We're hearing a lot about voice search lately, and that trend doesn't seem likely to disappear. But does it have a direct impact on how you should be thinking about your SEO strategy? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses what to expect when it comes to the future of search and what you can do to stay on top.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat 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.
Today
Today, we have a few sort of nascent beginnings of this, and I made a prediction at the beginning of this year, in my traditional predictions post, that voice search, conversational search, Internet of things, that these wouldn't actually have a big impact or much of an impact at all on the web marketing world. What we are hearing is from the engines, specifically Google and Bing, talking about how a higher and higher percent of their queries are coming through voice searches. However, what we're not hearing is how this might be changing SEO or whether it's changing SEO.
"Okay, Google"
So today what we have going on is things like folks asking their device, their Android device, "Okay, Google, what's the difference between libel and slander?" You might hear this. Maybe you have a question, something you want answered, and Google will respond verbally to you, or they might just show you the results on the screen, and then you can click through to there, or some combination of the two.
"Alexa"
You can ask your Alexa device, the Amazon Echo Alexa device, you can ask it, "Alexa, did Iceland beat England in the Euro soccer game," or football game as English and Icelandic people would call it. In fact they did. Really, sorry about that England, but I kind of want to see the Icelandic commentator freak out again. That seems exciting.
"Hey, Siri"
For Apple products, "Hey Siri, where can I get Vietnamese rice noodles near here?" And Siri will look around you, and then return some results, that sort of thing.
Talking to cars
Of course, there's also this idea that with more and more cars are becoming hotspots for searches as drivers ask their cars things or ask their phones in their cars things like, "All right Tesla," this is not real, you can't actually say this to Tesla yet, but I'm sure it's coming, "When is my brother-in-law's birthday, and does he drink whiskey?" Hopefully, your Tesla will be smart enough, through whatever partnerships it has with these other technology companies, to be able to answer that.
This is what's happening today. We're seeing the rise in conversational and voice search. So there's a new and different kind of keyword demand and also a new and different kind of result set that returns because of that. Does it really make a huge difference from an SEO perspective? Well, I'm going to argue that not yet, no, it doesn't. However, I think there are strategic and tactical things that we should be paying attention to as this world progresses, this world of voice search, conversational search progresses.
Strategically speaking
1. The rise in instant answers without search results will continue
We're going to see a continual rise in instant answers. What is happening is that when a lot of these voice and conversational search queries are coming through, they tend to be longer, and they tend to be seeking out an answer that a device can quickly give you a direct answer to. Things like, what I placed here, and this requires some logic and some understanding from the machines, some contextual understanding, but it's not that challenging, and the machines are doing a good job of this.
I suspect that what we'll continue to see is that the percent of queries with an instant answer result keeps rising over time. Now this is percent, not absolute numbers. I mean, obviously the absolute number is rising, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the traditional kinds of queries that have been made to search engines are going to disappear.
In fact, one of the things that I would urge you and caution against is to say, "Oh, because voice and conversational search are rising, we should stop paying attention to direct, traditional web search and web results." It may in fact be the case that even with the rise of all these instant answers and new SERP features and voice search that the raw number of clicks on search results in your industry, in your field, for your keywords may actually have gone up despite all these trends. Because these trends are additive, they are not necessarily taking away from other forms of queries, at least not necessarily.
2. Google (& Apple, Amazon, etc.) will continue to disintermediate simplistic answer/data problems:
I think Google and Apple and Amazon and Alexa and all of these engines that participate in this will be continuing to disintermediate simplistic data and answer publishers. So I think it behooves you to question what types of information you're publishing
The way I'd phrase this is if a certain percent, X percent of queries that result in traffic can be answered in fewer than Y words, or with a quick image or a quick graphic, a quick number, then the engine is going to do it themselves. They don't need you, and very frankly they're faster than you are. They can answer that more quickly, more directly than you can. So I think it pays to consider: Are you in the safe or dangerous portion of this strategic framework with the current content that you publish and with the content plans that you have out in the future?
