How Will Voice Search Affect SEO in 2023?
Reading Time: ~4 Mins | Written By: Mitchell Garrett
Smart devices that allow you to provide voice commands for setting timers, searching recipes, determining a local businesses’ hours, and more, are here to stay. So what does this mean for websites and their SEO performance?
Businesses should start thinking about how they can be found using voice search on home speakers, smart phones and more. Very soon we could be asking our speakers “order tonight’s pizza to be delivered from the best pizza place”. Here are three SEO tips to be prepared for smart speakers.
How Will Voice Search Affect SEO in 2023?
Different Speaker, Different Search Engine
Featured Snippet (Rank 0)
Pronunciation of Companies, Services, & Products
Different Speaker, Different Search Engine
Every voice search uses a different search engine to crawl the internet. Google Home uses Google, Amazon’s Alexa uses Bing, and Apple’s homepod uses their own Business Registry. So the result for the voice search “best pizza place near me” also depends on which search engine the speaker is using. All search engines use an authority ranking to determine which website is the most relevant to the user's search. If you own a pizza place, and your website has the highest domain authority, search engines could rank your website “more favourably”.
Every pizza place’s menu, or every business’s products and services, must be optimized on every search engine. A search engine will want to continue the order after it chooses a store, and ask the user “which item?”. The more information these search engines have about your store, the more smart devices can assist in the discovery and sales processes. That means a website with a lower domain rating could be the one recommended if it’s better optimized on that search engine in comparison to its competitors.
Featured Snippet (Rank 0)
Imagine asking your smart speaker a question, and then having to look it up on your phone because you didn’t get the full information you were looking for. That defeats the whole purpose of a voice search. Search engines have introduced “featured snippets”, or “rank 0”, to stop this problem. A featured snippet is a paragraph pulled from a website that will give a quick answer to the search query. Any featured snippet will be found at the top of the search engine results page. The purpose of featured snippets is to ensure users do not have to leave the search engine for answers. Smart speakers also use featured snippets to answer your questions, because they usually do not require further explanation. The goal for SEO is to be used in a featured snippet.
It is great for SEO that both search engines and voice search are using featured snippets. This makes it much easier for SEO specialists to adapt to voice search, and vice versa. However, when voice search technology becomes more advanced, we expect there will be extra optimization required from search engines. Keep your website on top of the current SEO best practices, and any transition will be easy to optimize for.
Pronunciation of Companies, Services, & Products
Businesses are doing their best to be unique when naming their company, products or services. Voice search now adds restrictions to just how unique our businesses are allowed to be. If you have ever played an online video game, you’ve likely encountered a player's username swapping a number for a letter. These usernames often take a minute to understand, and voice assistants don’t have time for that. If you’re using numbers and symbols in your business name, service or product, they need to be strategically placed. For example, if you name your pizza place “P1ZZ4”, voice search will know you as “P-one-Z-Z-four”. This would make it very difficult to be found on voice search.
Soon enough these smart devices will be in everyone's house and then we will see voice search affect SEO. So it is best to have your business prepared now. SEO will play a major role in order for users to see the full value in a smart speaker or other smart devices as it relates to voice search. We recommend staying on top of the latest SEO best practices, and optimizing your website regularly on every search engine. Smart speakers are an interesting piece of technology, and are worth your time keeping an eye on for years.
If you would like to take your website’s SEO to new heights, enroll in our Digital Marketing Bootcamp today! Check out our variety of Jelly Academy courses to see which course is best for your business.
