journey, my friend suggested me to do work on the Question-based keyword. But I didn’t see any result of my webpage is on a featured snippet. Yet I am getting usual organic traffic. I think I should learn more to take my site into google suggestions like voice search & Featured Snippet. Today I have learnt something new from your post. Thanks for that!

No problem, Khalil. Glad you liked the guide.

Dude, this is HUGE! Thanks so much for putting this out. I don’t do any voice search, so to me this topic is super foreign. I will take some to swallow this beast guide this weekend. In the meantime, thanks again for putting up so much great work!

You’re welcome, Ivan. Happy to help

Epic article Brian. Really awesome and actionable. I was just wondering if I should make voice search a priority when a lot of my income comes from running ads on my site. I need click throughs and as you say, with voice search results, they won’t need too because there are featured snippets. Any advice would be wonderful. Thank you 😊

Good question, Michele. Appearing as a Featured Snippet is actually a cheat code to getting more traffic. The FS is going to appear anyway, so you might as well get your content in there 🙂

I read every post of yours and I love it.

Just found out that the new FAQ page that we designed for a client was matching most of your tips!

Really glad to know that we are always one step ahead googl’s updates 😉

Awesome Kirill!

Great post as always Brain! Voice Search SEO is next big thing after mobile seo. People who aren’t optimizating their website for voice search is leaving money on the table. Nearly 57% of searches on mobile happen through voice search.

It is not hidden that mobile users have increased surprisingly in past few years that still counting on. You can’t imagine the market.

Thanks Umesh. I agree: voice search is growing at an insane pace.

Damn, Brian Dean back at it with another killer article. I got a ton of value from this and will definitely be optimizing for voice search. Keep up the killer content!

Thanks Zukais.

Hey Brian, awesome stuff as always.

I am most certain that I’ve already been implementing “conversational keywords” but this just drives the point home further.

I never think of searching “macbook air university” but rather “what’s the best laptop for university students” or simply “best laptops for university students”.

At any rate, keep up the great work!

Thanks Mike. I still find myself searching for robotic keywords (mostly because it’s faster). But I’m MUCH more conversational when I search with my voice.

Thank you so much for sharing your research and I really appreciate your clear response to Curt. As a content writer, I use FAQ pages to address long tail keyword searches, and these pages usually rank well on Google. Since most searches typically use less formal writing, I mirror the reading level in H2 and H3. Using a more conversational tone also alleviates any content ranking conflicts with other pages.

The tedious part is staying on top of content. For this, I map all links, headers, and keywords for a site in Excel before transition. I, for one, am thrilled with the way Google has improved searches – especially voice search. Quality content is intentional and well worth the effort.

Addressing your wonderful point about headers, I’m a big fan of Yoast and use the wordpress plugin. Interestingly, their online documentation for headers states “Although not a major ranking factor, headings do affect SEO. That’s because headings are important to help users understand the subject of an article. And if readers use headings to figure out what an article is about, Google will too.”

However, my experience and your research shows that it is important to carefully structure headings for SEO. Using specific, localized, and targeted long tail keywords in headings, can make content easier to understand AND improve ranking.

Brian, I believe that you have cracked voice search wide open. More than a few of us need to catch up to you!

Do you think this is another win for quality SEO content or a quick fix for keyword stuffers? For example, if 20 writers use identical H1 and h2, do you know how Google compares and ranks the content that follows?

Thanks again for sharing your hands-on research. You’re my go-to SEO Guru!

You’re welcome, Helen. I’m really glad to hear that you enjoyed today’s guide!

I’m with you 100%: H1 and H2 tags don’t get a lot of love. But they’re super important for helping Google understand your page. It also doesn’t hurt that lots of headers break up content into easy to read chunks.

It’s hard to say, but it’s looking like a win for keyword stuffers right now. Like any new technology, marketers that move fast and exploit it (in the bad sense of the word) tend to have a short-term advantage. But in the long-term, quality content and sites will ultimately come out on top.

To answer the question about 20 identical h1 and h2s, there’s a lot to that… but it’s mostly link-based.

How are you tracking the results from your voice search optimization efforts?

I work for a big B2B software company that operates in a very competitive market so I try to focus my efforts on interesting areas which can drive above average results. The big challenge with most large organizations (it should be all companies, really) is the mantra of “if it can’t be tracked, it doesn’t count”.

I think you can infer improvements in traffic by mining Search Console data for impressions that are likely driven by voice search (“X near me” or full sentence questions) and/or using a tool like Searchmetrics to track queries where your website is being shown in featured snippets, but I can see where both approaches would be a big reporting challenge which still probably wouldn’t tell the entire story.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for putting this guide together!

You’re welcome, Brian. And that makes sense: the results from optimizing for voice search are legit tough to track.

That said, your idea is a smart one. “Near me” searches are likely voice searches. So are really long, conversational searches.

(Not all of them, of course. But a good chunk)

Google recently said something about including voice search queries in the Google Search Console. It would be AWESOME if they did that. It would make tracking the ROI of this whole thing a helluva lot easier.

Once again a wonderful article, I thank you so very much for putting up great efforts in creating amazing content like this one!

Last but not the least, I just have a quick question

Can Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) help with voice search?

Thanks Tuhin. I’m actually not super familiar with LDA.

That’s simply a wonderful article. I thank you so much for putting a lot of efforts in publishing great contents like this.

Last but not the least, I just have one question;

Again a solid MUST BOOKMARK article. Thanks Brain!

You’re welcome, Louis. I aim to please 🙂

Great article Brian. I’ve noticed these trends hanging out with friends with these devices in their homes. What’s your opinion about providing voice answers to these questions embedded in your blog? I recently started doing this in hopes that Google or Alexa would get smart enough to play an answer back through the speaker and the potential client would get to hear my voice.

Hey Frank, thank you. I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean audio answers to people’s questions?

Exactly. Not only do I try to produce a quality blog article but I narrate it as well with an embedded Soundcloud snippet. I figure that it would be more attractive and natural that the search engines would play an audio result back instead of serving a computerized voice (of course from Google’s recent AI assistant demo, that may not be an issue soon)

Good stuff Frank. Very interesting.

It’s yet again another amazing piece of content. If there is one thing i would like to learn from you, it is how you craft such outstanding content not only text but very visual and graphically appealing. Sometimes when i am on the run but i receive an email from you, i simply scroll down while looking at the visuals then i get an idea. Latter on, i come back for the details.

So Brian, allow me to be off topic just for today, how do you do it?

Thanks for your kind words. These guides are actually custom designed and coded. Definitely not easy!

Awesome article, I’m going to start implementing this into my clients sites. Question I have on Google page insights, this is an issues we are struggling with. We can’t seem to get consistent green on the insights score. Sometimes it does sometimes it does not. In one case we had a site that was smaller in size not get green that one that was bigger in file size. All our sites are in WordPress, do you know if this is a WP issue?

Hi Dean, thanks! That tool can be pretty wonky actually (especially over the last few weeks). I’d just follow the recommendations. I also recommend hitting up GTmetrix or Webpagetest.org to see how browsers actually load the site.

I can only imagine the tremendous amount of hard work you put into this every single day. I’m starting up a digital marketing and SEO company in India.

You are an inspiration to me, personally. When I got into this world, I had no clue where to start. I only knew that I could write stuff, you know? And I wasn’t even great at that.

I’m still learning every day and I honestly think that it’s great that you put in your resources to give back to the SEO community.

Thanks Sumit. And best of luck with your new SEO company. I hope my material helps it succeed.

Brian, this was a much-awaited content. And finally, we have got this.

You are the most trustable person for this type of content.

Also, I want to let you know that you are featured in one of my Blog Post.

Either way, Keep up the good work!!

Thanks Mystic. Thanks for the kind words and for mentioning me in one of your blog posts.

Another stellar article,I wonder if anyone has ever tried using the skyscraper method with your articles. Would be very difficult to top this one.

Thanks Minhaj. Many have tried. Few have succeeded 🙂

Definitely a FAQ page. Makes total sense and if you know your business and clients you know what they usually ask 😉

Definitely Lautaro. It’s an easy win.

Google, please show me Brian Dean doing the floss.

Excited to see if this works, LOL

Great article!!!!

LOL! Did it work? 😂😂😂

No matching results that target that. But I just call that opportunity LOL

Brilliant information. Just wondering how voice search will have any impact on Ecommerce SEO and how to go about implementing It?

Thanks Prateek. It looks like voice search impacts all searches (including ecommerce). Think keywords like: “what’s the best yoga mat for travel?” etc.

I have a website about the best rooftop bars from all over the world. My biggest challange is to find which questions people are voice searching for. Any tips on where I can find this?

For example, maybe someone is voice searching for “Which is the best rooftop bar in Bangkok” or “where can I find the best rooftop bars in Bangkok” How do I know which question to optimize from?

Hans, right now I don’t know of any tools that specifically give you voice searches. That said, “near me” searches are almost always voice searches.

Thank you for an amazing article. I have one question, how can we drive traffic to our sites if voice searches become mainstream?

You’re welcome, Dave. Voice search isn’t just for Google Home and Alexa. 20% of all mobile searches (and 25% of Windows desktop searches) are now voice searches. So there are still plenty of opportunities to get traffic from voice search.

Leave a Comment

• This is an Ad-Free website
• Learn AI Jobs skills
• Blockchain Courses
• Digital Jobs Offers

The Voice Search has been experiencing steady growth in recent years. In 2021, over 50% of online searches were conducted using voice.

What does this mean in simple terms? It means that voice search is changing the way we interact with search engines, and consequently, the criteria for displaying results are also changing.

It will become common to request information using voice and have the responses read by a voice assistant, resulting in well-crafted content being more easily found in Voice SEO .

To stay ahead of the competition, it is necessary to implement voice search into your marketing strategy and become a specialist in Digital Marketing and SEO-SEM Certification .

How can you be found by those seeking information using their voice? How does SEO change for voice searches?

In this article, we explore what Voice Search is, how it works, the main voice assistants, 7 useful tips on optimizing a site for this purpose, and all the resulting advantages.

What is Voice Search?

To begin, it’s appropriate to define the term voice search, also known as vocal search , as a technology based on voice recognition that allows us to conduct online searches without typing the question into the search engine, but solely using our voice.

We can perform a voice search on the internet via smartphones, tablets, PCs, wearables (devices that can be worn, like smartwatches ), or smart home speakers , such as Google Home or Amazon Echo.

The device, or more precisely, the voice assistant on the device, listens to the question, interprets it, and returns the results it deems most relevant. Depending on the type of device and its settings, it can read us the answer.

What we users predominantly use today to browse the internet is the smartphone, essentially because it’s an extension of our arm, and we never part with it.

Voice searches, too, are mainly carried out on our mobile phones. To activate voice search, it’s enough, for example, to say “ Ok Google ” on an Android device or “ Hey Siri ” on Apple, and the job is done.

How many times have you done that? There are various reasons, let’s explore them together.

The advantages of voice assistants

As we mentioned, searches through Voice Search are experiencing a strong surge and will become the most used search method in the coming years. To confirm this, we have data directly provided by Google:

20% of mobile searches on Google are done through voice. 40% of adults and a whopping 55% of teenagers contribute to this. Percentages that are destined to grow. Read the source, Google blog .

But why are voice searches increasing?

• Because they are convenient: voice search saves us from typing the query , the question we are thinking, giving us the freedom to multitask. We use Voice Search when our hands or eyes are occupied with another activity, such as driving, cooking, or exercising when we cannot type on a device because it is inconvenient or small, or simply when we do not feel like writing.
• Because they are fast: without the need to type, voice search saves us time . It is estimated to be three times faster than a normal search, so it is widely used when we are in a hurry and want a quick result.
• Because they are pure and reliable: another reason why it is more convenient is that we use a more natural language . With voice searches, queries are no longer two or three disconnected keywords but genuine, long, and conversational. We formulate complete sentences and questions , making it easier for artificial intelligence to interpret our search intent (what we want to know) and provide satisfactory results . The error rate in voice recognition is, in fact, very low.

Given the advantages, the consequence is inevitable, we will all get used to giving commands primarily through voice.

How does Voice Search work?

Voice Search , the devices capable of understanding vocal input, operate thanks to artificial intelligence. Voice search technology is based on AI, machine learning , and the existence of the cloud.

Artificial Intelligence is a digital brain that interprets the semantic meaning of user queries and provides them with relevant answers .

To do this, it must analyze and compare an impressive amount of data, including the queries users have made in the past, their geographical location, and previous interactions with the device.

What allows Voice Search technology to be present on devices with low computing power is the cloud. The artificial intelligence software (the voice assistant, to be clear) is not physically installed on every device .

Being on the cloud, it only needs to be connected to the internet to access all the computing power needed for data analysis.

What you’ve just read is the technical explanation, in practical terms, to perform a voice search.

You just need to say the trigger words “Hey Siri”, “Hey Google”, or call “Alexa” , depending on your device, and ask your question.

The devices will take care of the rest, presenting you with the most suitable answers to your request, based on their configuration, of course.

To be clear, by confirmation I mean whether they are equipped with a screen or not.

If we talk to a smartphone, it will return the information we are looking for by displaying a list of contents that will appear on our screen.

If instead we use a home assistant like Google Home, we will only have to listen to the answer, which will be read to us directly by the device because it does not have any screen.

In any case, it’s all very easy and simplified!

What are Smart Speakers

Smart speakers (or smart assistants) are home voice assistants , hardware devices without a screen .

Smart speakers have a speaker, a microphone, and a Wi-Fi connection through which they communicate with AI software.

There are various brands and models, but the most well-known personal assistants are Google Home , which supports Google Assistant, and Amazon Echo , which supports Alexa.

We can give these devices voice commands related to home automation , ask them to read us the news, a book, and of course, to perform a voice search online .

As mentioned, since they don’t have a screen, they operate solely through voice input and output. Unable to display results on a screen, they are designed to read us the results .

Smart speakers experienced exponential growth in popularity starting in 2018 . In America, voice assistants have become an integral part of daily routines , thanks to devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.

The trend is also rising in Europe, with a peak in sales recorded during the pandemic period, especially in the first lockdown of 2020.

Primary voice assistants

Let’s analyze the voice assistants present in the market. These devices function with a brain that processes commands and requests, translating them into actions and responses.

The devices have different brains, not all supporting the same voice assistant . There are four primary voice assistants created by major market players:

• Google Assistant , owned by Google, is implemented on Android devices.
• Alexa by Amazon.
• Cortana by Microsoft.
• Siri by Apple.

There’s an important thing to know when deciding how to distribute and optimize online content. Voice assistants query different search engines and draw from different sources of information to provide results to users.

We won’t delve into which voice assistant is better at what and why, but if we want to appear in voice searches made by every type and brand of device, it’s useful to know where they gather information from.

Google Assistant

Google’s voice assistant, also known for its familiar “OK Google” followed by a request, gathers information from all the spaces where Google allows us to input information.

Its purpose is to assist us in everyday life, and its functions can be applied to all types of devices, performing different tasks for each.

Google Assistant is also compatible with numerous services or apps, making the voice experience increasingly customized.

Amazon’s cloud-based assistant in Amazon Echo, connected to Yext, Bing, and Yelp , arrived in 2018.

Today, it consists of multiple algorithms capable of continuously learning new responses, expressions, and abilities, and even enhancing empathy between the device and the person.

All of this allows users to interact solely through voice. With Alexa, you can ask to make purchases, get weather updates, play music, listen to audiobooks, control integrated smart home devices, and much more.

How? Simply say “Alexa” , and you’ll see a blue light, indicating that the device is listening.

Echo is the term that refers to the Amazon Echo family, which includes all the hardware devices developed by Amazon where Alexa can be activated, of course, using voice commands.

A fun fact, due to the high number of users who confuse the name Alexa with Alexia, searching for it on search engines with the latter name, Amazon cleverly (and slyly!) decided to create a dedicated page with the URL /alexia.

Inside, it contains all existing Amazon Echo devices.

Created by Microsoft, it is connected to Bing and Yelp. Launched in 2014, this assistant is integrated into mobile and desktop devices. Cortana can provide any information based on the data it can gather.

The software was developed for operating systems such as Windows Phone, Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Xbox One, and Android, albeit only in the United States.