SAFETY DANCE VS. DANGER ZONE
- Safe: Recipes
- Dangerous: Cooking conversions
So if you're in the world of food and cooking, recipes probably very safe. It's very, very difficult for an engine to say, "Okay, here let me read you the ingredients. Let me show you the photos. Let me give you the entire rundown. I'll give you the comments. I'll give you the star rating." This is too complex.
What's very simple is cooking conversions. "Alexa, how many pounds of flour do I need to make up a cup?" Very simple cooking conversion, instant answer very possible. Pretty dangerous to be relying on a ton of your click-through traffic for that dangerous stuff.
- Safe: Sports analysis
- Dangerous: Sport scores
Sports analysis, very, very difficult for any of these services to try and provide analysis of a game, very easy for them to provide a score.
- Safe: In-depth product comparison
- Dangerous: Simplistic product price comparison
Very difficult for them to do an in-depth product comparison, very easy for them to do a specific, simplistic product price comparison. "What are the prices of X on these?"
- Safe: Learn to code tutorials
- Dangerous: Quick function lookups
Learn to code tutorials, almost impossible to disintermediate, but a quick function look-up, very easy to disintermediate.
SAFE: If it's hard to aggregate and present simply, you have a competitive advantage, and you probably will be able to keep that traffic.
DANGEROUS: If it is easy to aggregate and present simply, you're probably in dangerous territory long term.
Tactically speaking
There are three things that we really think about as we move to the conversational and voice search world. Those are...
1. Keyword research & targeting requires SERP feature analysis
It requires SERP analysis of both desktop and mobile, and preferably in the future I think we're actually going to be looking for keyword research tools that can perform a voice query and then can tell us what the results either look like or sound like from the engine.
We need to do our prioritization of keyword targeting, which keywords we actually want to select and which keywords we want to create content for and try to rank for, based on our click-through opportunity and our value. If we don't have that information and that data, then we're probably going to be choosing some keywords unwisely compared to our competition who is thinking about this.
2. Content structure should optimize toward formats engines will use in their instant answers
If someone searches for libel versus slander, it is the case that if you rank on the first page and you have the right content structure, Google may pull you into that instant answer box. What we've seen from our research is that being in that instant answer box is not a bad thing. In fact, it tends to increase click-through rate and overall traffic for many, many publishers. Not true for everyone. Some instant answers do really disintermediate queries, the "Iceland versus England, what was the score?" If Google just tells you, you don't need to click through. But certainly on libel versus slander you may see libel is written or published defamatory statement, while slander is spoken. It's very likely that people will actually be clicking through to learn more about that subject, and then you have an opportunity to serve up ads or to serve up your services or whatever product you're selling, those types of things. So format things intelligently.
Dr. Pete did a great blog post on how to rank number zero, how to get into those instant answer results. He recently did a presentation at SMX Advanced that he's published on SlideShare, that you can check out as well. Both those resources very handy.
3. Keep an eye on absolute volume and search volume demand trends, NOT just percentages of queries and aggregated stats
So if keyword search volume for the terms and phrases that you care about, if the orange is typed and the green here is voice search, you can see that it looks like over here this is 60% plus, so voice search has overtaken typed search. But what's actually happened is that, year to year, typed search has gone up as well. It didn't stop paying to try and rank for these keywords. In fact, it paid more and more dividends. It's just that voice search grew even faster. So I think we have to be cautious if we think about voice as completely disintermediating or taking over our industry or our content. Rather we should think of this as additive, and we need to pay close attention to the true overall volume demand, both typed and voice search over time.
All right gang, look forward to your tactics, your strategies for voice and conversational search, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Well said Rand, I think as Mobilegeddon (mobile friendly update) another update is coming as voice search friendly. So, now instead of changing we have to focus on creating some new voice search strategies. I guess implementing long tail keywords will be help in this case; this will help typer and talkers as well.
