Voice Search has Arrived and You Better be Optimizing for It – OK GOOGLE?

Voice Search Statistics heading into 2020

  • eMarketer predicts that over a third of the US population (111.8 million people) will use a voice assistant monthly in 2019, up 9.5% from 2018.
  • ComScore predicts that by the year 2020, 50% of all online searches will be performed with voice search.
  • A Gartner study predicts that 30% of all browsing sessions will include voice search by 2020.
  • According to NRP and Edison Research, 1 in 6 Americans owned a smart speaker in 2018.
  • 1 of every 4 American homes equipped with Wi-Fi owned a smart speaker in 2018, according to Nielsen.
  • According to Google, 52% of smart speaker owners keep them in a common room such as a living room. 25% of these people keep them in their bedroom, while 22% keep a smart speaker assistant in their kitchen.
  • A 2018 study from BrightLocal found that 58% of consumers used voice search to find a local business in 2017, and 46% of people using voice search daily are searching for local business.
  • According to an Adobe Analytics survey, the most common voice searches on smart speakers are asking for music (70%) and the weather forecast (64%), followed by fun questions (53%), online search (47%), news (46%), and asking directions (34%).

How you can optimize for Voice Search?

Some points to be kept in mind while preparing keywords for voice searches are:

  • Using natural language with direct answers to specific questions is key.
  • Question keywords should be targeted. As illustrated before, voice search queries contain a lot of question words like how, what, when, why, where. The next time you add keywords for voice search, make sure you include these.
  • Long-tail keywords complete a question, and people have been sticking to this approach when using voice. We shouldn’t ignore long-tail keywords when we optimize for voice searches.
  • “Filler words” are a must to be included in questions which make the query more conversational and human. The examples of filler words are “I, the, of the, on the, to, for,” etc. 

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