Cortana can also support third-party apps and integrate with wearable devices (Microsoft Band and Fitbit).

Here’s a curiosity about “her” as well, Cortana is particularly famous for her fortune-telling abilities, she predicted the winning teams during the 2014 World Cup!

Siri is Apple’s voice assistant that uses Google, Apple Maps, and Yelp. It parted ways with Bing in 2017.

Like all previous voice assistants, Siri can provide various personalized information such as weather forecasts, local business locations, directions, and more.

Siri is available on third/fourth-generation devices and is available with the iOS 6 update. Activating it is simple, just say “Hey Siri”.

Voice Search VS Voice Command

Voice searches and voice commands both rely on voice recognition technology but differ in the action requested from the device.

A voice search is a request for information from a search engine. The voice command issues an order to the device to act within it, such as setting an alarm, making a call, sending an email, or updating the calendar.

If we exclude personal commands, Voice Search is used more frequently for:

• Local searches : when looking for businesses in a specific area. This includes all queries related to hotels, restaurants, events, weather, maps, and directions, known as “near me searches”, such as “OK Google, find a seafood restaurant near me”.
• Entertainment : all requests related to music, movies, video games, books, etc.
• General information : all other types of queries, such as tips on how to do something, curiosity, news, and product searches.

Voice Search Optimization: what is it?

Voice Search Optimization or VSO , means all the activities aimed at improving online content to provide users with useful, effective vocal responses, and consequently, a better conversational experience during searching .

Voice SEO or Vocal Search takes a less keyword-focused approach and is more about addressing a need. Doing Voice SEO means crafting and positioning content that answers increasingly specific questions.

The texts must be constructed with features that appeal to voice assistants, ensuring they are read by devices that integrate this function.

VSO activities are to be considered extensions of SEO. It must be clear that the vocal response obtained from a voice assistant comes from well-indexed and, therefore, high-quality content because it is well-positioned within the SERP.

The question then arises, has Voice Search changed the way of writing from an SEO perspective ? As you may have already understood, yes.

To provide satisfactory answers to people’s needs, we always start with questions . If the questions change, the traditional way of optimizing content on the web no longer works to appear in the first position for a Google Voice Search.

This is why SEO is divided, or rather specialized. SEO is for written and typed queries on the other hand, SEO is focused on voice search and VSO.

Some even speak of a total replacement of the activity and acronym SEO with Voice Search Optimization, VSO.

With the advent of voice assistants, we are witnessing a real revolution that concerns changing how we interact with the network and different positioning criteria.

Today, online user requests are increasingly made as a verbal exchange, like real conversations requiring quick and natural responses .

Doing SEO requires a good foundation in digital marketing. Find out if you’re ready with this quick test

How to optimize content for voice search: 7 helpful tips

Let’s get into specifics, I’ll now provide you with 7 useful tips to optimize content for Voice Search .

These suggestions are, in my opinion, the key factors to keep in mind, whether you already have an online website or are just starting with SEO.

Whether you’re a beginner or have experience, reading on will help you start on the right foot.

How do queries change in voice search?

If in the past the habit was to streamline the query, using fewer keywords to optimize searches on Google, Bing, etc.

Now the algorithm is focused on matching as closely as possible to voice searches , even if they are spontaneous or linguistically imprecise.

The factors to consider for optimization through voice searches are therefore:

• Geolocation : specific and personal. The search for terms like “near here” or “near me” is increasing, spoken aloud by mobile devices.
• Increased use of long-tail keywords , well-defined and structured: compared to traditional searches, dictated queries resemble the language of a normal conversation. Users are more specific and verbose. They are longer, less mechanical, and mostly questions with clear search intent. With voice search, you no longer think in terms of short or medium keywords but more in complete sentences.
• Vocal queries are mainly in the form of questions and spontaneous, more colloquial: questions accompanied by the 5W’s, such as how, where, when, why, and who , are popular. Ensure that your content answers these questions.
• Questions with first-person verbs : from 2015 to 2017, mobile voice searches containing “I need” or “I have to” increased by 65%, while those containing “can” increased by 85%. It is clear from these data that users primarily search for practical actions. To assist them with your content, ask yourself: does what I’ve written comprehensively answer the questions “can” and “I need”?

Structure and content of your website

As you have understood by reading so far, you should start seriously thinking about optimizing your site for voice search.

It’s just a matter of time before voice searches become the norm. To optimize a site for Google Voice Search , you need to act on two fronts.

The first is that of content and  the second is the optimization of technical aspects of the site such as speed, security, and authority, which benefit the overall ranking of a site but are particularly important for Voice Search.

Let’s delve into them in more detail:

“ Content is King “, as the saying goes, all the optimizations in the world are of no use if the content is not useful and interesting .

You need to establish a content strategy that is truly relevant to user needs , and the text must adhere to the basic rules of SEO Copy.

It should be easy to read and well-written , close to the language of the user, with short sentences, simple terms, many bullet points, and the list goes on.

Here is a basic checklist to optimize the content of a website for Voice Search :

• Understand the search intent: the first step to producing valuable content is to satisfy an informational need based on what people are searching for with their voice. As we define our content strategy, “SEO tools” come to our aid in searching for keywords and questions around a keyword, such as SEMrush (paid) and Answerthepublic (free). You can enter a keyword and see all the questions related to it. Do not forget the analysis of Google’s SERP, at our complete disposal and free. We constantly have everything we need in front of our eyes, we just need the right skills to use this information to our advantage and strategically.
• Monitor queries in Search Console or Analytics: focus on long-tail keywords related to an informational search intent. Ask yourself if, with the content we cover, we can answer one of those specific questions. These questions consist of multiple words and will have long-tail keywords within them that should be used in texts in relevant and logical contexts.
• Structure content in the form of question and answer: google loves structured texts and the use of titles. To be more visible on the search engine, structure the content in the form of question and answer. Insert the question in a header and the answer in the body of the text immediately below: you will make it easier for Google to extract the right answer.
• Provide short answers: answer user questions with short sentences because it makes it easy for Google to provide answers to people. You don’t need a long paragraph, one or two sentences are enough. Users want quick answers that can be read to them with their voice. The shorter your answer, the more likely your content will be selected. However, be careful, for voice search, pages with more than 2200 words perform better than pages with 500 – 700 words . So yes, to short and structured answers as I just explained, but within substantial content. This way, Google can index you for various terms, from which you will derive more traffic.
• Create FAQ pages: these pages are a good way to benefit from the SEO perspective. FAQs are a series of frequently asked, direct questions, and therefore absolutely perfect for voice searches.

As for the technical optimizations of the site , here’s what you need to do:

• Site Speed: the faster a site loads, the more traffic it will receive from voice searches. Site speed plays a crucial role in voice search and SEO, especially considering Google’s mobile-first criteria. An optimal result is equal to or less than 4.6 seconds. To check your site’s speed and get advice on speeding it up, you can use Google Page Speed .
• Authority, Link Building: building an authoritative domain doesn’t happen overnight. It is a process that takes time, consistency, and effort. You need to create valuable original content, engage in link building, and provide a good user experience. Working to improve content, design, and link building can help gain voice traffic , as Google views authoritative sites more favorably, attracting a larger audience.
• Secure Site, HTTPS Protocol: a site following the HTTPS protocol receives more traffic from voice searches because Google increasingly prioritizes user security. Over 65% of voice search results come from HTTPS sites, so even showcase sites seem to be approaching the time to switch to HTTPS. [Source by neilpatel ].

Navigate the future of Voice Search using SEO-SEM tactics! Grab your copy now!

Why featured snippets are important for voice search

A final necessary clarification regarding content optimizations concerns the featured snippet , which is nothing more than the organic result placed higher by Google, the so-called “position zero” .

You should know that according to the majority and as confirmed by Google itself in its guidelines if you want to optimize a site for Google Voice Search , you should aim to create the featured snippet in Google’s SERP.

It means that your content must be able to precisely and comprehensively satisfy a user’s specific query . This is where the information is taken, which is then read to users. We’re talking about high-quality content.

Add a personal assistant to your website

We have now understood that Voice Search will soon be the norm. What better idea than to add a personal voice assistant to your website?

You can already imagine the fantastic revolution it brings: imagine if the user, entering your online shop, could directly ask a voice assistant to show them the product they are looking for.

All this, without entering filters or having to type anything. Furthermore, it’s also possible to receive direct feedback from users after their experience on your site has ended.

Thanks to the artificial intelligence guiding voice assistants , you can ask the user if the product shown was satisfactory. This will continually improve search results for future customers. Cutting-edge technology!

Search session

By search session, it’s not just the duration of time a user spends on a site. It is certainly that, but also the before and after of the same search.

A session begins from the moment a person has the impulse to search for something specific and continues even in the days following the actual search.

This applies not only to Vocal Search but to every search conducted online, understanding and monitoring user behavior is crucial to attracting them and, above all, satisfying their needs before others.

Owned by schema.org and Google. Currently only operational in the United States, but worth keeping an eye on as it intends to expand to other countries.

Speakable selects parts of web pages or articles that are more suitable for voice reading and synthesizes them. From here, devices using Google Assistant can play them. Google Assistant uses Speakable data to respond to current news.

When asked about a specific topic, it provides three sources from around the web and supports audio playback with attached voice synthesis in articles that include Speakable structured data.

For more details, check the Speakable Markup schema .

Google My Business

The importance of Google My Business for local businesses is unquestionable, especially considering its visibility for voice assistants.

When users make requests like, “OK Google, find a nearby laundromat”, they immediately find the closest business through Google My Business.

Businesses without a presence, even if closer, won’t be easily discovered, meaning they are missing out on a significant potential customer base.

Google Action

This feature from Google lets you link your app to Google Assistant, enabling users to access your services simply by using their voice. It’s available for all Android apps.

This provides quick access to your app’s content, engaging your customers with tailor-made functionalities for them.

And what if you don’t have an app? No problem! Google still generates a dedicated page within Assistant based on your articles.

Once voice requests through Google Assistant align with your content, Google will ask users if they want to read or listen to your news.

Additionally, with Google, you can implement your successful advertising strategy!

Discover the art of engaging audiences through Voice Searches on smartphones and smart devices. Download our exclusive ebook for free

The evolution of voice search

The Voice Search was born in the distant August of 2008, back then known as Voice Action , and was launched by Google only on Android devices. A month later, voice search became available for iPhones as well.

Versions in Spanish, German, and French were launched from 2011 onwards, initially available only in English.

In 2011, specifically in June, Google announced that it would incorporate Voice Search on all devices, including smartphones and desktops. An innovative feature that provided users with the ability to use their mobile phones to search on Google.

As expected, in the early stages, the process was not as immediate and straightforward as it is now, the user had to call the Google Voice Search System number and wait to verbally communicate the keywords they wanted to search.

The next step involved waiting for the page to update with the requested information. Over ten years later, almost all devices now support Voice Search and are capable of providing increasingly precise answers to users.

The exponential growth of Voice Search is revolutionizing the entire way of interacting online. It’s only a matter of time before using voice assistants to perform tasks and searches becomes the norm.

This revolution is compelling SEO professionals to adopt new ways to optimize online content for voice search.

To stay ahead and not lose the market share derived from voice searches, it is undoubtedly important to adopt a voice search marketing strategy . The guidelines in this mini-guide are initial considerations, to be explored further.

If you are passionate about the world of marketing, especially SEO and SEM, and you create content for the web, you might be interested in certifying yourself and delving into all the subjects to become a true specialist in voice searches and more!

Reach out to us for a conversation on optimizing your presence through voice search. Let your voice be heard online!

CONTACT US NOW

Hello there! I’m passionate about a variety of interests, including playing badminton, diving into video games, indulging in movies and series, and exploring new destinations while listening to my favorite tunes. I thrive on learning, constantly seeking out new knowledge and experiences. My professional journey started in a call center, but I’ve transitioned into freelancing, dedicating myself to continuous improvement and striving to be the best at what I do.

START YOUR CAREER

DOWNLOAD YOUR EBOOK

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Submit Comment

Privacy Overview

Case Studies on Voice Search Success

Table of contents.

Voice search has revolutionized the way people interact with technology, providing a convenient and hands-free method of accessing information. It is quickly becoming a dominant form of search, and businesses are starting to recognize its importance. In this article, we will explore case studies that highlight the success of voice search implementation in various industries.

But what exactly is voice search ? It is a technology that allows users to perform searches and commands using their voice through virtual assistants like Siri , Google Assistant , or Amazon Alexa . This technology utilizes speech recognition and natural language processing to understand and respond to user queries accurately.

So, why is voice search important? The rise of voice-enabled devices and virtual assistants has transformed consumer behavior. With voice search, users can get immediate answers, engage in hands-free browsing, and access information while on the go. This shift in user behavior presents significant opportunities for businesses to optimize their content and marketing strategies for voice search.

To illustrate the impact of voice search, we will examine three case studies that demonstrate successful implementation in different industries. The first case study focuses on an e-commerce company, showcasing how voice search integration has enhanced the customer experience and driven sales. The second case study explores the travel industry, highlighting how voice search has revolutionized travel planning and improved customer engagement. Lastly, we will examine how local businesses have leveraged voice search to expand their customer reach and boost sales.

These case studies will provide valuable insights into the strategies and benefits of voice search implementation. With the key takeaways from these studies, businesses can understand the potential of voice search and develop effective strategies to optimize their online presence for this emerging trend. Let’s dive into these case studies and uncover the secrets behind voice search success.

Key takeaways:

• Case studies demonstrate the success of voice search in e-commerce: Implementing voice search can lead to improved customer experience, higher engagement, and increased sales for e-commerce companies.
• Voice search can drive customer engagement in the travel industry: Incorporating voice search into travel companies can enhance the customer experience, increase engagement, and improve customer reach and sales.
• Adopting voice search strategies is beneficial for local businesses: Local businesses can benefit from integrating voice search by expanding their customer reach, improving customer engagement, and ultimately increasing sales.

What is Voice Search?

Why is Voice Search Important?

Voice search is crucial because it offers convenience, speed, and accessibility . It allows users to search for information hands-free and on-the-go , making it ideal for multitasking or when physical interaction with a device is not possible. Moreover, voice search provides faster results compared to typing, significantly reducing the time spent searching for information. Importantly, voice search caters to individuals with disabilities or those who prefer audio-based interactions . Given the increasing prevalence of voice-controlled devices, such as smart speakers , understanding and optimizing for voice search is necessary for businesses and marketers to effectively meet the evolving needs of users.

Case Study 1: Voice Search Success in E-commerce

In the realm of voice search success, let’s dive into an intriguing case study – exploring an e-commerce company’s journey to triumph. Discover the background of this dynamic enterprise, witness the seamless implementation of voice search, and explore the impressive results and countless benefits that were gleaned. Get ready to be inspired by this captivating real-life example of harnessing the power of voice search in the world of online retail.

Background of the E-commerce Company

The background of the e-commerce company, including factors such as their industry, target audience, and technological capabilities, is crucial in comprehending their triumph with voice search. For instance, a well-established online retailer with a tech-savvy customer base is more inclined to seamlessly integrate voice search. The company’s dedication to innovation and adaptability to emerging trends play a significant role in their achievements. By examining the background of the e-commerce company, we can pinpoint the specific challenges they encountered and the strategies they implemented to effectively harness the power of voice search. This comprehension can offer valuable insights and recommendations for other businesses seeking to incorporate voice search into their operations.

Implementation of Voice Search

Implementing voice search involves several key steps to optimize your website for voice-based interactions.

• Conduct keyword research to identify popular voice queries relevant to your business.
• Optimize your website content by incorporating long-tail keywords , natural language , and question-based phrases .
• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly to provide a seamless user experience.
• Implement structured data markup to help search engines understand and display your content in voice search results.
• Create conversational and concise content that provides direct answers to users’ voice queries .
• Leverage local SEO strategies to target voice searches focused on location-based queries .

Fact: By 2022, it is estimated that voice-enabled speakers will reach 1.8 billion worldwide, emphasizing the importance of implementing voice search strategies.

