“Ok Google, tell me all about voice search and how it affects my SEO strategy?”
Firstly, what is voice search? Voice search can be carried out on a number of devices including mobiles, tablets, TV’s and smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Devices that support voice search use voice recognition software to listen to a searchers query rather than this having to be typed. 40% of adults now use voice search every day and it is predicted that by the year 2020 50% of all searches will be voice searches.
With statistics like this, it is hard to ignore the power of voice search and how it is influencing SEO. There are a few things that SEO expert Brian Dean, has flagged as being important factors when it comes to performing well with voice search.
One of the main things that Brian noticed through his research was that page speed makes a big difference when it comes to the top results in Google voice search. He found that the average voice search result page loaded in 4.6 seconds which is 52% faster than the average page. So what can you do to help the loading speed of your site? One of the big things you can do is make sure your images are optimised for web. It can really slow a site down when it is trying to load large image files, and as Brian’s findings demonstrate, that’s not something you can afford if you aim to rank in voice search results.
Brian also found that site security was a bigger factor when it comes to ranking in voice search results than the normal search results page. When returning results for voice search 70.4% of the results were secured with https. This is just further demonstrates the emphasis Google place on site security and how applying an SSL certificate to your site is a quick win to helping you improve your chances of ranking well in Google.
As well as the speed and the security of the site the way your content is written has a big impact on how likely you are to rank with voice search. Google favours simple, easy to read and concise answers to queries. A typical voice search result returns an answer in around 29 words in length but the average word count of a voice search result page was 2,312 words. What this shows is that Google tends to find the answers to searchers queries from longer, in depth content and shows just how important it is to cover all your bases when it comes to the topics you cover in your content.
We hope this has made voice search a little clearer for you, next month we will be talking all about ways to improve your content with some tried and tested tips.