Hi Rand,
I had missed out on this white board friday earlier, I found it very interesting.
We are expecting more and more efforts from google to be focused on developing voice search and similar technologies. This is the future of search, as we go towards more and more mobile traffic
Regards,
Vijay
Oh, how i just miss the old WBF intro. :-)
Anyway, great video, useful as always.
Just a quick question: is this your prediction for Tesla Motors? Have you heard about their recently updated master plan?
I did hear about that :-) I think self-driving cars in general are going to increase our time spent online. In fact, I think that's one of the big reasons Google is working so hard on them -- they want to drive more time online, and driving time cuts into that. Give people 30-60 extra minutes a day in a vehicle that they don't need to operate, and they'll be on their mobile device instead.
I has never thought about why Google is in the driverless car space until now and if you are correct, it just boggles the mind on how forward thinking they are. They've been working on driverless tech for easily ten years and to think that all that research and work could have come from a 'blue sky' session on how to keep people online just amazes me. I can only guess what they are working on now that will impact my life in another 10 years.
It seems like Google is always 10 steps ahead of the game. Just when you think "how the heck could they monetize THAT technology"...
Oh my. Definitely 10 steps ahead of everyone. :-)
For me I think its more like humming bird it's not how the user is searching is trying to work out what they are looking for, finding the meaning in that search.
The IoT will really rock our world with refrigerators suggesting consumables, search-enabled cars, and internet-enabled wearables. I'm looking forward to seeing how it changes our profession.
You and me both, though I'm not totally sure the self-ordering refrigerator is all that needed... I kinda hope IoT turns out to be something more exciting than what's been imagined so far.
Rand good stuff here like always and with that said everything here at Moz gets my brain thinking on new strategy and how ever evolve with the changing landscape of SEO. With myself along with the rest of the world population using voice search more having 2 categories as you mentioned to think about when developing content strategy is brilliant. If it is easy to aggregate then well getting search traffic from info that the engines will naturally produce is going to be off but having that more complex specific needs provided in your content strategy will put you right under the search engines initial response.
I would say that well no need to be a robot we can leave that to "Roger", but to think like one can help a marketer provide the best sources of information to the seeking searches.
Thanks as always and great video too really enjoyed it.
Great perspective!
Furthermore - it is not known if it is available or on the "Google minds" yet.
Queries like:
What best brands of laptops are available here (within 50 miles)? Email me and/or save the results; all the exercises can be done by using the voice feature only.
Compare the prices of the laptops available at store X, email me and/or save the results and tell me, using the voice feature. Next time I will be there - organic results only!
What an interesting feature! It sounds to me like the beginnings of search engines, which used not to provide good results for complex queries, but they learned very fast. Regarding your question-title.
Does Voice Search and/or Conversational Search Change SEO Tactics or Strategy?
Maybe, I’m starting to think about in the future answering the common questions, where and what, in a more specific way...
I can see these voice search softwares being corrupted with biased responses towards companies that pay for sponsored answers
whats stopping amazon from signing a deal with nike to reccomend thier products for questions like "what are the best runners for sale"
Sorry for my english guys i'm french.
I read an article about voice research no that long ago and I start think about it.
In my opinion it will have a huge impact on seo really soon because when people are doing a classic query their research can be short or long. For voice research it's, in my opinion, often long, because it's easier and faster to speak than to write. So seo will have to improve website for short keywords and long tail keywords to answer all type of queries.
But classic research will not disapear. I do really think that because I tryed to do a voice research in english and my accent is not that good so google didnt understand me. So i had to wrote it :/ When you have to do a research in an other language writing is easier than speaking.
Hope my post is clear ^^
And ty Rand for that awesome video.
I agree to some degree, but I think classic search won't be entirely replaced, just augmented with these new voice searches. In many ways, voice search is just another new type of query that's going to add to the total queries we see, rather than cannibalize.
Interesting reflection.