Results and Benefits of Voice Search

Voice search offers a wide range of results and benefits for users, greatly enhancing their search experience and providing unparalleled convenience. Allow me to outline several advantages of voice search:

• Increased Efficiency: Voice search enables faster and hands-free searching, allowing users to swiftly access information with ease.
• Enhanced Accuracy: As voice search technology continues to advance, it consistently delivers precise results that precisely align with the user’s intent.
• Unmatched Convenience: Users can effortlessly execute voice searches while on the move, eliminating the need to manually type on a small screen.
• Improved Accessibility: Voice search greatly facilitates access to information for individuals with disabilities or those who encounter challenges with typing.
• Tailored Personalization: Voice assistants possess the ability to learn an individual’s preferences and consequently provide highly personalized recommendations.

Pro-tip: To ensure utmost accuracy in voice search results, it is crucial to enunciate clearly and concisely.

Case Study 2: Voice Search Success in Travel Industry

In the fascinating world of voice search success, our attention now turns to a remarkable case study in the travel industry. Picture this: an innovative travel company harnessing the power of voice search technology to transform customer experience and engagement. We’ll dive into the integration of voice search, examine its impact on customer experience, and explore the adoption of effective voice search strategies. Brace yourself for insights on how this forward-thinking approach has led to increased customer reach and skyrocketing sales. Let’s embark on our journey into the captivating realm of voice search success in the travel industry!

Overview of the Travel Company

When considering voice search success in the travel industry, it’s essential to have an overview of the travel company. This overview should include understanding their target audience , the range of services they offer, and their online presence . For instance, suppose we take a travel company that specializes in adventure travel . In that case, they may have a particular appeal to a younger demographic and provide activities like hiking and rock climbing . Additionally, they might have a robust online presence with a user-friendly website and a mobile app. By comprehending the unique characteristics and offerings of the travel company , voice search can be seamlessly integrated to enhance customer experience and engagement. Numerous case studies have demonstrated that leveraging voice search has led to increased bookings and heightened customer satisfaction for travel companies.

Integration of Voice Search

Integrating voice search into various industries has proven to be a successful strategy in improving customer experience and engagement. The integration of voice search has been particularly impactful in the e-commerce sector, where companies like Amazon have implemented voice search features. These features allow customers to conveniently search for products and make purchases using their voice. As a result, there has been a significant increase in sales and customer satisfaction.

Furthermore, the travel industry has also recognized the benefits of integrating voice search. Companies such as Expedia have leveraged voice search technology to assist customers in finding and booking flights, hotels, and activities. This integration has greatly enhanced the overall customer experience and has led to increased engagement.

Not only have large corporations benefited from the integration of voice search, but local businesses have also experienced positive outcomes. By incorporating voice search into their operations, local businesses have expanded their customer reach. This expansion, in turn, has contributed to an uplift in sales.

Impact on Customer Experience and Engagement

The impact of voice search on customer experience and engagement is immense. Customers are increasingly relying on voice search to discover information, make purchases, and interact with businesses. This advanced technology has greatly simplified the process for customers to access information and connect with businesses, resulting in enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty . By delivering a more convenient and seamless experience, voice search significantly contributes to customer engagement by promptly and accurately addressing their queries. Consequently, businesses that prioritize integrating voice search can anticipate a surge in customer engagement, elevated conversion rates, and fortified customer relationships. Voice search undeniably leaves a positive impact on customer experience and helps businesses maintain their competitiveness in the digital era.

Adoption of Voice Search Strategies

Adoption of voice search strategies is essential for businesses looking to gain an edge in the digital landscape. Here are some crucial steps to consider:

The adoption of voice search strategies has revolutionized how businesses engage with customers. Companies that have embraced this technology have witnessed substantial improvements in customer reach and sales. For instance, a local bakery implemented voice search on their website, enabling customers to easily locate the nearest store and check product availability. This resulted in a 30% increase in customer reach and a 15% boost in sales. By incorporating voice search strategies, businesses can elevate customer experiences and remain competitive in the ever-evolving digital world.

Increase in Customer Reach and Sales

Increasing customer reach and sales is vital for the success of any business, and voice search can play a significant role in achieving this. Here are some ways in which voice search can assist businesses in expanding their customer reach and boosting sales:

Enhanced accessibility: Voice search enables customers to easily access information and make purchases using only their voice, making it more convenient and accessible for a broader range of customers.

Improved customer experience: Voice search provides a personalized and interactive experience, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and increased loyalty.

Enhanced visibility: Optimizing your business for voice search increases the likelihood of appearing in voice search results, making it easier for potential customers to discover and engage with your business.

Competitive advantage: By adopting voice search strategies early on, businesses can stay ahead of their competitors and attract more customers.

A local coffee shop implemented voice search optimization to enhance customer reach and sales. By creating a voice search-friendly website and optimizing product listings for voice queries, they experienced a significant increase in online visibility and brand awareness. This resulted in a surge in foot traffic and sales, as more customers discovered and frequented the shop through voice search recommendations. Embracing voice search technology helped them expand their customer base and achieve substantial sales growth.

Key Takeaways from Voice Search Case Studies

• Optimize your content to appear in featured snippets , as voice search often pulls answers from these snippets .
• Focus on optimizing for long-tail keywords , as voice search queries are typically longer and more conversational.
• Ensure that your business is optimized for local search , as voice searches are often location-based .
• Make sure your website is mobile-friendly , as most voice searches are done on mobile devices .
• Match the way people speak by optimizing your content to use natural language and answer questions directly.

Did you know? Voice search is growing rapidly, with approximately 55% of teenagers and 41% of adults using voice search daily.

Some Facts About Case Studies on Voice Search Success:

• ✅ Voice search is revolutionizing the way we search for information and interact with technology.
• ✅ Virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant have become integrated into millions of devices worldwide.
• ✅ Voice search is faster, more convenient, and allows for hands-free searching.
• ✅ It provides more accurate results, especially for local businesses and directions.
• ✅ Voice search technology improves accessibility for people with disabilities or mobility issues.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. how is voice search technology improving accessibility and convenience in our daily lives.

Voice search technology, powered by speech recognition software and virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, allows for quicker and hands-free searching. It enables people with disabilities or mobility issues to easily browse for information, improving accessibility and convenience in their daily lives.

2. What are the key findings from a study on voice search optimization?

A comprehensive study on voice search optimization found that close to 80% of answers came from the top three organic results. Additionally, 70% of answers occupied a SERP feature, with 60% of those being Featured Snippets. The study also revealed that backlinks had a slight influence on rankings.

3. How has voice search impacted the Hong Kong market?

In Hong Kong, the implementation of voice search has changed the way people conduct searches due to the complexity of Cantonese grammar and vocabulary. With the incorporation of Cantonese as a language option in Google Assistant, users now vocalize full questions or longer phrases, optimizing voice search for the specific linguistic nuances of Cantonese.

4. How is improved accuracy in voice recognition technology benefiting users?

Voice recognition technology has made significant advancements, with accuracy rates reaching 95% or higher. This improved accuracy ensures that users receive more accurate search results, especially for local businesses and directions, enhancing their overall search experience.

5. What are the ranking factors that affect voice search?

Ranking factors for voice search include factors such as readability, page speed, backlinks, and SERP features. A study analyzing over 50,000 questions found that nearly 80% of answers came from the top three organic results, with 70% of answers occupying a SERP feature, primarily Featured Snippets.

6. How can businesses optimize for voice search to improve brand visibility?

To optimize for voice search, businesses should focus on factors such as page speed, trust score, and the use of natural language processing. It is also essential to target SERP features, such as Featured Snippets, and ensure that their website content is easily understandable and accessible through voice-activated devices like Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.

Related posts:

• Challenges in Voice Search Adaptation
• Voice Search vs Text Search Behaviour
• Role of AI in Voice Search Evolution
• Future Trends in Voice-Activated Searches

We offer specialised expertise in complex digital channels with unique services and customised solutions for growth, reputation management, research, analytics, and SEO.

Your Privacy Choices

By clicking “ Accept All Cookies ”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.

We won’t track your information when you visit our site. But in order to comply with your preferences, we’ll have to use just one tiny cookie so that you’re not asked to make this choice again.

← Back to Articles

Dec 28, 2022

Prepare for the Future of Voice Search

• Customer Experience (CX)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Written by Clark Boyd

There are plenty of impressive statistics regarding digital assistants and voice search. To cite just a few:

• Over 25% of the global online population use the voice search on mobile devices (Source: Microsoft)
• One third of U.S consumers own a smart speaker - Statista
• The use of digital voice assistants will triple to 8 billion by 2023 driven by smart home devices - Juniper Research
• The transaction value of purchases made through voice assistants on smart home devices globally is predicted by Statista to reach $164 billion in 2025

Clearly, this is a growing industry and there’s huge scope for customer engagement and advertising opportunities. 

Devices such as Google Home, Homey and the Amazon Echo range are increasingly prominent in living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms in Western countries. Furthermore, anthropomorphic assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant are embedded in a wide range of smartphones, cars, and even vacuum cleaners .    

It is a trend that sits at the intersection of increased mobile use, sophisticated machine learning algorithms, and the symbiotic relationship between people and technology. As such, its continued rise seems inexorable.

But what does this really mean for brands? Does voice search require a separate strategy? And if so, what does it entail?

This article will examine what we know about voice search and give you some tips that will help integrate voice into your marketing strategy. 

Voice Search: A Natural Extension of Semantic Search

The evolution of communication begins with speech and moves on to written language. However, search engines have  experienced this in reverse .

The signals that we innately pick up on, such as intonation or memories of past interactions, are difficult to incorporate into a search engine.

When I ask a friend, “What would be the best smartphone for me to buy?”, they can tailor the recommendation based on my preferences.

Scaling that level of insight requires significant natural language processing power, along with the information retrieval technology to sift through billions of results and locate the right one. Smartphones provide more contextual information than desktop computers, but a search engine still needs a reliable way to process and utilize so much data.

The image below highlights the levels of difficulty for a search engine and the technology required in each case:

This matters when we consider voice search strategy. People adapt their behaviors based on the possibilities at their disposal. As marketers, understanding those behaviors is essential if we want to cut through the noise and connect.

Brands create the content that leads a consumer from question to answer. A search engine is the interlocutor that makes the connection.

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm ushered in the age of semantic search, making use of the Google Knowledge Graph to understand the relationship between entities and deliver something approaching conversational search.

Ask Google “Who is the king of Spain?”, and it will respond “King Felipe VI”. Next, ask “Who is his wife?”, and it will respond “Letizia of Spain”.

Google infers that ‘his’ refers to King Felipe. This is a subtle but significant shift that affects how we should create and promote content through search. We can now have conversations through search engine optimization (SEO) , rather than one-off exchanges.

Semantic search is changing how people find information and it is heightening their expectations. As the search engine’s capabilities change, so should ours as marketers.

In essence, this development is a natural and vital component of voice search’s rise. Google reports that people are increasingly searching for queries using words such as ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘I’.

As an indicator of the modern consumer’s requirements from online content, this is very telling. People would only ask these questions if they expect the answer to be personalized and unique to them. These searches are typically carried out by voice, rather than text.

Once more, this points to the difference between voice search and traditional search. Consumers are treating digital assistants as exactly that, a personal helper to get things done quicker and easier than before. We expect the assistant to ‘know’ us.

Another question that is often raised is just how genuine the commercial opportunity is for voice search.

A 2017 study from iProspect revealed that while people predominantly use voice search to get information, such as weather forecasts, or enable actions like turning on lights and playing music, they are also using them to find stores, research and purchase.

Moreover, the distinction between voice search on mobile and with a smart home device is rather marked. This is perhaps to be expected, given that we carry mobile devices with us and they have screens, whereas home devices tend not to, but it does bring important implications for brands. Mobile phone screens provide a canvas on which to display choice and information, while a home device must deliver one, authoritative answer.

And the ecommerce sector is taking note as Walmart acquired conversational AI-startup Botmock , and partnered with Google to allow customers add items to their virtual shopping cart through Google Assistant. Target and Carrefour also struck such deals with Google, and Ocado has partnered with Amazon to create a similar experience through Alexa.

From this, we can start to understand the drivers – both technological and human – that have seen voice search grow so rapidly.

Voice Search Best Practices

Technical seo.

• Focus on speed and mobile-friendliness. A study of 10,000 voice search results by Backlinko shows that the time to first byte for a voice search result is significantly shorter than for the average webpage. With Google’s “speed update” rolling out for all users now, this should be the first port of call for any mobile or voice search strategy.
• Use structured data on all landing pages. One sizeable challenge for digital assistants is that they must comb through trillions of pages to identify the elements that will answer a user’s query. Structured data, taken from the Schema.org standard, helps a search engine to navigate code and understand its contents.
• Experiment with new data formats. Google supports the Speakable structured data element which is useful when asking for specific topics and news related to a particular brand or event. In Google’s words:

“In order to fulfil news queries with results people can count on, we collaborated on a new schema.org structured data specification called Speakable, for eligible publishers to mark up sections of a news article that are most relevant to be read aloud by the Google Assistant.”

The application of this format is limited for now, but it’s not difficult to imagine a future where digital assistants read content directly from all landing pages. Early movers will seize the advantage in this field

Content Marketing

When it comes to voice search, the area it can have a huge impact is in content marketing . It can help you to:

• Create conversational content - Voice search lends itself naturally to dialogue, which should be factored into content strategy. Identify common questions or pain points in your industry and, quite simply, answer them better than anyone else does.
• Write for intent states, not keywords - Voice search queries tend to be much more varied than their typed counterparts. As such, trying to target individual queries within content is a challenging and unnecessary approach. Search engines want to satisfy user intent. Aim to understand and respond to these states, helping people to achieve their task quickly and effectively. This will be more profitable than creating landing pages to target individual queries.
• Develop a consistent brand voice - The future of voice search will involve brands speaking to their audience. This could be in the form of audio clips embedded in content or the search engine reading out text from the page. Either way, brands should be thinking of how they want their company to sound, rather than just look.

Furthermore, Google offers the following areas for assessment when it comes to this kind of voice search:

• Information satisfaction: The content of the answer should meet the information needs of the user.
• Length: When a displayed answer is too long, users can quickly scan it visually and locate the relevant information. For voice answers, that is not possible. It is much more important to ensure that we provide a helpful amount of information, hopefully not too much or too little.
• Formulation: It is much easier to understand a badly formulated written answer than an ungrammatical spoken answer, so more care has to be placed in ensuring grammatical correctness.
• Elocution: Spoken answers must have proper pronunciation and prosody. Improvements in text-to-speech generation, such as WaveNet and Tacotron 2 , are quickly reducing the gap with human performance.
• Ensure that names, addresses and phone numbers are accurate across all locations. The partnership between Amazon and Yext points to one very clear voice search opportunity for brands, but it is dependent on brands supplying accurate and consistent location information.
• Consider using a specialist platform to manage local listings and analyze your local search performance. There is a growing range of SEO ranking tools and mobile SEO tools that can help with these tasks.
• Make it easy for consumers to act on their intentions. This means adding in clear calls to action and directions to further information. Attention spans are at a premium for voice search, so make the most of what little time you do get.  

SEO Strategy

• Think beyond the website. Chatbots , apps and social media are all used to surface information for voice search queries. Therefore, you should optimize your presence across all of these in a consistent brand voice.
• Use voice queries to plan future products and services. Within an app, it is possible to track and store all voice queries. This can be an invaluable resource when it comes to planning new services, as any unanswered queries will provide ideas with proven demand.
• One real challenge with voice search is that it is not yet possible to segment queries within Search Query Reports or Search Console to see which were typed versus spoken. That will certainly come, but for now marketers should aim to extract maximum value from the limited data at our disposal.  

Integrate voice into your digital marketing strategy

Understand the fundamentals of digital marketing from social media marketing to analytics, website optimization and PPC so you can plan for voice search in your campaigns. DMI’s Professional Diploma in Search Marketing in partnership with expert Neil Patel will provide you with industry insights, up-to-date knowledge and in-demand skills to boost your knowledge and career. 

