The Obvious One

“Hey Google, I am bored. Can you please play with me?” a regular ice breaker for my 10 years old daughter with Google assistant. It generally happens when she is lonely or wants fun. And every time Google assistant surprises us with perfect response.

This is not a one-off situation. Google tells us, teens love to talk with their devices. In fact, they tell us that people of all ages are now talking with their devices. Talking with the device is now. It is in. But more importantly, this opens up technological aspects not considered before.

Personal assistants and voice-supported devices are building new opportunities. In here, I am looking at the situation from a search marketing perspective.

To start, let us sort out how voice search and digital assistants will change search environment, altogether. Not only for my daughter but for every viewer, searching their queries.

Voice search is vertically growing. Of all search data, 55% of teens and 41% of adults prefer voice search over text-based search (Google).

The audience can command a voice search through their hands-free communicator. All they need to do is talk clearly and bring in huge mobility to search. With voice search, you no more need the keyboard. And now the search is on the move, without the keyboard anchoring it. You search while running for your 8.37 metro, you search attending the school sports day, you search standing on your head. And you search important things, some of which are often extremely local.

Let us repeat the reality. Voice search is already here. According to research, a billion voice searches occur every month.

Where and How?

Music apps like Spotify and Gaana integrate voice search technology in their APP and their users do not type in details of their songs. Recent Gaana stats tell us that nearly 25% of users or 20 million users use voice to search music in regional language in their APP.

Around 60% of Google searches are carried out on mobile (per Hitwise), According to Google’s recent stat 1 in every 5 mobile searches is accomplished via voice.

Interestingly, voice search is not limited to a mobile device only, people also use the desktop and a smart-speaker device like Alexa for voice search.

In the United States alone, 13% of all households had the smart speaker in 2017, per OC&C Strategy Consultants and the number is predicted to grow to 55% by 2022.

Geomarketing says, around 65% of Alexa or Google-Home owners can’t imagine returning to typed search.

We can safely predict this voice search number will shoot through the roof as more people adopt digital assistants. Amazon is already selling their assistants very fast.

ComScore estimate is half of all searches will be voice by 2020. If this estimate is half true, we seriously need to think and brace for the change in our planning for search marketing.

Why Has The User Chosen To Use Voice Search Over Text-Based Search?

It is obvious. I am still listing a few points.

Comfort– Digital assistants and mobile devices are easier to use for voice search than keyboard search. It is easier to talk than type and that too when one is designed only for voice and other for limited typing.

Speed– With keyboard search, you type 40 WPM but can speak 150 words in voice search. Much faster. Typing “What are seven wonders of the world?” on phone is a huge pain, whereas saying the same phrase aloud is cool.

Through voice search, you save time, you search on the move, you search much easier, and often you search on your head. Here is internet trending report to make it clearer.

Innovation in user experience through new devices into our everyday life is a big push for voice search. Smart home devices like Alexa and Google Home that wrap up homes completely and control every point of it are a huge hit today. This shows the users’ readiness to welcome “smart home revolution”. Though Google offered voice search assistance for long, the idea of voice search took shape when users started voice commanding their home assistants.

How Are The Two Different?

Voice search is different than text-based search. When we type words for searching, as a shortcut we use a short phrase.

If I need to know the recipe of white sauce, I would prefer to type “white sauce recipe”. But if I use voice search I would say. “Okay Google, How can I make the white sauce at home?”.

Type search is rarely a full sentence. Voice searches are longer and conversational.

According to Google, almost 70% user use natural language while searching with voice.

It is quite natural that these long term and natural language search phrases will impact tomorrow’s SEO, SEM, and content.

How Do You Optimize Content For Voice Search?

We come there. The search talk. Influence of voice search on your content efforts.

The content itself– It is shown that voice search is more likely to contain question phrases. If you use voice search you probably ask a question like “which restaurant serves Italian food near me “. But if you type-search on your phone you might type “Italian restaurant in Delhi”

So, when you plan your content it needs to offer your audience straight answers to their queries. Look at every page of your website and find exactly what question you answer. And then reverse track to figure out if these are the questions you want your customers and audiences to ask. If not, change.

Voice search is here to stay. It will not change. Only we can change. And we can change our content.

Keywords– Before content, come your keywords. They determine the visibility of your content to a huge extent. I talked above, about keeping natural and conversational phrases more in voice search than text-based queries. And whiling researching your keywords look for those conversational suggestions your keywords research tool offers. Most of the keyword tools offer good suggestions, you only need to look for them.

All along I have been a loyal Google keywords research tools fan. I get good ideas about search volume, CPC, competition trend, short and long-tail phrases’ variations, even question phrases.