I like this development, but the question I have is that normally the communication of the web is written and this communication is different from the verbal. I guess when more this practice (increasingly rising ) extends, double content must be created, one written and one oral.
Hey Rand, great stuff sir. I've been betting on this horse for a couple years now. Here's an article I published yesterday. I took a big chance ending the article the way I did. I essentially challenged readers to test my theory. It's going to be a mixed bag of results -for sure. If you have time to check it out, and take the challenge, you'll see what I mean.
I'm all in on voice search. We'll just have to see how long voice search is additive before the long tail search truly does rule the roost.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-does-voice-sear...
I think ranking in the future will be more long tail but I think we also have to look at competition. I think with voice search the brands you'd consider your competitors increases as well. If I'm in the robots sections and look up terms around what people want to know and decide to answer a question around how Iron Man's suite works. That'd open me up to competing with Mythbusters or Bill Nye The Science Guy as brands that I'd not have thought of competitors before today.
Hi Rand,
How can you rank within the instant answer?
I know you mentioned a link, would be great if you could let me know what that link is.
Thanks
Hey Karl - check out these posts from Dr. Pete: Google Answer Boxes w/ Bonus Experiment and How We Fixed the Internet (OK, an Answer Box).
Hey karl62, you might also like today's post by Dr. Pete, which is the one Rand mentioned in the Whiteboard Friday: https://moz.com/blog/ranking-zero-seo-for-answers :)
Hey Rand,
I was at a new Search event here in the UK a week or two back called SearchLeeds and was at a talk from Tom Antony (distilled), whom you guys now well. His talk, which I hope he doesn't mind me mentioning, was about Intelligent Personal Assistants and the rise of voice search etc.
I was really surprised, very surprised by just how much and quickly they are advancing. Two voice search tech companies Hound and VIV (from the creators of Siri) appear to be very, very clever and able to perform very complex conversational searches even down to conversion level.
One element which struck a cord, was Tom's thoughts on how he once felt you did not need an app developed, but now maybe you do. I would of loved to have quizzed him more on this and his reasons why. Hopefully he will read this and expand :)
Overall, it might be worth you getting in touch about his thoughts on voice search as he is clearly very knowledgeable on the subject.
Personally after his presentation, I do now wonder how voice search for the millennial generation may impact search efforts going forward with users not necessarily interacting with Search Engines but by app engagement.
Cheers
Tim
PS thanks for the cool new Water Bottle from MOZ, It is now taking pride of place on my desk next to RogerBot :)
Thanks for this fantastic WBF. I really appreciate hte strategy vs tactic, and also the dangerous vs safe... Dual realitities make understanding much simpler.
My 8 year old tells me if I am writing a search for something he wants to know "why don´t you simple ask Google?" (we´ve tried sometimes and he finds that better and simpler) So if a 8 year old says that the future seems to be there I reckon!
It is good to think about possible opportunities disentermidiation may open (examples like metasearch engines in air tickets or hotel room sales for instance)
Would you think Rand that being on a dangerous zone could be mitigated if analysis is added (and eventually branded) For instance, France vs Portugal result can be 0-1, or can be 0-1 with stats on ball possesion and many other plus quick analysis by top commentator, or a "was it fair index" type of thing. People are interested about the actual result, but also about many other things. I don´t know, the future is always full of questions!! but opportnities should open from those
love the post as last few months I began noticing my young bro using voice search and how the future of search will be long tail keywords but what I did not realize is how action based queries will be and future will be instead of pizza near me, will be order me a small pie etc, and how different the typer is vs the one using voice results- love that part
Very interesting, but a very unknown matter, I do not know anyone who does this kind of searches, what kind of user does use the voice searche? apart from the Google commands like guide me to...or stuff like that?
A very timely WBF Rand, I was just reading up on voice search yesterday afternoon. Great video once again.
I'm now wondering how much of voice search is going to rely on RankBrain in terms of understanding the context of questions? Will it be used to help pick out accents, dialects or slang? Will be interested to see how it all develops over the next 12 months.