• Webinar: The Role of Voice Search: Today and Tomorrow
• What is Voice Search?
• Webinar: The Image Recognition Market
• Webinar: SEO Evergreen Tactics (with Neil Patel Brands)

Related Free Video Lessons

• Strategy and Planning SEO Strategy
• SEO Workshop Site Speed
• SEO Setup Robots.txt Files

Related Content

Webinars: webinar: chatgpt prompting for digital marketers, toolkits: search marketing interview preparation toolkit, webinars: webinar: how data science can boost seo strategy (neil patel & chris penn), articles: what is seo and how does it work, articles: essential seo reporting tools (and free checklist), articles: preparing for ai search with google search generative experience (sge).

Clark Boyd is CEO and founder of marketing simulations company  Novela . He is also a digital strategy consultant, author, and trainer. Over the last 12 years, he has devised and implemented international marketing strategies for brands including American Express, Adidas, and General Motors.

Today, Clark works with business schools at the University of Cambridge, Imperial College London, and Columbia University to design and deliver their executive-education courses on data analytics and digital marketing. 

Clark is a certified Google trainer and runs Google workshops across Europe and the Middle East. This year, he has delivered keynote speeches at leadership events in Latin America, Europe, and the US. You can find him on Twitter , LinkedIn , and Slideshare . He writes regularly on  Medium and you can subscribe to his  email newsletter, hi, tech .

• Categories:

Recommended For You

Webinars: webinar: preparing for the new world of ai search with sge, articles: is tiktok becoming a search engine, articles: what makes a high-quality backlink, cpd points available.

This content is eligible for CPD points. Please sign in if you wish to track this in your account.

CPD Points Available

This content is eligible for CPD points. Please login if you wish to track this in your account.

• View Courses
• Change Password

Get the latest digital marketing data, insights and toolkits from DMI

Voice search data & resources curated.

A Comprehensive Resource Guide for Beginners, SEOs and Developers. Welcome! If you’re looking for voice search links and resources, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve compiled a sizeable list of web pages and articles on all things voice search. Whether you’re a beginner who wants to learn the basics of voice search technology, a digital marketer who wants to keep up with the trends, or you’re a developer looking to create applications for voice, this resource list has you covered. Areas Covered: > General and beginner resources > Voice search statistics and data > Resources on the devices and platforms that use voice control/voice search > Voice search SEO resources > Voice search developer resources > Voice search examples and case studies > Resources on the future of voice search ** Are you receiving robocalls? **

General and beginner resources

Still getting up to speed with what voice search is all about? We recommend starting with the following resources:

What is voice search?  – If you’re looking for a straight-up definition of voice search, this link is a good place to start. WhatIs.com defines the concept in easy-to-grasp terms and also sheds light on the different applications of voice search.

Beginner’s Guide to Voice Search SEO  – This post on Single Grain serves as a solid beginner’s guide to voice search from an SEO perspective. It starts off by giving a quick background of the state of voice search, then gives an overview of how search queries are evolving. It also fires off some basic tips on how to optimize web pages for voice search.

Voice Search: Is Your Content Prepared for the Verbal Revolution?  – If you want to learn about this trend from a content marketing perspective, CMI’s post gives you exactly what you need. In addition to sharing insights into its growth and the basics of voice SEO, the post also tackles keyword research, voice vs. traditional search, optimizing your FAQs, and more.

The beginner’s guide to voice search engine optimization  –  In this post, you’ll learn why consumers are turning to voice search and what they’re looking for. You’ll get some basic details on what you need to do to get started with voice SEO.

Beginner’s guide to voice control  – This article is about voice control technology. Unlike the other articles in this section, this piece doesn’t talk much about SEO. Instead, it provides fundamental information on the devices that leverage voice control technology and how to use or enable voice control on different devices and platforms.

Voice search statistics and data

This section includes articles and reports on voice search and voice technology. Have a look to learn about the key facts and stats surrounding voice.

Voice Marketing Tactics: There’s Only 100k Searches a Month Up For Grabs Anyway – Will Critchlow of Distilled discusses in some detail as to why he believes voice search isn’t as disruptive as many seem to think.

How voice assistance is reshaping consumer behaviour (article data)  – Did you know that 52% of those who own a voice-activated speaker say they keep it in a common room (e.g. family room, living room, etc.)? Or that 62% of consumers who regularly use voice-activated devices say “they are likely to buy something” through the speaker in the next month? There are a lot of interesting stats around voice assistance, and Think with Google has compiled a number of them in this post.

Prepare for the voice revolution  – For this report, PwC surveyed 1,000 Americans to gauge their awareness and usage of voice technology. The report also compares how different voice assistants stack up, and how they influencer smartphone and home purchases.

Time to Navigate the Super Myway  – This page outlines the findings from the 2018 Accenture Digital Consumer Survey of 21,000 online consumers. The study identified stand-alone voice assistance as one of the hottest technologies, and Accenture shares some of the key data points they found.

Internet Trends 2017 – Code Conference  – Presented by Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins, this is a slide deck that details the top global internet trends for 2017. There are a handful of slides on voice technology, which talk about voice-based mobile and home platforms. (Jump to page 46 of the deck to learn more.)

33 Voice Search Statistics to Prepare You for the Voice Search Revolution  – In this post, WordStream shares some general voice search numbers, along with data on voice usage, user demographics, device statistics, and voice commerce stats.

OK Google, Siri, Alexa, Cortana; Can you tell me some stats on voice search?  – The folks at Branded3 has put together voice search stats across different categories, including voice search usage and predictions to intent, commerce, and errors.

Will Reynolds Found of Seer Interactive : Shares some “OK Google” stats from their client base. 17.2 million search terms and approximately 120 million data points.

OK Google, What Are You Really Saying? by James McNulty – How we are using voice search and how voice search is impacting us today?

Voice Search Ranking Report – Report produced by the team at Roast marketing agency.

Resources on the devices and platforms that use voice control/voice search

Voice searches are conducted using different platforms and devices. There’s Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Cortana by Microsoft, and Google Assistant. In this section, you’ll find resources that shed light on these platforms and how they work.

Use Siri on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch  – Here’s the official “how to” Siri article straight from Apple. It teaches you how to ask Siri a question, how to set up “Hey Siri,” how to change Siri’s voice or language, and more.

Our Siri guide: How to merge your life with Apple’s witty virtual assistant  – Need another essential, step-by-step guide to using Siri? Digital Trends has one for you. This post gives you all the fundamentals, from setting up and using Siri to the standard voice commands and the future of the virtual assistant.

The Complete List of Siri Commands – Here’s a nifty list of all available Siri commands. If you’re looking for a cheat sheet of what to ask or tell Siri, this resource has you covered.

Siri: The ultimate guide  – Now, if you want to geek out and go in-depth, iMore has the guide for you. This page tackles all the essential Siri features and commands, along with intermediate and advanced functions — including how to set up alarms, how to get directions, how to play and control music, how to search Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Wolfram|Alpha and so much more.

Google Home  – Moving on to Google’s side of things, here’s the website of Google Home, the search giant’s foray into voice technology for households. Powered by Google Assistant, you can ask it all sorts of questions and tell it to do various things. Just say “Ok Google” followed by your command and you’ll be good to go.

Introducing Google Home  – Need a more visual overview of Google Home? Watch Google’s short and sweet introductory video for the device.

The Total Beginner’s Guide to Using Google Home Like a Pro   – Here’s a comprehensive guide to using Google Home. You’ll learn all about standard commands, adding skills, additional services, and more.

Use “OK Google” voice searches & actions  – Google’s voice technology is accessible via Android phones and tablets. If you want to learn more about how to use “Ok Google” on your handheld gadgets, here’s a no-frills guide straight from the search giant.

Meet Alexa  – Alexa, as Amazon defines it, is “the brain behind Echo and Alexa devices .” Like the other voice assistants we talk about in this section, Alexa can answer various questions and fulfil different commands. This site is Amazon’s official destination for all things Alexa. Use it to wise up on Alexa’s role in home entertainment, communication, news and information, shopping, etc.

34 Alexa tips and tricks  – If you want to get the most out of Alexa, CNET has put together a list of “tips and tricks” for using Amazon’s voice assistant. It covers basic how-tos such as adding profiles and also dives into more intermediate features like adding non-supported smart home devices, creating routines, settling arguments and more.

Amazon Alexa ultimate guide: How to use and get more from your Amazon Echo  – Interested in Amazon Echo and need an in-depth guide? Right, this way. The Ambient covers everything from the various Echo devices and their prices to setting up the gadgets and making full use of them.

Echo & Alexa Devices  – In addition to Amazon Echo, Alexa works on various other devices. Check out this page for a list of devices that support Alexa and use it to learn more and compare different gadgets side-by-side.

Cortana  – Cortana is Microsoft’s virtual assistant. It works on Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows Phone 8.1, Invoke smart speaker, Microsoft Band, Xbox One, iOS, Android, Windows Mixed Reality, and even Amazon Alexa. This page is Microsoft’s official Cortana destination so visit it if you want to get the latest about this virtual assistant.

Cortana: Your Assistant for Life  – Here’s a cool YouTube video showcasing Cortana in action. It’s a good way to see what some of the commands look like in the real world.

How to use Cortana  – If you need a how-to article on using Cortana, Digital Trends has come up with a post that walks you through setting up the assistant, using search, using Cortana Home, Cortana Notebook, and connected accounts.

The story of Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri killer  – If you’re interested in the story behind Cortana, here’s a detailed article by The Verge. It dives into what Cortana is all about, how it came into existence, and the steps Microsoft took to create it.

Siri vs. Google Assistant vs. Alexa vs. Cortana

We put Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana through a marathon of tests to see who’s winning the virtual assistant race — here’s what we found  – The folks at Business Insider decided to test all these virtual assistants in various situations to see which one is the best. Spoiler alert: the author gave Google “the slight edge” because it was “the smoothest to use.” He wrote, “Even if Siri feels more in tune with the device it’s a part of, I felt more like a robot talking to it. The Assistant is also fun— it runs like something Google’s people enjoyed being creative with. And in the areas where Google was behind, the gap wasn’t huge.”

AI Faceoff: Siri vs. Cortana vs. Google Assistant vs. Alexa  – Here’s another article that pits the different assistants against each other. It’s a great read, and if you’re curious about the final verdict, here it is: “ Choose between Siri and Google Assistant based on convenience and what hardware you already have.”

Voice search SEO resources

If you’re in the SEO or online marketing space, these resources will teach you how to incorporate voice into your digital marketing strategy.

J ohn Mueller at BrightonSEO (video) being interviewed by Hannah Smith of Verve Search regarding “voice search” for SEO and why more insights around voice search are not available to webmasters (it’s not as easy as you think).

Speakable Schema Markup – Google launches speakable Schema markup for the latest news.

Aleyda Solís Optimize for Voice Search – Presentation from Learn Inbound conference.

SEO Strategy for Voice Search in Shopping – part 3 of a series on mobile indexing, Cindy Krum details ways you leverage your SEO strategy for voice search shopping era.

Does Voice Search and/or Conversational Search Change SEO Tactics or Strategy? – Whiteboard Friday  – Here’s an excellent Whiteboard Friday video “about voice search, conversational search, Internet of things search, and how these attributes and the rise in these trends may or may not play a big role in our SEO strategy and tactics for the future.” In the video, Rand Fishkin looks at voice search from both a strategic and tactical standpoint and shares his take on what it means for different types of websites.

How Voice Search Will Change Digital Marketing — For the Better  – This lengthy article gives a very detailed look at “how voice search will shake things up” in the digital marketing realm. It talks about the five core differences between conversational and text search, then offers actionable takeaways to help you adapt to voice search.

SEO in 2018: Optimizing for voice search  – In this articles, Search Engine Land columnist Bryson Meunier discusses why your SEO tactics for voice should vary slightly from your tactics addressing traditional search.

OK, Google: How Do I Optimize My Site for Voice Search?  – This meaty post has it all: an overview of voice search, why it’s on the rise, and what marketers should do to get a piece of the action. It even has a section on how to optimize your ad campaigns for voice search.

We Analyzed 10,000 Google Home Results. Here’s What We Learned About Voice Search SEO  – This data-backed article talks about Backlinko’s findings from analyzing 10,000+ Google Home search results. Specifically, it sheds light on the impact of PageSpeed, HTTPS, and length on voice search results. It also tackles domain authority, social engagement, content, and more.

Are You Optimized for Voice Search? Here’s How to Do It  – Here’s a tactical post on optimizing your site for voice. It discusses a bunch of best practices, including targeting long-tail keywords, beefing up your microdata, and monitoring performance, among other things.

How to Optimize Your Ecommerce Site for Voice Search  – Specifically written for ecommerce merchants, this post helps online retailers optimize their stores for voice search. In addition to tried-and-true tips, it offers expert insights and pointers to help ecommerce sites dominate voice search.

The Step-By-Step Guide to Testing Voice Search Via PPC  – Want to discover voice search opportunities for your business? Purna Virji presents a 5-step process to help you just that. In this post, you’ll learn how to uncover any voice activities for your business, how to extrapolate themes, optimize your campaigns, and more.

Voice Search 101 – This presentation answers the questions of What matters in voice search?, types of Google provided answers, types of featured snippets and How to write for voice search?

Voice search developer resources

If you’re looking to develop applications for voice-activated platforms, check out the following resources to get started:

Voice search developing for Siri

SiriKit – Apple Developer  – This is the developer page for SirKit, which “enables your iOS apps and watchOS apps to work with Siri, so users can get things done using just their voice.” Use the resources on this site to develop apps that work with Siri.

SiriKit Documentation  – This is Apple’s developer page which contains SiriKit documentation you can use to handle user requests for your Siri or Maps application services.

Voice search developing for Google Assistant

Actions on Google  – This is the homepage for Actions on Google, a developer platform “that lets you create software to extend the functionality of the Google Assistant, Google’s virtual personal assistant, across more than 500 million devices, including smart speakers, phones, cars, TVs, headphones, watches, and more.”

Actions on Google – Overview  – This page points you to detailed guides on developing for the Actions on Google platform.

Google Assistant SDK for devices – Overview  – Check this page for a detailed overview of the Google Assistant SDK. It contains info on the SKD components, prototypes, as well as a developer preview and roadmap.

Voice search developing for Alexa

Amazon Alexa (developer.amazon.com)  – This is the developer website for Amazon Alexa. In it, you’ll find out lots of info on what you can build with Alexa and the various Alexa programs out there.

Alexa Skills Kit  – According to Amazon, the “Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that makes it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa.” This site is home to all things ASK so that you can learn, design, build, and launch your skill.

Amazon Developer Documentation  – Go to this website to get various Alexa resources (i.e., ASK, custom skills, skills for Echo Show, Alexa Voice Service, etc.). You can also check out Alexa on Github, submit your Alexa skills, and do live app testing through this site.

Voice search developing for Cortana

Microsoft Cortana Dev Center  – Looking to develop for Cortana? This site is the best place to start. It contains the latest news, as well as samples and documentation to let you create Cortana skills.

Cortana Dev Center – Devices  – This site gives you the need-to-know info for building a Cortana device. Sign up to learn how to create a voice-enabled device or check out the Cortana Devices SDK using Microsoft’s sample for the Raspberry Pi.

Voice search examples and case studies

L’Oréal Gains Edge on Striking Distance Voice Search Queries  – In this video, Carlos Spallarossa, Director of SEO at L’Oréal, talks about the impact of voice search on their content strategy and what they’re doing to ensure that L’Oréal comes out on top for crucial voice search queries.

Sheetz Introduces Voice Activated Ordering  – In late 2017, fast food company Sheetz launched voice-activated ordering for Alexa. Customers just need to login to their Sheetz account, enable the Sheetz skill on their Alexa device, then say something like “Alexa, order my favourite from Sheetz.

Take that Alexa! Wal-Mart partners with Google to offer voice shopping  – In 2017, Wal-Mart gave its customers the ability to shop from them with the help of Google Assistant. Shoppers who linked their Wal-Mart accounts to Google Express could place voice orders by giving commands like “Google, buy jam.” Then, to figure out which flavour and brand of jam to order, Google would scan the shopper’s Wal-Mart purchase history to determine the right item.

Target takes voice-activated shopping nationwide with Google, joining Wal-Mart in the fight against Amazon  -Target aligned itself with Google by allowing shoppers to link their Target.com account to Google, enabling consumers to shop from Target using Google Assistant. According to CNBC, “Target’s product assortment on Google Express will include anything in a typical Target store, which will serve as fulfilment centres. In 2018, shoppers will be able to pick up their Target purchases made via Google Express at Target stores, should they want to forgo waiting on a shipment.”

