Google’s voice search and a short history
Google Voice Search is a feature that allows users to search the network for information by giving voice commands rather than typing from the keyboard. It’s used from both desktop and mobile devices. The user wakes up the system by calling the welcome phrase “OK, Google” through the phone, headset, or by clicking the microphone icon in the search box:
Like almost all popular search engine services, such as Gmail, voice search was born in the laboratory, where Google engineers are testing new technologies and ideas. When it was first introduced to the public in 2010, voice search worked like this: first, it asked the user to call a special phone number and record the phrase “Name the keywords”. Then, when you access the voice search, the user would play the phrase, say the keywords you wanted to find, Google would open a page or suggest a link to the search results.
It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it paved the way for a serious speech recognition technology that Google managed to develop quite soon. In the years following the launch, Google integrated voice search into many products – maps, virtual assistants, and even the core of search technology. Today, voice search is fully compatible with dozens of products and applications. It has become an integral part of Google’s user experience and has even influenced how algorithms to process search queries.
How Google learns to recognize our voices and habits: personalized marketing and natural language
The most important change in search engines in recent years is a very personalized release. Google has been a pioneer in combining several services into a single user profile to produce search results. This gave impetus to the flourishing of marketing strategies based on human preferences. Google knows more and more about us, and as a result, we have more personalized marketing offers. They are based not only on our browsing history and shopping habits but also on our speech.
Google and similar voice algorithms learn how to recognize voice based on natural language processing. Not only does the search engine take into account the unique characteristics of your voice, but also your behavior, interests and other personal information.
Google and Siri can learn how to build phrases. There are no two people with a completely identical way of speaking, there will always be some difference in accents, the pronunciation of individual words. Even simple queries are very different from user to user. At the same time, Google is constantly studying you as a consumer, analyzing your search habits, shopping preferences, and other online behavior. This is what allows Google to provide personalized, relevant search results. For those who are advertised in AdWords, this is a big plus, because Google gives users the most relevant ads.
How to optimize the site for voice queries
So how to make the site more friendly to those users who are looking for a voice? The good news is that if you use modern SEO-techniques, you will have to rebuild only a little. But if you don’t use them, you will have a lot of work ahead of you. Mageworx company can help you with that. User intentions and voice search. If you have ever looked for a voice from a mobile phone, it was probably a specific request – address, hours of operation, the price for a particular product or service. Therefore, it is important that you consider these intentions when structuring your site and content. It is best to prepare answers to users’ questions in advance.
How to answer users’ questions? It’s simple, but keep in mind – the most important information about the business: address, phone, hours of operation – should be at the top of your site. Google is a smart system, but if you make it easy for him to work, the site will go up in search. This information does not need to be placed on the image, such as a banner – make it available in HMTL. The more difficult it is for a search engine to read information from your site – the lower the position in the issue.
Think about your most important products and services. Buyers don’t know what you’re doing. They may not even guess that they need your service. What do you have customers most often ask? What information do they lack to make a decision? What is your UTP, is it clear at a glance? Many questions need to be anticipated and answered in advance.
Use the metadata. Schema is a markup language that allows webmasters and site owners to give search engines additional information about the content of the site. Metadata is data about data. With Schema you can describe the data on the website in the most complete way. Metadata is a powerful SEO tool, but not everyone uses it 100%.
Target at long search queries. They are often very specific and make up about 70% of the total search. In many topics, long searches are cheaper than short ones.