Selecting short tail keywords for their higher search volume is outdated. People avoid long tail keywords for their low search volume. But as voice search spurts, those neglected long tail uber specific keywords will rule.

The long tails, I insist-When you optimize your content with long tail keywords at critical points Google bots scan them and tries for exact matches with the voice search query. So, more is the match, more chance the content has to rank for that particular voice search.

Most voice searches are question phrases. Figure out your customers’ question regarding your business and build your content around that content. I know, I repeat this, but this is important to remember.

Answer The public is a great tool for getting question phrase ideas on keywords. When you enter any keyword in the search box, it returns plenty of question phrase ideas.

Here I have used the keywords “auto insurance” and the result I got.

Target the word “near me”.

Google says

“near me searches” grew more than 130% in the last couple of years.
22% of all voice searches are to find local information according to internet trends report. One in five voice search is for finding local information.
People extensively use “near me” phrase to find a local business.

By putting “near me” in your content you bring better match chances for the content. Use ‘near me’ tag in the title, meta description and even to interlink the pages. Contact Us page is a solid excuse to use “near me”.

Clearly describe your business and specifically mention how locals around you benefit from your service or product.
Offer specific details about the landmarks around your business. “nearby landmarks”.
Describe the neighborhood around your business location embedding the word “near location”, this will increase visibility in local search.

Use Structure Data

A good part of voice search is local. When users search for local business, they often check contact information, address, operational hours and direction.

Use ‘structure data” to ensure that the search engine show this information while showing your business.

Structure data explain the content to the search engines and tells how it should be ranked and categorized.

People do not see the code that is embedded on the backend. But it helps search engines to organize and classify the content better.

When searching local businesses people ask for their phone number and opening hour in voice search. When you use ‘structure-data’, the search engine easily fishes out the information and answer the visitor promptly.

Aim for Featured Snippets

Most voice searches answered by Google are from featured-snippet. The direct answers that you get in search result page when you type a question.

After introducing featured Snippets, the number of organic clicks dropped for many sites. Visitors no more visit a site for the answer as it comes directly in Google search result.

Now featured snippet is being similarly used for voice search. Google usually reads the featured snippet to answer the query.

To leverage this characteristic, you need to build content with a direct answer to a question. Figure out the important questions your viewers want to know and find out how snippet is delivered for a search question. Maybe we will discuss featured snippet in a future discussion.

Google prefers to show a short and concise answer to voice search. Remember your content should answer visitors’ queries in short. Use table, paragraph or bullet points to shorten.

Use The FAQ Page As A Prime Tool

Once voice search gains speed we will see a surge in search queries with pointed questions. your FAQ page is the perfect weapon to tackle all your business niche queries. So, you can draw your viewer to the site with featured snippets and then answer their remaining queries on the FAQ page.

To proceed ahead you need to know the questions asked by your consumers. Google Suggest, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and different forums are great sources for getting ideas about customers’ mindset.

You will get a multi-angled perspective on their needs and thought processes and thinking. Combine the different perspectives and use the best phrase on your FAQ page. Now, your FAQ page is ready to rank for voice search.

Conclusion

As search integrates more with our lives, it gets easier from the users’ perspective. At least commanding a search.

Mobiles, voice prompt in mobiles, personal assistants are gradual progressions to add more comfort to search. Since comfort and technology are guiding this growth of voice search, safely we can say, it is here to stay. One who has experienced the luxury of getting help from Google assistant will not return to type in a search.

A friendly, parting suggestion. Make your website mobile friendly. Long back Google confirmed that mobile-responsive website is one of the most important factors of ranking. It is needless to say if the site is not mobile friendly, it is not eligible for voice search also. Not being mobile-optimized impacts overall search-related business prospect of a site.

Rather than fighting it is better to embrace voice search and work to better it. Me, you and all other marketers will then move with time and technology.

Have you optimized content for digital assistants? Did you use a different approach to the ones we discussed here or used one of them? Did you improvise on these? Let us talk about your experiences. You are free to share your regular experiences also. For more reach out to me at Soma

A political battle that takes the Global search giant into its twirl.

US Republican Party, in the recent past, accused Google of manipulating their search algo to support Democratic party. As an aftereffect, Google CEO explained their process of search-ranking. Riding on this controversy the search of “Idiot” jumped to 200 million, which is an all-time high. According to Google trends, the search was very high in the month of July and December 2018.

We can now take a search perspective on that jump and dissect some.