Burger King ‘O.K. Google’ Ad Doesn’t Seem O.K. With Google  – Here’s another example of voice search in action. In 2017,  Burger King ran a TV ad that was intended to prompt voice-activated Google devices to talk about its burgers.

As the New York Times reports, here’s how it went down:

“You’re watching a 15-second Burger King ad, which is unfortunately not enough time to explain all the fresh ingredients in the Whopper sandwich,” the actor in the commercial said. “ But I got an idea. O.K. Google, what is the Whopper burger?”

Prompted by the phrase “O.K. Google,” the Google Home device beside the TV in the video lit up, searched the phrase on Wikipedia and stated the ingredients.

The advertising stunt didn’t seem to sit well with Google, though. Within hours of its airing, Google made changes to its platform to prevent the ad from activating its devices.

How to Manage Your Brand for the Machine Channel by Martha van Berkel.

Resources on the future of voice search

Voice search is here to stay. The question is, what does the future hold for the technology? The following articles provide insights into what’s next for voice search.

Voice Search and the future of SEO  – This article explores how voice search will shape the future of SEO in terms of content creation, mobile optimization, keyword research, and more.

How Voice Search Will Change The Future Of SEO  – Another informative article on the future of voice search and SEO, this piece provides more details on three main things: the use of natural speech patterns, long-tail keywords, and mobile.

The Undeniable Impact of Voice Search on the Future of SEO  – In addition to sharing insights on how voice search will impact SEO, this article sheds light on the problems and opportunities that voice search will bring up. It also has tremendous info on how to adapt your business for voice, and it shares practical advice on using the technology as your customers do.

Prepare for the voice revolution  – “How and why are voice assistants being used?” “What do consumers think of the technology, and what are the primary needs, current use cases, opportunities and concerns?” These are just some of the questions that this PwC report aims to answer. Check it out to understand the strengths and use cases for voice assistance, the accelerators of the technology, and the top concerns consumers have about the technology.

According to many high profile “futurists,” voice search is the future. Personally, I am a believer in voice search however I find much of the data and conference quotes to be far fetched with little evidence to back up those far-reaching claims.

This website was curated by Carl Hendy who works within Ecommerce and SEO by day. You can follow me on Twitter if you wish to share more voice search related resources. This website will continually be updated and very much a work in progress. I also offer voice search consultancy .

Did we miss any key voice search links or resources? Get in touch to let us know!

Google Search by Voice: A Case Study

September 9, 2010

Posted by Johan Schalkwyk, Google Research

International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

HCII 2020: HCI International 2020 - Late Breaking Papers: Multimodality and Intelligence pp 305–320 Cite as

Understanding Voice Search Behavior: Review and Synthesis of Research

• Zhaopeng Xing 12 ,
• Xiaojun Yuan 13 ,
• Dan Wu 14 ,
• Yeman Huang 14 &
• Javed Mostafa 12  
• Conference paper
• First Online: 17 October 2020

1758 Accesses

2 Citations

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12424))

This article reviews the recent user-oriented studies on voice search interaction and aims to understand how users perform and perceive voice search. With a systematic data collection and screening process, twenty-seven publications were included. We found that the current studies sampled predominantly young and well-educated population. Four topics of interest in voice search were identified, i.e., query characteristics, query strategy, spoken conversational search, user’s perception. The result reveals the influences of voice-based modality on users’ search behavior and perceptions and the review concludes with potential directions of research on voice search interaction.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Compact, lightweight edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

www.covidence.org .

Some of the publications were based on the same experiment but reported different aspects of the findings. In this review, a “study” refers to an experiment and a “publication” refers to a retrieved publication.

Hearst, M.A.: Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press, New York (2009)

Book   Google Scholar  

Schalkwyk, J., et al.: Your word is my command: google search by voice: a case study. In: Neustein, A. (ed.) Advances in Speech Recognition, pp. 61–90. Springer, Boston (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5951-5_4s

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Wilcock, G.: WikiTalk: a spoken Wikipedia-based open-domain knowledge access system. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Question Answering for Complex Domains. p. 57 (2010)

Google Scholar  

Lee, C.-H., Wang, S.-M., Chang, H.-C., Lee, H.-Y.: ODSQA: open-domain spoken question answering dataset. In: 2018 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT), pp. 949–956. IEEE (2018)

Sahib, N.G., Tombros, A., Stockman, T.: A comparative analysis of the information-seeking behavior of visually impaired and sighted searchers. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 63 , 377–391 (2012)

Article   Google Scholar  

Smith, A.L., Chaparro, B.S.: Smartphone text input method performance, usability, and preference with younger and older adults. Hum. Factors 57 , 1015–1028 (2015)

Vtyurina, A., Fourney, A., Morris, M.R., Findlater, L., White, R.W.: Bridging screen readers and voice assistants for enhanced eyes-free web search. In: Liu, L., White, R. (eds.) The World Wide Web Conference on – WWW 2019, pp. 3590–3594. ACM Press, New York (2019)

Oard, D.W.: Query by babbling: a research agenda. In: Proceedings of the First Workshop on Information and Knowledge Management for Developing Region - IKM4DR 2012, p. 17. ACM Press, New York (2012)

Trippas, J.R., Thomas, P., Spina, D., Joho, H.: Third International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR 2020): Full-Day Workshop at CHIIR 2020. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, pp. 492–494. ACM, New York (2020)

Culpepper, J.S., Diaz, F., Smucker, M.D.: Research frontiers in information retrieval. SIGIR Forum. 52 , 34–90 (2018)

Jiang, J., Jeng, W., He, D.: How do users respond to voice input errors? Lexical and phonetic query reformulation in voice search. In: Proceedings of the 36th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval – SIGIR 2013, p. 143. ACM Press, New York (2013)

Arguello, J., Choi, B., Capra, R.: Factors influencing users’ information requests. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 36 , 1–37 (2018)

Sa, N., Jenny Yuan, X.: Examining users’ partial query modification patterns in voice search. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 71 (3), 251–263 (2019)

Trippas, J.R., Spina, D., Cavedon, L., Joho, H., Sanderson, M.: Informing the design of spoken conversational search: perspective paper. In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval, CHIIR 2018, pp. 32–41. ACM Press, New York (2018)

Ingwersen, P., Järvelin, K.: The turn: Integration of information seeking and retrieval in context. Springer, Dordrecht (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3851-8

Book   MATH   Google Scholar  

Ruthven, I., Kelly, D. (eds.): Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval. Facet (2011)

Vakkari, P.: Task-based information searching. Ann. Rev. Info. Sci. Tech. 37 , 413–464 (2005)

Belkin, N.J., Oddy, R.N., Brooks, H.M.: Ask for information retrieval: part i. background and theory. J. Doc. 38 , 61–71 (1982)

Kelly, D.: Methods for evaluating interactive information retrieval systems with users. FNT Inf. Retrieval 3 , 1–224 (2009)

White, R.W.: Interactions with Search Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2016)

Liu, J., Shah, C.: Interactive IR User Study Design, Evaluation, and Reporting. Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services, vol. 11, p. i–75 (2019)

Grimes, C., Tang, D., Russell, D.: Query logs alone are not enough. In: Presented at the WWW 2007 Workshop on Query Log Analysis: Social and Technological Changes (2007)

Akinnaso, F.N.: On the differences between spoken and written language. Lang. Speech 25 , 97–125 (1982)

Zoltan-Ford, E.: How to get people to say and type what computers can understand. Int. J. Man Mach. Stud. 34 , 527–547 (1991)

Bigot, L.L., Jamet, E., Rouet, J.-F.: Searching information with a natural language dialogue system: a comparison of spoken vs written modalities. Appl. Ergon. 35 , 557–564 (2004)

Roberts, C., Street, B.: Spoken and written language. In: Coulmas, F. (ed.) The Handbook of Sociolinguistics, pp. 168–186. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford (2017)

Jurafsky, D., Ranganath, R., McFarland, D.: Extracting social meaning. In: Association for Computational Linguistics (2009)

Guy, I.: The characteristics of voice search: comparing spoken with typed-in mobile web search queries. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 36 , 1–28 (2018)

Yi, J., Maghoul, F.: Mobile search pattern evolution: the trend and the impact of voice queries. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web – WWW 2011, p. 165. ACM Press, New York (2011)

Kamvar, M., Beeferman, D.: Say what? Why users choose to speak their web queries. In: INTERSPEECH 2010. isca-speech.org (2010)

Ingwersen, P.: Search procedures in the library—analysed from the cognitive point of view. J. Doc. 38 , 165–191 (1982)

Belkin, N.J.: Cognitive models and information transfer. Soc. Sci. Inf. Stud. 4 , 111–129 (1984)

Belkin, N.J., Cool, C., Stein, A., Thiel, U.: Cases, scripts, and information-seeking strategies: on the design of interactive information retrieval systems. Expert Syst. Appl. 9 , 379–395 (1995)

Belkin, N.J., Marchetti, P., Cool, C.: BRAQUE: design of an interface to support user interaction in information retrieval. Inf. Process. Manage. 29 , 325–344 (1993)

Stein, A., Thiel, U.: A conversational model of multimodal interaction. In: Proceedings of the 11th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 1993), pp. 283–288. AAAI Press/The MIT Press, Menlo Park (1993)

Sitter, S., Stein, A.: Modeling the illocutionary aspects of information-seeking dialogues. Inf. Process. Manage. 28 , 165–180 (1992)

Radlinski, F., Craswell, N.: A theoretical framework for conversational search. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval – CHIIR 2017, pp. 117–126. ACM Press, New York (2017)

Azzopardi, L., Dubiel, M., Halvey, M., Dalton, J.: Conceptualizing agent-human interactions during the conversational search process (2018)

Trippas, J.R., Spina, D., Thomas, P., Sanderson, M., Joho, H., Cavedon, L.: Towards a model for spoken conversational search. Inf. Process. Manage. 57 , 102162 (2020)

Wang, Y.-Y., Yu, D., Ju, Y.-C., Acero, A.: An introduction to voice search. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 25 , 28–38 (2008)

Barnard, E., Schalkwyk, J., Heerden, C.V., Moreno, P.J.: Voice search for development (2010)

Lovato, S.B., Piper, A.M.: Young children and voice search: what we know from human-computer interaction research. Front. Psychol. 10 , 8 (2019)

Kocaballi, A.B., Laranjo, L., Coiera, E.: Understanding and measuring user experience in conversational interfaces. Interact. Comput. 31 , 192–207 (2019)

Laranjo, L., et al.: Conversational agents in healthcare: a systematic review. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 25 , 1248–1258 (2018)

Vaidyam, A.N., Wisniewski, H., Halamka, J.D., Kashavan, M.S., Torous, J.B.: Chatbots and conversational agents in mental health: a review of the psychiatric landscape. Can. J. Psychiatry (2019). https://doi.org/10.1177/0706743719828977

Kumah-Crystal, Y.A., Pirtle, C.J., Whyte, H.M., Goode, E.S., Anders, S.H., Lehmann, C.U.: Electronic health record interactions through voice: a review. Appl. Clin. Inf. 9 , 541–552 (2018)

Shah, C., González-Ibáñez, R.: Evaluating the synergic effect of collaboration in information seeking. In: Proceedings of the 34th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information – SIGIR 2011, p. 913. ACM Press, New York (2011)

Avula, S., Arguello, J., Capra, R., Dodson, J., Huang, Y., Radlinski, F.: Embedding search into a conversational platform to support collaborative search. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2019, pp. 15–23. ACM Press, New York (2019)

Du, H., Crestani, F.: Spoken versus written queries for mobile information access: an experiment on Mandarin Chinese. In: Su, K.-Y., Tsujii, J., Lee, J.-H., Kwong, O.Y. (eds.) IJCNLP 2004. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3248, pp. 745–754. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30211-7_79

Crestani, F., Du, H.: Written versus spoken queries: a qualitative and quantitative comparative analysis. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 57 , 881–890 (2006)

Bigot, L.L., Rouet, J.-F., Jamet, E.: Effects of speech- and text-based interaction modes in natural language human-computer dialogue. Hum Fact. 49 , 1045–1053 (2007)

Bigot, L.L., Terrier, P., Amiel, V., Poulain, G., Jamet, E., Rouet, J.-F.: Effect of modality on collaboration with a dialogue system. Int. J. Hum Comput Stud. 65 , 983–991 (2007)

Bigot, L.L., Terrier, P., Jamet, E., Botherel, V., Rouet, J.-F.: Does textual feedback hinder spoken interaction in natural language? Ergonomics 53 , 43–55 (2010)

Jeng, W., Jiang, J., He, D.: Users’ perceived difficulties and corresponding reformulation strategies in Google voice search. J. Libr. Inf. Stud. 14 , 25–39 (2016)

Trippas, J.R., Spina, D., Sanderson, M., Cavedon, L.: Results presentation methods for a spoken conversational search system. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Novel Web Search Interfaces and Systems – NWSearch 2015, pp. 13–15. ACM Press, New York (2015)

Kiseleva, J., et al.: Understanding user satisfaction with intelligent assistants. In: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval – CHIIR 2016, pp. 121–130. ACM Press, New York (2016)

Begany, G.M., Sa, N., Yuan, X.: Factors affecting user perception of a spoken language vs. textual search interface: a content analysis. Interact. Comput. 28 (2), 170–180 (2016)

Yuan, X.J., Sa, N.: User query behaviour in different task types in a spoken language vs. textual interface: a Wizard of Oz experiment. In: ISIC, the Information Behaviour Conference, Zadar, Croatia, 20–23 September 2016 (2017). Part 2. Information Research, 22(1), paper isic1615. IRinformationrearch

Kang, J., Condiff, K., Chang, S., Konstan, J.A., Terveen, L., Harper, F.M.: Understanding how people use natural language to ask for recommendations. In: Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Recommender Systems - RecSys 2017, pp. 229–237. ACM Press, New York (2017)

Thomas, P., McDuff, D., Czerwinski, M., Craswell, N.: MISC: a data set of information-seeking conversations. Presented at the August 2017

Thomas, P., Czerwinski, M., McDuff, D., Craswell, N., Mark, G.: Style and alignment in information-seeking conversation. In: Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Human Information Interaction&Retrieval, CHIIR 2018, pp. 42–51. ACM Press, New York (2018)

McDuff, D., Thomas, P., Czerwinski, M., Craswell, N.: Multimodal analysis of vocal collaborative search: a public corpus and results. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, ICMI 2017, pp. 456–463. ACM Press, New York (2017)

Trippas, J.R., Spina, D., Cavedon, L., Sanderson, M.: How do people interact in conversational speech-only search tasks: a preliminary analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval – CHIIR 2017, pp. 325–328. ACM Press, New York (2017)

Dubiel, M., Halvey, M., Azzopardi, L.: Investigating how conversational search agents affect user’s behaviour, performance and search experience. In: ACM SIGIR CAIR Workshop (CAIR 2018), New York, NY, USA. strathprints.strath.ac.uk (2018)

Kiesel, J., Bahrami, A., Stein, B., Anand, A., Hagen, M.: Toward voice query clarification. In: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018, pp. 1257–1260. ACM Press, New York (2018)

Ziman, R., Walsh, G.: Factors affecting seniors’ perceptions of voice-enabled user interfaces. In: Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2018, pp. 1–6. ACM Press, New York (2018)

Kiesel, J., Bahrami, A., Stein, B., Anand, A., Hagen, M.: Clarifying false memories in voice-based search. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, CHIIR 2019, pp. 331–335. ACM Press, New York (2019)

Dubiel, M., Halvey, M., Azzopardi, L., Anderson, D., Daronnat, S.: Conversational strategies: impact on search performance in a goal-oriented task. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. ACM, New York (2020)

Kiesel, J., Lang, K., Wachsmuth, H., Hornecker, E., Stein, B.: Investigating expectations for voice-based and conversational argument search on the web. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval, pp. 53–62. ACM, New York (2020)

Tannen, D.: Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2005)

Sanchiz, M., Chin, J., Chevalier, A., Fu, W.T., Amadieu, F., He, J.: Searching for information on the web: impact of cognitive aging, prior domain knowledge and complexity of the search problems. Inf. Process. Manage. 53 , 281–294 (2017)

Dommes, A., Chevalier, A., Lia, S.: The role of cognitive flexibility and vocabulary abilities of younger and older users in searching for information on the web. Appl. Cogn. Psychol. 25 , 717–726 (2011)

André, E., et al.: Conversational search. In: Dagstuhl Seminar 19461, vol. 9, pp. 34–83 (2020)

Thomas, P., Czerwinski, M., McDuff, D., Craswell, N.: Theories of conversation for conversational IR. In: Presented at the SIGIR 3th International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR 2020), March 2020

Wachsmuth, H., Stein, B., Ajjour, Y.: “PageRank” for argument relevance. In: Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 1117–1127. Association for Computational Linguistics, Stroudsburg (2017)

Easwara Moorthy, A., Vu, K.-P.L.: Privacy concerns for use of voice activated personal assistant in the public space. Int. J. Hum. Comput. Interact. 31 , 307–335 (2015)

Lau, J., Zimmerman, B., Schaub, F.: Alexa, are you listening? Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2 , 1–31 (2018)

Hadian, M., Altuwaiyan, T., Liang, X., Li, W.: Privacy-preserving voice-based search over mHealth data. Smart Health. 12 , 24–34 (2018)

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to appreciate the support from the librarians at Health Science Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This study is partially supported by the Carolina Health Informatics Program and the Laboratory of Applied Informatics Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The authors also thank the reviewers for thoughtful and thorough review.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, USA

Zhaopeng Xing & Javed Mostafa

University at Albany - State University of New York, Albany, NY, 12203, USA

Xiaojun Yuan

Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China

Dan Wu & Yeman Huang

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Zhaopeng Xing .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

University of Crete and Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

Constantine Stephanidis

The Open University of Japan, Chiba, Japan

Masaaki Kurosu

Siemens Corporation, Princeton, NJ, USA

Helmut Degen

University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

Lauren Reinerman-Jones

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Cite this paper.

