How Will Voice Search Impact SEO?

15 Feb 2020

As time goes on, every year brings new advancements in technology which have the capability to bring new opportunities to the digital marketing world, especially SEO.

The last most significant example of this would be the popularity growth of smartphones and mobile devices no more than 10 years ago, which have continued to change the landscape of digital marketing up to this day. But now, as time has gone on there’s a new player which in recent years which has started to change the game of digital marketing and SEO once again — voice search.

Voice search is HUGE right now and it’s only going to get bigger. With everybody who has a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch or smart-whatever having the ability to to use at least one form of voice search, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the amount of users who take advantage of these virtual assistants is increasing. 

Voice recognition technology has significantly improved since its inception, and 20% of queries on Google’s mobile app and Android devices are made with voice, while 31% of smartphone users use voice search at least once a week.

Optimise Your SEO for Voice Search

Lots of users always try to keep their searches brief and specific. For example “web design Darlington” is a query which someone might type into Google to find what they’re looking for. It’s short and simple but Google has come to understand queries like these and bring up the relevant results.

As Google and virtual assistants get smarter and more people begin to use voice search, search queries are starting to becoming more natural and conversational rather than very short and generic. So what someone would usually search as “web design Darlington” into Google the same person might ask their phone “Show me a list of web design agencies in Darlington”. For this reason, optimising your websites content for voice search will require you to implement long-tail keywords such as “web design agency in Darlington” in your SEO plan rather than “web design Darlington”.

Learn more about long term keywords in our blog discussing the Google BERT update.