The first search engine was created by Alan Emtage in 1990 and named Archie. Yahoo! was then born in 1994. Altavista in 1995. Ask Jeeves in 1997. And Google was founded in 1998. A good majority of people these days, including yourself, may say “I’ll Google it” as Google has become a household name.
When we “Google it” - what exactly does that entail? It means you go to the browser, type in keywords— and then Google, Bing, or whichever search engine you use will come back with results. But, that’s now changing.
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People are beginning to use voice search more often, asking questions out loud such as: “Hey Google, when is the Boston Marathon?” “Alexa, what’s the weather?” or “Hey Siri, what are Italian restaurants near me?”
Today, over 75 million U.S. adults own smart speakers and 150 million have used voice assistants on smartphones. We are either voice searching in our browser (Google or Bing) or through one of four commonly-used virtual assistants: 1) Google Assistant, 2) Amazon Alexa, 3) Microsoft Cortana, or 4) Apple Siri.
While people have mainly thought of searching via voice for things like “what’s today’s news?,” more people have started asking questions related to your brand, products, and services. Guess what? These brands, (potentially, your organization) probably have not optimized for voice search.
There’s this notion that optimizing for voice search is the same as optimizing for text-based search, which is incorrect - the search results that come back for each are different. Voice SEO is not the same as traditional SEO.
“What happens when you ask over 4,000 questions to voice assistants about brands and products? You hear a lot of Wikipedia entries. If there is a location angle to the question, Yelp is a popular data source. Then there are your standard knowledge graph responses, mostly from Google and often featured snippets, Google My Business information, or local product inventory feed.” - Voicebot.ai 2019 SEO Report
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Voice search is changing the way we search and find information with 40% of adults doing at least one voice search per day. And, brands are far behind in voice search engine optimization. Imagine if you could change that so that your brand, product, or service can become either the featured snippet or a top search engine result.
We’d like to show you more – we just introduced Orbita’s Voice SEO product where you can manage the questions your audience will ask and curate the answers you want them to receive (and also the answers you want them to see if they’re looking on a device or browser).
Start improving your search engine rankings and get found when consumers voice search. Take a look here and if you want to learn more, we’re happy to chat.