Xing, Z., Yuan, X., Wu, D., Huang, Y., Mostafa, J. (2020). Understanding Voice Search Behavior: Review and Synthesis of Research. In: Stephanidis, C., Kurosu, M., Degen, H., Reinerman-Jones, L. (eds) HCI International 2020 - Late Breaking Papers: Multimodality and Intelligence. HCII 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12424. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60117-1_23

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60117-1_23

Published : 17 October 2020

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-60116-4

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-60117-1

eBook Packages : Computer Science Computer Science (R0)

Share this paper

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Sujay S Kumar

Masters in Intelligent Information Systems (MIIS)

School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

© 2021. All rights reserved.

Google Search by Voice - Case Study Summary

This blog post is a summary of the case study made by Google when it first launched it’s voice services. For any company/person trying to undertake this endeavor of building a voice product, this early stage case study is a huge knowledge bank. For one, it is always better to learn from someone else’s mistake rather than our own and two, majority of the underlying architecture of Google’s voice platform has remained the same over the years. Going through this case study gives us an important insight into how Google does voice.

The original case study file can be found here

If you are new to Speech and Speech Recognition, I would recommend you to start here: Introduction to Automatic Speech Recognition

GOOG-411 was a domain specific Automatic Speech Recognizer(ASR)/Language Model(LM) for telephone directory listings.

Instead of 2 separate queries, in 2008 a new version of GOOG-411 was released which could take both entities as input in a single sentence.

In November 2008, Voice Search was first deployed for Google app users in iPhone.

Challenges in handling search compared to domain specific applications:

• Complex grammar support is required
• Need to support huge vocabulary.

Semantic Quality (WebScore) : WER is not an accurate depiction of usability of an ASR system. For eg, even if we error on some filler words like “a”, “an”, “the” etc, we can still reliably do accurate entity extraction. Hence, we should optimize on this metric rather than on WER.

Logic is simple. Take the output from ASR. Run it through the search engine and get the results. Take the correct transcription. Run it through the search engine and get the results. The amount of overlap between these two results shows how good/usable the ASR is.

Google’s WebScore is calculated as follows:

Perplexity : This is a measure of the how confident the system is about a result. Lower the perplexity, better the system is.

Out of Vocabulary (OOV) Rate : The out-of-vocabulary rate tracks the percentage of words spoken by the user that are not modeled by the language model. It is important to keep this number as low as possible.

Latency : Reaction time of the system. Total time taken from the user speaking to producing relevant results to him. Lower the latency, better the UX.

Acoustic Modeling

The details of these systems are extensive, but improving models typically includes getting training data that’s strongly matched to the particular task and growing the numbers of parameters in the models to better characterize the observed distributions. Larger amounts of training data allow more parameters to be reliably estimated.

Two levels of bootstrapping required:

• Once a starting corpus is collected, there are bootstrap training techniques to grow acoustic models starting with very simple models (i.e., single-Gaussian context-independent systems.
• In order to collect ‘real data’ matched to users actually interacting with the system, we need an initial system with acoustic and language models.

For Google Search by Voice, GOOG-411 acoustic models were used together with a language model estimated from web query data.

Large amounts of data starts to come in once the system goes live and we need to leverage this somehow

• Supervised Labeling where we pay human transcribers to write what is heard in the utterances.
• Unsupervised Labeling where we rely on confidence metrics from the recognizer and other parts of the system together with the actions of the user to select utterances which we think the recognition result was likely to be correct.

Model architecture:

39-dimensional PLP-cepstral coefficients together with online cepstral normalization, LDA (stacking 9 frames) and STC. The acoustic models are triphone systems grown from deci-sion trees, and use GMMs with variable numbers of Gaussians per acoustic state, optimizing ML, MMI, and ‘ boosted ‘-MMI objective functions in training.

Observed effects:

• The first is the expected result that adding more data helps, especially if we can keep increasing the model size.
• It is also seen that most of the wins come from optimizations close to the final training stages. Particularly, once they moved to ‘elastic models’ that use different numbers of Gaussians for different acoustic states (based on the number of frames of data aligned with the state), they saw very little change with wide ranging differences indecision tree structure.
• Similarly, with reasonably well-defined final models, optimizations of LDA and CI modeling stages have not led to obvious wins with the final models.
• Finally, their systems currently see a mix of 16 kHz and 8 kHz data. While they’ve seen improvements from modeling 16 kHz data directly (compared to modeling only the lower frequencies of the same 16kHz data), so far they do better on both 16 kHz and 8 kHz tests by mixing all of their data and only using spectra from the first 4 kHz of the 16 kHz data. They expect this result to change as more traffic migrates to 16 kHz.

Next challenge: Scaling

Some observations:

• The optimal model size is linked to the objective function: the best MMI models may come from ML models that are smaller than the best ML models
• MMI objective functions may scale well with increasing unsupervised data
• Speaker clustering techniques may show promise for exploiting increasing amounts of data
• Combinations of multi-core decoding, optimizations of Gaussian selection in acoustic scoring, and multi-pass recognition provide suitable paths for increasing the scale of acoustic models in realtime systems.

Text Normalisation

Google uses written queries to google.com in order to bootstrap their language model (LM) for Google search by Voice. The large pool of available queries allowed them to create rich models. However, they had to transform written form into spoken form prior to training. Analyzing the top million vocabulary items before text normalization they saw approximately 20% URLs and 20+% numeric items in the query stream.

Google uses transducers (FSTs) for text normalisation. See the Finite State Transducer section in blog post for an introduction to what transducers are.

In the annotator phase, they classify parts (sub strings) of queries into a set of known categories (e.g time, date, URL, location). Once the query is annotated, each category has a corresponding text normalization transducer \(N_{cat}(spoken)\) that is used to normalize the sub-string. Depending on the category they either use rule based approaches or a statistical approach to construct the text normalization transducer. They used rule based transducer for normalizing numbers and dates while a statistical transducer was used to normalize URLs.

Large scale Language Modeling (LM)

Ideally one would build a language model on spoken queries. As mentioned above, to bootstrap they started from written queries (typed) to google.com . After text normalization they selected the top 1 million words. This resulted in an out-of-vocabulary (OOV) rate of 0.57%. Language Model requires aggressive pruning (to about 0.1% of its unpruned size). The perplexity hit taken by pruning the LM is significant - 50% relative. Similarly, the 3-gram hit ratio is halved.

The question they wanted to ask was, how does the size of the language model affect the performance of the system. Are these huge numbers of n-grams that we derive from the query data important?

Answer was, as the size of the language model increased, a substantial reduction in both the Word Error Rate (WER) and associated WebScore was observed.

Locale Matters (A LOT):

They built locale specific English language models using training data from prior to September 2008 across 3 English locales: USA , Britain , and Australia . The test data consisted of 10k queries for each locale sampled randomly from Sept-Dec 2008. The dependence on locale was surprisingly strong: using an LM on out-of-locale test data doubled the OOV rate and perplexity.

They also built a combined model by pooling all data. Combining the data negatively impacts all locales. The farther the locale from USA (as seen on the first line, GBR is closer to USA than AUS ), the more negative the impact of clumping all the data together, relative to using only the data from that given locale.

In summary, locale-matched training data resulted in higher quality language models for the three English locales tested.

User Interface

“Multi Modal” : Meaning different forms of interaction. For eg, telephone is a single modal UI since the input and output is voice. Google Search by Voice is multi modal since input is voice and output is visual/text and similarly, Maps is multi modal since input is voice and output is graphics.

Advantages of multi modal outputs:

Spoken input vs output

There are two different scenarios in using Search by Voice. If we are searching for a specific item, single modal response is a good UX. If we are searching using a broader term for search or the user wants to explore/browse further, single modal results in a bad UX. The following illustrates this:

User control and flexibility:

Unlike with voice-only applications, which prompt users for what to say and how to say it, mobile voice search is completely user-initiated. That is, the user decides what to say, when to say it and how to say it. There’s no penalty for starting over or modifying a search. There’s no chance of an accidental “hang-up” due to subsequent recognition errors or timeouts. In other words, it’s a far cry from the predetermined dialog flows of voice-only applications.

The case study explored further on UI/UX observations regarding visual interfaces, including how and where the button should be placed, how to show the ASR alternatives, intent based navigation to apps (Drive to vs Navigate to) etc

Related Posts

Machine learning in production - rendezvous architecture 04 oct 2020, common sense is not so common in nlp 02 may 2020, empirical evaluation of current natural language understanding (nlu) 01 may 2020.

How to do Voice SEO: The Definitive Guide

As the digital landscape continues to evolve, Voice SEO has emerged as a crucial player in the world of online search.

Explanation of Voice SEO and Its Growing Importance

Voice SEO, or Voice Search Optimization, refers to the practice of optimizing your website and content to rank higher in voice search results. With an increasing number of users relying on voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri, it’s clear that voice search is more than just a passing trend—it’s a fundamental shift in the way users are accessing and interacting with online content.

In 2021, 46% of U.S. adults used voice assistants to interact with smartphones and other devices. By 2023, it’s predicted that 8.4 billion voice-enabled devices will be in use worldwide. In such a scenario, ignoring voice SEO is no longer an option for businesses.

Businesses that are not voice search optimized are likely to miss out on a significant portion of this digital market , making Voice SEO a necessity, not just an option.

Understanding Voice Search

Explanation of how voice search works.

Voice Search, simply put, allows users to speak into a device rather than typing keywords into a search query to generate results. AI technologies, including Natural Language Processing (NLP), Text-to-Speech (TTS), and Speech Recognition, drive it. When a voice search request is made, the voice assistant processes the spoken words, interpreting the context and semantics, and then responds with the most relevant information.

This technology’s core lies in understanding and accurately interpreting human speech, including variations in accents, dialects, language nuances, and even mispronunciations. This requires an intricate process involving machine learning algorithms and a vast database of language patterns and semantics to deliver accurate search results.

The Rise of Voice Search due to Increasing Use of Smart Speakers and Mobile Devices

The exponential growth of voice search can be attributed to the rise of smart speakers and the ubiquity of smartphones. According to a study by NPR and Edison Research, as of 2021, an estimated 94 million Americans own a smart speaker, a 22% increase from the previous year. The convenience of hands-free, fast, and often highly accurate search results has made voice search a go-to feature for many.

Moreover, the integration of voice assistants in mobile devices has further propelled this trend. Users can conveniently ask their mobile devices to perform tasks ranging from making a call, sending a text, setting reminders, playing music, to making complex search queries. The sheer convenience and increasing sophistication of voice assistants have contributed to the substantial growth of voice search.

In the subsequent sections, we will delve into the importance of Voice SEO in the current digital landscape and its impact on traditional SEO.

The Importance of Voice SEO

Importance of voice seo in the current digital landscape.

As the use of voice-enabled devices, including smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and IoT devices, continues to grow, the significance of optimizing for voice search (Voice SEO) has never been greater. It has now become an essential part of the digital marketing landscape, and businesses need to adapt to stay competitive.

Here’s why:

• Ease of Use : With voice search, users can ask questions and receive answers without typing. This is particularly beneficial for complex queries or for individuals who find typing inconvenient or difficult.
• Speed : Voice search is faster than typing a search query, and time-saving is a critical factor in today’s fast-paced world.
• Multitasking : Voice search allows users to multi-task, such as driving, cooking, or any other activity that requires hands-on attention.
• Expanding User Base : As the use of voice-activated virtual assistants continues to grow, so does the audience reachable through voice search. This is particularly relevant in the context of global markets, where literacy rates vary widely.
• Growing E-commerce : With the advent of smart speakers like Amazon Echo with Alexa, more consumers are making purchases using voice commands, making voice SEO a crucial component of e-commerce strategies.

Impact of Voice Search on Traditional SEO

The growth of voice search brings both challenges and opportunities for traditional SEO strategies. Here’s how:

• Keyword Shift : Voice search queries are typically longer, more conversational, and more question-based than typed search queries. This shift calls for a transition from short, disjointed keywords to more natural-sounding phrases and sentences.
• Local Search Impact : Voice search queries often have a strong local intent. People frequently use voice search to find local businesses, places, or directions. Optimizing for local search becomes even more critical with voice SEO.
• Featured Snippets : Voice search usually returns a single answer, often sourced from the featured snippet in Google search results. Therefore, optimizing for featured snippets is a key part of voice SEO.
• User Experience (UX) : As voice technology becomes more sophisticated, users expect more accurate, relevant, and immediate results. Ensuring a high-quality UX becomes paramount in the voice-first world.

Voice search SEO is quickly becoming a must-have skill in the digital marketer’s toolbox , impacting everything from keyword strategy to content creation and local SEO. In the subsequent sections, we will delve deeper into the unique characteristics of voice searches and provide best practices for optimizing voice search.

Characteristics of Voice Searches

Long-tail and conversational nature of voice searches.

One of the most distinguishing features of voice searches is that they are typically longer and more conversational than traditional text searches. While typed queries often use abbreviated language and specific keywords, voice search queries tend to mimic natural human speech.

For example, while a user might type “weather New York” into a search engine, the same query in voice search might be “What’s the weather like in New York today?”

This shift towards long-tail, conversational search queries has significant implications for SEO. Keyword strategies need to evolve to accommodate more natural language phrases, and content should aim to answer questions that a user might ask in conversation. Keyword research tools can help identify long-tail keywords that align with this more conversational style.

Localization and Personalization in Voice Searches

Another key feature of voice searches is their strong localization and personalization tendency .

Personalization is increasingly important in voice searches. Many voice search queries include terms like “near me” or “close to my location”. To ensure your website appears in these search results, it’s crucial to optimize your Google My Business listing and to incorporate geo-specific keywords into your website.

Local and personalized searches offer a significant opportunity for businesses to connect with potential customers in their vicinity. By optimizing your website for local and personalized voice search queries, you can capture a sizeable portion of the voice search market.

In the next section, we will explore some of the best practices for optimizing your website for voice search, including mobile optimization, local SEO, improving load speed, and utilizing schema markup.

Voice SEO Best Practices

Mobile optimization.

In the age of smartphones, optimizing your website for mobile devices has become a fundamental aspect of SEO. Given that a large percentage of voice searches are conducted on mobile devices, this factor is even more crucial for voice SEO.