All Those Who Were Victims

Searching for image of IDIOT, viewers got the image of President Trump. The situation was first reported by The Guardian in their story “Search ‘IDIOT’ get Trump”. This media report did a cascading effect. Image search of ‘Idiot’ hugely shot up. The start of the whole story is pinned to president’s visit to UK. There, protesters used the soundtrack of ‘American Idiot’ as theme music for the visit. This can be called the tipping point. Online crusaders took the cue from this and started using the word as an insulting response to the ways the president was working. At the same time, the ‘I’ word was linked to an image of Donald Trump. This spread like wildfire when Reddit users upvoted one such image of the president with the word.

Earlier, in 2009 former first lady Michelle Obama had a similar brush with image distortion. In the early phase of her public life, a caricature was ranked first for image search of ‘Michelle Obama’.

Indian politician Sonia Gandhi is also experiencing a similar situation. People get her Wiki page when one searches for ‘Bar Girl in India.’

How Did This Happen? Is it Google bombing?

When a group of people link to a particular search and deliberately manipulate SERP to change natural search positions, this is called Google bombing. This involves a good number of links. In the process, a group of people bent on creating artificial search results, use similar anchor texts (the phrase one uses to link to another page, of a different color than the original text color of the page) and link to a particular site. Here IDIOT can be the anchor text to link back to a presidential website. But this has clearly not happened. This is not Google bombing.

For the other case, of ‘Bar girl in India’ no links were directed to the Wiki page of Sonia Gandhi.

Clearly, this is also not a Google bombing. Then what?

Is it Google Bias?

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked to explain why Google image search for “idiot” turned up pictures of Donald Trump — and whether that was a case of intentional bias.

Rejecting the allegation Sundar Pichai explained how search works, “we take the keyword and match it against relevant pages in our database and rank them based on over 200 signals. Things like relevance, freshness, popularity, how other people are using it. And based on that, at any given time, we try to rank and find the best search results for that query.” It is hard to manipulate any particular result on a bias.

Relevancy and authority of a website, social signals are few important factors Google uses to rank an identity against a search.

The Power of Social

In Trump’s case, Reddit influenced the SERP most. Reddit is an extremely powerful social site with 25 million daily traffic. Members up-vote a content which gets a better chance of being seen. Google indexes a page within 1 hour of publishing on Reddit. Being such a high authority site, Reddit has the power to influence Google search algo to rank on the first page according to relevance and freshness. When users on Reddit upvoted the post with a picture of Trump linking ‘Idiot’ Google search algorithm started prioritizing the image with the keyword.

The Strength of Media in Google

Other than Reddit-community upvote-push, another factor that worked for the search to click is media story headlines linking the name with the keyword. Once the media published this story, regular people also started sharing it and making their own stories on it. As more and more media and more and more viewers started putting the two, the name of the president and the derogatory word together, they elevated the image rank, establishing the tentative search as confirmed. And it happened around the world. It is also important here to mention that a media link is very strong, having a media title tag with these two words together makes for a sure-fire search rank achiever.

So, how do we free the president?

Google Images tend to grab images from news stories, especially from the higher authority news sites. As long as IDIOT and President’s name come together in headlines and visitors click the link to open any webpage, it will push the image of Trump at the top against the search of IDIOT. (I have not added fuel to it, carefully I tried to avoid it as much possible).

The mystery of the ‘Bar Girl”

In SEO, ‘Title tag’ and ‘CTR’ have a real impact on search result and ranking. Title tag is the writing you see when you hover your mouse over the URL portion of the site and CTR is the acronym for Click Through Rate.

When we type “bar girl in India”, we are getting multiple Quora pages on SERP using both Sonia Gandhi’s name and the word in the title of the page. Quora, like Reddit, is a very potent social media Q&A platform. Few examples of those titles are –

Was Sonia Gandhi a bar dancer before marrying Rajiv?
Was Sonia Gandhi really a waitress in a bar?
Was Sonia Gandhi a bar dancer?

So here we can see ‘bar girl or dancer’ used with ‘Sonia Gandhi’ in the page title. Page title is the tag which search engine bots try to relate with the typed word in the search. When someone is searching the two terms together the engine bots bring up these question pages. Search engines automatically take into account both the page title and content as a reference before putting them on the Search Engine Ranking Pages.

Most importantly titles are visible to the audience so, when we click on any link from search result page google considers it relevant. The more frequently the page link is clicked CTR will be high for that page against this particular search term.

Here the titles are extensively used to raise the search rank accompanied by click through rate.

As political battles heat up around the world expect more such search manipulations. You may find your favorite politician associated with animals, cuss words, curses and poorer things. And it can come in any way.

But a serious word of caution. Manipulating search is a group activity. You, your reputation, or reputation of anybody can be damaged with targeted Google bombing or any other manipulations we discussed here. There are more ways. Let them remain hidden and take care. It is important to be careful in the cyber world.

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Manipulation of Google Search and Why You Should Be Worried