Voice search optimization has been another important aspect of on-page content marketing for webmasters in recent times.
Bloggers and content marketers now optimize their articles for Google voice search queries to target and reach more audiences.
What is a Voice Search?
Voice search is a voice-based search on search engines, using a virtual language assistant to support your voice.
In voice search, the user asks questions as if he’s asking a fellow human.
In text-based search, a user asks ‘horse’s price Atlanta’ while in search-based search, he asks ‘what’s the price of horse in Atlanta’
Voice searches, therefore, follow natural language patterns, and most times, are often personalized or connected to Geo-location.
How Do Voice Search Work?
Voice Search uses Natural Language Processing (NLP).
This includes all techniques and methods for machine processing of natural language with the aim of direct communication between humans and computers.
The speech captured by the microphone is broken down into individual sentence and word components (lexical analysis).
Then follows a grammatical determination (syntactic analysis) of the individual words.
The meaning of a word/phrase is then analyzed (semantic analysis), followed by pragmatic analysis, that is, the nature of the question, for example, a question, a statement, an instruction, or others.
Importance of Voice Search
In voice searches, the user can use voice control to make a query. It makes it easy and comfortable for search engine users.
You don’t have to make use of the keyboard or stress yourself with typo errors, you can quickly switch to ‘type by voice’ and speak to the search engine to make your query.
Users with eyesight problems and other physical impairments can make their queries on the go without any issue.
Even without any physical handicap, situations are typing on the keyboard may be challenging, like when you’re driving and you need a direction or have to use the search engine.
With voice search, you can use the search engine anytime, and anywhere, in any situation as long as you’re with your computer device.
Application of Voice search
Voice search works with a wide range of devices, both mobile and desktop devices.
However, google voice search is more used on a mobile applications than a computer.
Voice search is not only used on smartphones, tablets, and computers, it’s also used on other devices, smart TVs, smart refrigerators, speakers and other smart devices that can be connected to the internet.
Depending on the manufacturer of the device, different search engines can be used, voice search is not limited to Google, Google is only more popular.
Apple uses Siri, Alexa is from Amazon, Bixby is from Samsung, Cortana from Microsoft, and Google Assistant is from Google.
Voice Search Optimization
For content marketers, voice search volume is increasing every year, and you need to factor this into your content development.
With just a little tweak, you can implement voice search in your website and optimize your articles for voice search.
Break down your content into subheadings. A subheading that’s more than 300 words should probably be further broken down into more sub-topics.
Each subheading should be a question-type, make use of Who, How, Why, When, What, etc to structure your headings.
Also, each subheading should focus on a specific question and a direct answer should be made to answer the question.
Text-based search queries can be converted to voice search and implemented, and there are also voice search queries you can research and implement into your content development.