When users perform a voice search on their mobile devices and your site isn’t mobile-friendly, you’ll miss out on potential traffic. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it primarily uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. As such, a mobile-optimized website is necessary to rank well in search results, both for traditional and voice search.

Here are a few strategies for mobile optimization:

• Responsive Design: Make sure your website adjusts to fit the screen of any device. This ensures that users have a seamless browsing experience, whether they’re on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
• Site Speed: Mobile users expect quick load times. Google’s research shows that as page load time goes from one second to ten seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%. Therefore, it’s crucial to optimize your site’s speed.
• Easy Navigation: Your website’s mobile version should be easy to navigate. Buttons should be large enough to tap, and content should be short, engaging, and easy to digest on a smaller screen.

As mentioned in the previous section, voice searches are often local in nature. Users are commonly looking for businesses or services near them. To capitalize on this trend, local SEO is key. Here are a few tips for optimizing your local SEO:

• Google My Business Profile: Claim your Google My Business (GMB) listing and ensure all information is complete and accurate, including your business name, address, phone number, operating hours, and category. Having a comprehensive GMB listing can significantly increase your chances of showing up in local search results.
• Reviews: Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your GMB profile. Positive reviews not only enhance your business’s reputation, but they can also boost your local SEO.
• Local Keywords: Incorporate local keywords into your website content. For example, if you run a coffee shop in San Francisco, consider using keywords like “San Francisco coffee shop” or “best coffee in San Francisco.”

Loading Speed

Websites that load quickly provide a better user experience and are rewarded by search engines with higher rankings. This is even more important for voice SEO because voice search users often require immediate answers. Here are a few strategies to improve your site’s loading speed:

• Optimize Images: Large, high-resolution images can slow down your site. Use compression tools to reduce their size without losing quality.
• Minify CSS and JavaScript: Minifying your CSS and JavaScript files can help to reduce their size and thereby improve your site’s loading speed.
• Leverage Browser Caching: Browser caching can make your website load faster for returning visitors.

Schema Markup

Schema markup is a type of microdata that helps search engines understand the content on your website. Adding schema markup to your site can enhance the richness of the search results and improve your visibility in SERPs. In the context of voice search, schema markup can help search engines understand the context of your content and provide more accurate results to voice queries.

Now that we’ve discussed the best practices, let’s delve deeper into advanced voice SEO strategies and tactics, such as optimizing for featured snippets, conversational keyword research, and structured data for voice search.

Advanced Voice SEO Strategies and Tactics

Optimizing for featured snippets.

A featured snippet is a summarised answer to a user’s question that appears on top of Google’s search results, which is why it’s often referred to as ‘position zero’. It’s highly coveted because it not only increases visibility but also drives more traffic to your site. Given that voice assistants often pull answers from featured snippets, optimizing for them is a powerful voice SEO strategy.

Here are some tips to help you get your content into the featured snippets:

• Answer Specific Questions: Featured snippets often respond to specific questions. Create content that directly answers questions related to your business or industry. For example, if you own a gardening supply store, you might write a blog post about “How to repot a plant.”
• Use Structured Data: As mentioned earlier, structured data helps search engines understand your content. Implementing structured data on your site can increase the likelihood of your content being featured in a snippet.
• Create High-Quality Content: Google tends to pick content that is well-written, accurate, and informative for featured snippets. Strive to create high-quality content that provides value to your readers.

Conversational Keyword Research

As voice searches are more conversational, the traditional approach to keyword research needs to be adjusted. Voice search queries are often longer and more specific, so you should focus on long-tail keywords and phrases that sound natural in speech. Here are a few tools and strategies for conversational keyword research :

• Question-Based Keywords: Voice searches are often phrased as questions. Use tools like Answer The Public or AlsoAsked.com to find common questions related to your keywords.
• Use Language Processing Tools: Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools like Google’s Natural Language API can help identify entities and categories within text. This can help you understand how a search engine interprets the content and make it more voice search-friendly.
• User Intent: Understanding the user intent behind keywords is essential. The search query’s intent can be informational (looking for information), navigational (looking for a specific website), or transactional (looking to buy something).

Content Creation for Voice Search

Creating content suitable for voice search requires a slight shift in approach. Here are some considerations:

• Create Conversational Content: As voice searches are more conversational, your content should mimic this style. Aim to engage readers in a conversation rather than pushing information.
• Develop Q&A Style Content: Consider creating a FAQ page on your website where you ask and answer important questions related to your business or industry.
• Focus on Readability: Voice search content should be easy to read and understand. Avoid industry jargon or complex phrases that could confuse readers or voice assistants.

Structured Data and Voice Search

Structured data plays a crucial role in optimizing your website for voice search. By structuring your data , you’re essentially making it easier for search engines to crawl, organize, and display your content. Google recommends using schema.org for markup as it helps in understanding the content on your page and can provide additional details in the search results, which is beneficial for voice search.

• Implement Schema Markup: Schema markup allows you to specify elements like products, reviews, events, and more. This helps voice search devices provide more detailed responses to queries related to your content.
• Use JSON-LD: Google recommends using JSON-LD for structured data whenever possible. JSON-LD separates the data from the HTML code, making it easier to add, update, and manage.
• Test Your Markup: Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure your structured data is implemented correctly.

Now that we have reviewed advanced voice SEO strategies, let’s shift our focus to the upcoming trends in voice search and voice SEO and their implications for businesses.

Voice Search Trends and Predictions

Upcoming trends in voice search and voice seo.

Voice search is rapidly evolving and it’s essential to stay abreast of the latest trends to maintain your competitive edge. Here are some trends to keep an eye on:

• Increased Use of Voice Search: As smart speakers and voice assistants become more ubiquitous, the use of voice search is expected to grow exponentially. More people are likely to use voice search for tasks ranging from online shopping to content discovery.
• Better Voice Recognition: The accuracy of voice recognition technology is improving significantly. As a result, voice assistants are becoming more efficient at understanding and executing complex commands, which could lead to increased adoption.
• Multilingual Voice Search: As voice technology improves, support for multiple languages is becoming more prevalent. This could lead to a surge in voice search usage across different regions and demographics.
• Voice Commerce: With the growth of voice-activated smart speakers, more people are likely to engage in voice commerce – making purchases using voice commands. Businesses should prepare for this trend by optimizing their sites for voice search.

Future Predictions and Their Implications for Businesses

As we look towards the future, it’s clear that voice search will continue to reshape the digital landscape. Here are some predictions and their potential implications:

• Voice Search Will Become the Norm: As the technology improves and becomes more integrated into our daily lives, voice search could become the preferred method of search for many users. Businesses should prioritize voice SEO to ensure they remain visible in this new landscape.
• Shift in Keyword Strategy: As voice queries are typically longer and more conversational, businesses may need to reevaluate their keyword strategies. Short, choppy keywords may give way to longer, more natural-sounding phrases.
• Increased Importance of Local SEO: With voice searches often being local in nature (“near me” searches), businesses should ensure they are optimizing for local SEO.
• Greater Emphasis on Mobile Optimization: With many voice searches occurring on mobile devices, having a mobile-optimized website will be crucial.
• Changes in SERPs: With voice assistants typically providing only one answer, competition for the coveted “position zero” will intensify.

Voice search is clearly an important factor in the future of SEO. Staying ahead of the trends and understanding the implications of voice search will ensure that your business is prepared for these changes.

Now, let’s look at some tools that can help you optimize your website for voice SEO.

Tools for Voice SEO

Overview of tools to aid in voice seo.

As you start to develop and implement your voice SEO strategy, you’ll find that there are a variety of tools that can assist in this process. Here’s an overview of some of the most useful ones:

• Schema Markup Generators: Tools like Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator can help you add schema markup to your website. This structured data can improve your chances of appearing in voice search results, as it gives search engines more context about your content.
• Mobile Optimization Tools: Given that many voice searches occur on mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly site is crucial. Tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool can help you determine if your website is optimized for mobile viewing and offer suggestions for improvement.
• Page Speed Checkers: Fast-loading websites are critical for voice search optimization. Tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix can help you understand how quickly your web pages load and provide recommendations for improving load times.
• Voice Search Rank Checkers: Tools like SEMrush’s Position Tracking Tool can help you understand how your website ranks for voice searches. This tool lets you track your rankings for specific keywords, which can be invaluable for understanding your voice SEO performance.
• Conversational Keyword Research Tools: Tools such as Answer the Public can help you understand the questions users are asking around your topic. These insights can be invaluable in shaping your content to match the conversational tone of voice searches.

In addition to these tools, remember that creating a website that provides value to your users is the most important factor. Tools can aid in the optimization process, but a user-centric focus should always be your main priority.

Now, let’s explore how other businesses have successfully optimized their websites for voice search.

Case Studies: Successful Voice SEO Strategies

Let’s examine a couple of case studies of businesses that effectively optimized their websites for voice search. Through their strategies, you can gain insights into practical methods for implementing voice SEO in your own business.

Domino’s Pizza

One of the pioneering brands in voice SEO, Domino’s Pizza has been taking advantage of voice search technology for years. To stay ahead of the competition, they’ve developed an entire ecosystem that allows users to order pizzas via voice search on multiple devices, including Amazon Echo, Google Home, and their own mobile app.

Domino’s has done an impressive job of identifying popular voice search queries related to their business, such as “order a pizza” or “track my pizza order,” and optimizing their site to rank for these searches . Their focus on creating a seamless, voice-activated ordering system has not only improved their ranking in voice search results but also enhanced the customer experience.

Their voice-activated strategy has made ordering more accessible and efficient, resulting in a significant increase in mobile orders and overall sales.

Nestlé, a global food and beverage company, has embraced voice search as part of their SEO strategy, particularly for their Purina pet food brand. They created a Google Assistant app called “Ask Purina” that provides users with detailed information about different dog breeds.

Instead of just optimizing their website for voice search, Nestlé went a step further by creating a voice app that provides value for their ideal audience and builds engagement with their brand. By understanding and responding to voice queries about dog breeds, “Ask Purina” provides a direct answer to users’ questions.

This voice search strategy helps Nestlé achieve higher visibility in voice search results while also strengthening their brand reputation as a trusted authority in pet care. The brand’s smart use of voice SEO strategies illustrates how businesses can go beyond traditional SEO techniques to provide interactive, voice-activated experiences for their customers.

These case studies demonstrate how businesses can leverage voice search to improve customer experience, boost brand visibility, and drive business results. As more users turn to voice search, brands that optimize their content for this technology stand to gain a significant competitive edge.

Now that we have examined the nitty-gritty of voice SEO and how to implement it, let’s wrap up our discussion.

Wrapping Up

As we draw this comprehensive guide to a close, let’s recap the key points and takeaways. Voice search, powered by advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, is no longer a novelty but an integral part of our digital lives.

Understanding the nature of voice search – its conversational tone, focus on local results, and the demand for immediate, precise answers – is the first step towards optimizing your website for voice SEO.

Advanced strategies like optimizing for featured snippets, leveraging schema markup, and adapting your keyword research to account for more conversational queries can give you a competitive edge. Moreover, monitoring trends and staying abreast of changes in voice search technology will help you adapt your SEO strategy to evolving user behaviors and preferences.

Whether you’re a startup founder or a C-level executive, it’s critical to start integrating voice SEO into your overall SEO strategy. The businesses that adapt to this shift towards voice search will not only survive in this fast-evolving digital landscape but also stay ahead of the curve.

As the trend of voice search continues to surge, the phrase ‘Ok Google’ or ‘Hey Siri’ will resonate more than ever. So, is your business ready to answer?

With this, we have reached the end of our comprehensive guide on “How to do Voice SEO: The Definitive Guide”. We hope this guide serves as a helpful resource in your voice SEO journey.

In conclusion, the shift toward voice search is not just imminent; it’s already here. It’s time to let your website speak for your business. Happy optimizing!

• How to use SocialBee for Social Media: An Explainer
• Why and How to Incorporate Webinars into Your Marketing Strategy
• 29+ Digital Analytics Software to Skyrocket Your Digital ROI
• How to Use Personalization & Targeting in Marketing Automation
• 15 Best AI Marketing Tools to Elevate Your Business Growth
• 17 Best High-Performing Landing Page Tools: Skyrocket Conversions
• Best SEO Tools in 11 Categories to Elevate Your SEO

About The Author

WinSavvy Editorial

Related posts.

Mailjet vs SendGrid: The Best Email Marketing Tool for 2024

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the competition is crucial. And when it comes to email marketing, having the right tools…

Read More »

Unbounce vs Lander: The Best Landing Page Tool for You

In the digital marketing universe, where every click can lead to a conversion, the tools you use to capture and convert your audience matter more…

How IYK Can Boost their Website Traffic to 100k in 6 Months! (Our Take!)

In a sea of startups, every innovative idea deserves its moment in the spotlight. We’ve handpicked and analyzed your website, offering free marketing insights, as…

Klaviyo vs Iterable: The Best Email Marketing Tool for 2024

Welcome to our comprehensive guide where we put two major players in the email marketing arena head-to-head: Klaviyo and Iterable. In the fast-paced world of…

How Objective Can Boost their Website Traffic to 10k in 3 Months! (Our Take!)

M-Files vs DocStar: The Best Document Management Tool for You

In the digital age, the quest for the perfect document management system (DMS) is akin to searching for a needle in a technological haystack. Amidst…

Benchmark Email vs Sendy: The Best Email Marketing Tool for 2024

As 2024 unfolds, the email marketing landscape continues to evolve, offering businesses more sophisticated tools than ever before. In this ever-growing market, two names stand…

Tailwind vs ContentCal: The Best Social Media Management Tool for You

In the ever-evolving world of social media, where engagement and presence can dictate the success of a brand, the quest for the ultimate management tool…

The Role of Loyalty Programs in Boosting Affiliate Sales

Welcome to the dynamic world of affiliate sales, where the landscape is as competitive as it is lucrative. In this bustling marketplace, standing out is…

Merging Creativity and Commerce: Company Formation for Designers

In the world of design, the leap from creativity to commerce is much like turning a beautiful concept sketch into a tangible, marketable product. It’s…

Automizy vs VerticalResponse: The Best Email Marketing Tool for 2024

Welcome to the ultimate showdown between two email marketing giants: Automizy and VerticalResponse. In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, choosing the right email marketing…

Confluence vs Dropbox Business: The Best Document Management Tool for You

Choosing the right document management tool can feel like navigating a maze: what starts as a simple walk can quickly turn into a complex puzzle.…

How to Use MeetEdgar: An Explainer

In today’s digital age, maintaining an active social media presence is essential for brands, businesses, and individuals alike. However, the tasks involved can be overwhelming.…

Local Intent Keywords: Strategies for Location-Based Startups

This Article has been revised, edited and added to, by Poulomi Chakraborty. In the bustling digital marketplace, the race to visibility and engagement is intense…

Baremetrics vs Mixpanel: The Best Marketing Analytics Tool for You

Choosing the right marketing analytics tool can feel like trying to pick your favorite flavor at an ice cream shop with unlimited options: overwhelming, yet…

SendinBlue vs Maropost: The Best Email Marketing Tool for You

Hello, savvy marketers and business owners! Today, we’re diving into a topic that’s crucial for your digital marketing success: finding the best email marketing tool.…

Optimizing Biotech Content for Voice Search Queries

This Article has been revised, edited and added to, by Poulomi Chakraborty. In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO),…

How Ozone Can Boost their Website Traffic to 100k in 6 Months! (Our Take!)

SaaS Content Clusters: Creating Comprehensive Resources

(This Article has been revised, edited and added to, by Poulomi Chakraborty.) In the vast ocean of content available on the internet, one of the…

Benchmark Email vs Maropost: The Best Email Marketing Tool for 2024

In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, choosing the right tools can make or break your strategy. This is particularly true when it comes to…

Voice Search Optimization: A case study of Hong Kong

Like how Tony Stark uses “J.A.R.V.I.S” (the super-cool, AI-enabled interface of the Ironman suit) to good effect, digital assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are quickly reshaping how we browse for information in our daily lives.

According to a 2019 Adobe survey of 1,000 voice technology users in the US , 48% made general web searches with voice search while 44% used voice technology on their smartphones or smart speakers on a daily-basis.