Hello Rand,
Absolutely agree with keeping a keen eye on absolute volume and search volume demand trends, about how to be in Google's instant answer box, and more other mix of strategies for voice and conversational search in future.
The future of search is in fact based on the AI apps like Google Now, Siri and Alexa. I think the better we cover a specific topic in its entirety the better would be the chances to achieve ranks specifically in the Instant answers which most of the voice search apps rely on. Anyways nicely covered topic!
Hi Rand, Another great post. Another great perspective.
Totally agree with your view that voice search will continue to grow along with basic search. However, it is not due to preference of typing over speaking (they prefer speaking instead); because search engines are still some distance away from answering and understanding speech accurately.
The next level of growth in search engine traffic will not come from USA (where largely one language is used for conversing) but from countries in Asia (read India and China) where language changes every few hundred miles. If Google or Bing or Amazon are able to crack the conundrum of accurately answering in multiple languages and dialects, the mix of voice to non-voice searches would change drastically. Whichever search engine solves the puzzle faster will win the next round of search revolution.
I would love to here your view.
Alright Rand,
As always I loved this Whiteboard Friday, especially your point that despite there being an increase in voice related search, this should not influence businesses to switch off their focus on traditional marketing tactics, yet keep up to speed with the changing search and SERP environment and adapt where necessary.
Cheers,
Kev
Does Google have an estimate on when they'll start differentiating voice vs traditional search reports in GA?
Hi Rand!! It's been long time I comment in whiteboard Friday. Well, I think I cought the idea SAFE / DANGEROUS.... Correct me if I'm wrong... In "Dangerous areas" we can have a better result because we are searching a term in the "long tail"? If that's so, I think that "long tail" is an opportunity to make better conversions.
It's creepy that based in your predictions, in 2020 60% of search will be by voice! No doubt future is here! Thanks Rand. Another question.... are you going to still helping us in 2020, right? :)
I'll still be around (I hope!) :-)
Yahooo!! :)
practically the purpose of voice search is to help people in their most convenient way. Imagine yourself as a nomad or a foreigner to a certain place and you are looking for the nearest hotel so you will ask google were is "HOTEL NAME" and it will respond you to the nearest hotel you are located.
Then adding a second question HOW TO GET THERE? or DIRECTION google will respond the address and direction how to get to that hotel.
This is very convenient for travelers and almost everyone, since this is quicker compared to typing and searching using your phone.
Owesome, good post of voice search, thanks for share
Voice Search is a great features of Google. It gives instant search results and also save our times to typing words.
Great WBF as always Rand. I am just wondering did you research any data over SIRI & Cortana? May be % search queries increasing over past year!
Would love to see your inputs!
Hi Rand
It is clear that the search time will be each day more widespread and therefore more efforts must focus here, but I comes a question ... Are there products or markets that are interested in voice search? I think there are products such as condoms and other sex products or creams against haemorrhoids that do not listen to us when we ask, we will continue looking for the traditional way
Good weekend
I believe that our strategy depends of the audience, market and product we are working for. As you say it is not the same an haemorrhoids cream that a betting page
Hey Rand, Great WBF.. This WBF was needed at this point of time. Awesome work.
Also, i am glad to know recipe blogs are in safe zone ;)
My Sister started a new recipe blog.. and i am trying to help her by improving her blog's Online presence!
Future is here! Currently, analyzes, reflections and top rated content still offered in writing. The knowledge has been passed in writing and, increasingly, audiovisual form. Could not the SEO thought voice search using a system similar to SEO in typed search? In the end, the keywords will make you find what you are looking for, whether speaking or writing. However, a very interesting article, we hope to continue learning with you, Rand ;)
Another great WhiteBoardFriday Rand. This is a good future thinking.
detailed info on voice search, very interesting and informative. definitely will help those who are trying to grasp what is happening in the voice search area. kudos to the author. #randfishkin
I like this information