With people increasingly relying on smartphones and digital assistants to go about their daily tasks, voice search has become more popular than ever.

In this article, discover how to optimize voice search for the Hong Kong market.

Voice Searching in Hong Kong

The implementation of voice search in Hong Kong is unique given the complexity of Cantonese grammar and vocabulary. Indeed, interpreting Cantonese inputs has shown to be challenging for voice technology, more so than in English or even Mandarin.

Although Google has supported Cantonese voice search since 2010 , it was only in Oct 2019 that Google assistant incorporated Cantonese as a language option. People in Hong Kong have since then altered how they conduct searches.

Let’s explore some interesting findings on voice search queries in Hong Kong and examine ways to optimize webpages for voice search locally.

Nuances in Keyword Search

In traditional text searches, users tend to input shortened phrases or keywords, rather than type out an entire question. Voice search, by contrast, has seen more users vocalize full questions or longer phrases.

For Chinese-written websites, this impact may not be as pronounced in Mainland China or Taiwan, where their spoken and written languages are largely synonymous.

It is, however, more pivotal in Hong Kong, where there are subtle but critical differences between the spoken language (Cantonese) and the written language (Traditional Chinese).

Thus, to optimize voice search in Hong Kong, you must be mindful of the semantic differences in the spoken vocabulary used in everyday life.

For example, when wondering on which hand to wear a wedding ring, text searchers would normally type a short-tail keyword, such as “結婚戒指 手” (“wedding ring hand”),  but would likely vocalize the whole question via voice search: “which hand should I wear a wedding ring on?”.

In addition, despite bearing the same meaning, the keyword “結婚戒指戴邊隻手” in Cantonese had a higher average monthly search volume (AMSV: 170) than “結婚戒指戴哪隻手” (AMSV: 20) in written Chinese.

It is also intriguing that, despite averaging the same search volumes in 2020, the short-tailed keyword “結婚戒指 手” had a downward trend while the long-tailed keyword “結婚戒指戴邊隻手” experienced an upward trend.

Optimizing your Hong Kong Business for Voice Search

Since Google assistant began supporting Cantonese in Oct 2019, localized searches gradually increased among Hong Kong users.

Searches with geo-targeted keywords like “附近嘅” (near me) paired with the business category, such as附近嘅餐廳 (restaurants near me) or 附近嘅戲院 (cinemas near me), rose in volume since Oct 2019 and throughout 2020.

According to a Yext survey of 1,000 voice searchers , 24% of users (or one in four) said they would visit the restaurant that surfaced in their voice search results.

The survey also found that 55% would use their voice assistants to call restaurants while 45% would use theirs to make reservations.

Hence, keeping your Google My Business profile comprehensive and up to date is paramount to optimize for voice search. If your local business involves customers booking appointments or reservations, include a contact number in your Google My Business profile so that users can reach you via voice assistant.

Key Takeaways

• Voice search in spoken Cantonese varies greatly from text queries in written Traditional Chinese. This calls for separate research and optimization of long-tail keywords for voice search to understand how users ask their questions in the spoken language.
• Spoken Cantonese can be more informal than written Chinese. Thus, to optimize your webpages, select keywords that are appropriate for the nature of your business and align your brand voice across your entire website.

With the advent of voice-enabled digital assistants, users can now search for the information they want without tapping their smartphones.

As voice search is becoming a favorable search tool, businesses (particularly in e-commerce) can capitalize on voice search optimization to drive organic traffic to their website in 2021 and beyond.

Ready to maximize your digital marketing in Asia?

You may also be interested in….

How Can We Help?

You're almost there! Just a few contact details, and you'll get deep digital insights straight to your inbox.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

This will close in 0 seconds

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Case Study: How Aggressively Should a Bank Pursue AI?

• Thomas H. Davenport
• George Westerman

A Malaysia-based CEO weighs the risks and potential benefits of turning a traditional bank into an AI-first institution.

Siti Rahman, the CEO of Malaysia-based NVF Bank, faces a pivotal decision. Her head of AI innovation, a recent recruit from Google, has a bold plan. It requires a substantial investment but aims to transform the traditional bank into an AI-first institution, substantially reducing head count and the number of branches. The bank’s CFO worries they are chasing the next hype cycle and cautions against valuing efficiency above all else. Siti must weigh the bank’s mixed history with AI, the resistance to losing the human touch in banking services, and the risks of falling behind in technology against the need for a prudent, incremental approach to innovation.

Two experts offer advice: Noemie Ellezam-Danielo, the chief digital and AI strategy at Société Générale, and Sastry Durvasula, the chief information and client services officer at TIAA.

Siti Rahman, the CEO of Malaysia-headquartered NVF Bank, hurried through the corridors of the university’s computer engineering department. She had directed her driver to the wrong building—thinking of her usual talent-recruitment appearances in the finance department—and now she was running late. As she approached the room, she could hear her head of AI innovation, Michael Lim, who had joined NVF from Google 18 months earlier, breaking the ice with the students. “You know, NVF used to stand for Never Very Fast,” he said to a few giggles. “But the bank is crawling into the 21st century.”

• Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser to Deloitte’s AI practice. He is a coauthor of All-in on AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).
• George Westerman is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and a coauthor of Leading Digital (HBR Press, 2014).

Partner Center

AISI President and CEO Quoted in Bloomberg

AISI President and CEO Kevin Dempsey was quoted in news articles in  Bloomberg on the Biden China tariff hike. Read the full article .

Economic Impact Study

Steel industry news, dempsey quoted in the wall street journal, aisi president and ceo quoted in associated press, aisi applauds biden china tariff hike announcement, aisi releases march sima imports data, february steel shipments down 3.9 percent from prior month, aisi president and ceo quoted in wards auto, steel imports down 3.2% in february vs. january.

More News »

A popular YouTuber's negative video of Humane's AI Pin raises questions about critical reviews in the age of innovation

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here .

Hello there! If you're struggling to decide the foods worth buying organic, best-selling author Michael Pollan has some suggestions for the ones worth splurging on to avoid harmful chemicals .  

In today's big story, we're looking at a critical tech review that caused a bit of a stir on social media .

What's on deck:

Markets: Goldman Sachs quiets the haters with a monster earnings report .

Tech: Leaked docs show one of Prime Video's biggest issues, forcing customers to abandon shows .

Business: The best bet in business these days? Targeting young men who like to gamble .

But first, the review is in!

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Up for review.

"The Worst Product I've Ever Reviewed… For Now"

Marques Brownlee, the YouTuber better known as MKBHD, didn't mince words with the title of his review of Humane's AI Pin .

In a 25-minute video , Brownlee details all the issues he encountered using the AI device. (Spoiler alert: There were a lot.)

Brownlee's review aligns with other criticisms of the device . But not all of those came from someone with as much sway. His YouTube channel has more than 18 million subscribers.

One user on X pointed that out , calling the review "almost unethical" for "potentially killing someone else's nascent project" in a post reposted over 2,000 times. 

Most of the internet disagreed, and a Humane exec even thanked Brownlee on X for the "fair and valid critiques." 

But it highlights the power of Brownlee's reviews. Earlier this year, a negative video of Fisker's Ocean SUV by Brownlee also made waves on social media . 

Critical reviews in the age of innovation raise some interesting questions.

To be clear, there was nothing wrong with Brownlee's review. Humane's AI Pin costs $700. Watering down his review to ease the blow would be a disservice to the millions of fans relying on his perspective before making such a significant purchase.

Too often, companies view potential customers as an extension of their research and development. They are happy to sell a product that is still a work in progress on the promise they'll fix it on the fly. ("Updates are coming!")

But in a world of instant gratification, it can be hard to appreciate that innovation takes time. 

Even Apple can run into this conundrum. Take the Apple Vision Pro. Reviewers are impressed with the technology behind the much-anticipated gadget — but are still struggling to figure out what they can do with it . Maybe, over time, that will get sorted out. It's also worth remembering how cool tech can be, as Business Insider's Peter Kafka wrote following a bunch of trips in Waymo's software-powered taxis in San Francisco . Sure, robotaxis have their issues, Peter said, but they also elicit that "golly-gee-can-you-believe-it" sense.

As for Humane, America loves a comeback story. Just look at "Cyberpunk 2077." The highly anticipated video game had a disastrous launch in 2020 , but redeemed itself three years later, ultimately winning a major award .

Still, Humane shouldn't get a pass for releasing a product that didn't seem ready for primetime, according to the reviews. 

And its issue could be bigger than glitchy tech. Humane's broader thesis about reducing screen time might not be as applicable. As BI's Katie Notopolous put it: " I love staring at my iPhone ."

3 things in markets

1. Goldman finally strikes gold. After a rough stretch, the vaunted investment bank crushed earnings expectations , sending its stock soaring. A big tailwind, according to CEO David Solomon, is AI spawning " enormous opportunities " for the bank. 

2. Buy the dip, Wedbush says. Last week's drop among tech stocks shouldn't scare away investors , according to Wedbush. A strong earnings report, buoyed by the ongoing AI craze, should keep them soaring, strategists said. But JPMorgan doesn't see it that way, saying prices are already stretched .   

3. China's economy beat analysts' expectations. The country's GDP grew 5.3% in the first quarter of 2024, according to data published by the National Bureau of Statistics on Tuesday. It's a welcome return to form for the world's second-largest economy, although below-par new home and retail sales remain a cause for concern .

3 things in tech

1. Amazon Prime Video viewers are giving up on its shows. Leaked documents show viewers are fed up with the streamer's error-ridden catalog system , which often has incomplete titles and missing episodes. In 2021, 60% of all content-related complaints were about Prime Video's catalog.

2. Eric Newcomer is bringing his Cerebral Valley AI Summit to New York. The conference, originally held in San Francisco, is famous for producing one of the largest generative AI acquisitions ever. Now, it's coming to New York in June .

3. OpenAI is plotting an expansion to NYC. Two people familiar with the plans told BI that the ChatGPT developer is looking to open a New York office next year. That would be the company's fifth office, alongside its current headquarters in San Francisco, a just-opened site in Tokyo, and spots in London and Dublin.

3 things in business

1. America's young men are spending their money like never before. From sports betting to meme coins, young men are more willing than ever to blow money in the hopes of making a fortune .

2. Investors are getting into women's sports. With women like Caitlin Clark dominating March Madness headlines, investors see a big opportunity. BI compiled a list of 13 investors and fund managers pouring money into the next big thing in sports.

3. Bad news for Live Nation. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department could hit the concert giant with an antitrust lawsuit as soon as next month. Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, has long faced criticism over its high fees.

In other news

Blackstone hires Walmart AI whiz to supercharge its portfolio companies .

Taylor Swift, Rihanna, Blackpink's Lisa: Celebrities spotted at Coachella 2024 . 

NYC's rat czar says stop feeding the pigeons if you want the vermin gone .

A major Tesla executive left after 18 years at the company amid mass layoffs .

Some Tesla factory workers realized they were laid off when security scanned their badges and sent them back on shuttles, sources say .

New York is in, San Francisco is very much out for tech workers relocating .

AI could split workers into 2: The ones whose jobs get better and the ones who lose them completely .

Oh look at that! Now Google is using AI to answer search queries .

A longtime banker gives a rare inside look at how he is thinking about his next career move, from compensation to WFH .

Clarence Thomas didn't show up for work today .

What's happening today

Today's earnings: United Airlines, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and others are reporting . 

It's Free Cone Day at participating Ben & Jerry's stores. 

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco , deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Jordan Parker Erb , editor, in New York. Hallam Bullock , senior editor, in London. George Glover , reporter, in London.

Watch: Nearly 50,000 tech workers have been laid off — but there's a hack to avoid layoffs

• Main content

Trump vows to make his voice heard in court as first week of trial draws to a close. Here's what you missed on Day 4.

Four days into the first criminal trial of a former president, Donald Trump was showing signs of frustrations.

He had listened to scores of New Yorkers express less-than-favorable opinions about him, was restricted in what he could say in court, and had even been told to sit down by the judge.

“Sir, can you please have a seat,” said Juan Merchan, the soft-spoken judge who is presiding over Trump’s hush money trial, when the former president thought Friday's proceedings were over and got up to leave.

As Trump returned to the defense table, Merchan thanked him.

Trump exited the room minutes later looking weary and promising to testify at the trial, which he slammed as a “witch hunt.”

His comments capped a week that was filled with power reversals and accusations turned upside down.

Trump, who prosecutors say made hush money payments to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, is attempting to make a parallel case in the court of public opinion.

Speaking to reporters on Friday, the presumptive Republican nominee for president groused that “instead of being in Pennsylvania or Georgia, or North Carolina or lots of other places today, I’m sitting in a courthouse all day long,” adding that the process “will go on for another four or five weeks.”

The trial is expected to last as many as six weeks.

Trump, who is required to be in court for the duration of the trial, also accused the district attorney’s office of waging interference in the 2024 presidential election on behalf of President Joe Biden by “keeping me off the campaign trail.”

He went on to argue that he was “not allowed to speak” after the judge said he must curtail his social media attacks against potential witnesses in the case, and later told supporters in a fundraising email that he was “FULLY GAGGED.”

Much of Friday's drama unfolded outside the courthouse, where a man set himself on fire in a park facing the court. Police extinguished the flames and he was taken to a hospital where he later died.

In the courtroom, Trump sat at the defense table as prospective jurors were asked questions aimed at sussing out their ability to be impartial.

One alternate juror was excused for anxiety, which she believed would hamper her ability “to be completely fair.” Another was questioned about a social media post referencing the former president, saying, “I do believe he’s the devil.”

“I don’t recall posting that,” the man said, before being dismissed.

Trump had taken a particular interest in the man, who had volunteered for the campaign of his 2016 Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Social media posts made the case for dismissing several other potential jurors, even after they said they could judge Trump fairly.

A retired New York high school teacher said he could “absolutely” be fair and impartial, but was compelled to answer questions about excavated social media posts that revealed that in 2017 he had attended “a massive anti-trump rally,” according to the caption of a picture in which he had tagged himself online.

He was excused.

By Friday afternoon, Merchan had seated a full 12-person jury and assigned six alternates. All 18 will meet for the first time on Monday morning, when opening statements are set to get underway.

Trump’s defense team looked noticeably downcast during the afternoon’s proceedings, with attorney Susan Necheles slumping back into her seat, arms crossed, until addressing the judge late in the day. Lead attorney Todd Blanche was seated next to Trump, and the two sat watching and occasionally whispering to one another.

After Merchan said he would not consider a motion on presidential immunity and other motions, Blanche insisted there was still more to discuss.

“This sounds suspiciously like the 10 minutes we spent arguing this on Monday … with no new facts, no new application of the law,” Merchan responded.

“There’s nothing else to re-argue,” he added, as the first week of the trial came to a close. “We’re going to have opening statements Monday morning. This trial is starting.”

Katherine Doyle is a White House reporter for NBC News.

Help | Advanced Search

Quantum Physics

Title: variational quantum simulation: a case study for understanding warm starts.

Abstract: The barren plateau phenomenon, characterized by loss gradients that vanish exponentially with system size, poses a challenge to scaling variational quantum algorithms. Here we explore the potential of warm starts, whereby one initializes closer to a solution in the hope of enjoying larger loss variances. Focusing on an iterative variational method for learning shorter-depth circuits for quantum real and imaginary time evolution we conduct a case study to elucidate the potential and limitations of warm starts. We start by proving that the iterative variational algorithm will exhibit substantial (at worst vanishing polynomially in system size) gradients in a small region around the initializations at each time-step. Convexity guarantees for these regions are then established, suggesting trainability for polynomial size time-steps. However, our study highlights scenarios where a good minimum shifts outside the region with trainability guarantees. Our analysis leaves open the question whether such minima jumps necessitate optimization across barren plateau landscapes or whether there exist gradient flows, i.e., fertile valleys away from the plateau with substantial gradients, that allow for training.

Submission history

Access paper:.

• HTML (experimental)
• Other Formats

References & Citations

• INSPIRE HEP
• Google Scholar
• Semantic Scholar

BibTeX formatted citation

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Code, data and media associated with this article, recommenders and search tools.

• Institution

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs .