Voice search: Why you shouldn’t just optimise for Google
I’ve previously written on this blog about why that’s highly unlikely to happen, but it’s still true that there have been a number of important developments in the realm of voice search over the past 12 months, from the advent of speakable schema to the growing install base of smart speakers and other voice assistant-powered smart devices, such as smart fridges and smart microwaves.
How can marketers who want to start preparing for a world where voice is more widespread go about it? To answer this question, Econsultancy has released a new briefing, ‘Getting to Grips with Voice Search’, aimed at bringing marketers up to speed with voice search and voice technology, helping them to understand its present and its future, and advising them on how best to optimise for voice.
One important thing to understand about voice search in 2019 is that it isn’t just a single-search-engine game. Many voice search guides, like many SEO guides, make the assumption that Google is the search engine being optimised for.
But, as I point out in the report, “marketers are just as likely to be catering to a voice assistant that draws its results from Bing. Of the four predominant voice assistants, three – Siri, Alexa and Cortana – use Bing for web search, while only Google’s proprietary Assistant uses Google.”
On top of this, search engines aren’t the only things that power voice search results, as local results are likely to be drawn from a map application like Apple Maps or Bing Maps. And although Google is doing its best to dominate voice search as it has done with keyboard-input search, this state of affairs isn’t likely to change in a hurry.
Here’s why marketers optimising for voice search should bear multiple voice assistants in mind, and how to go about it.
Why Google (and its Assistant) isn’t the only player in voice search
What a lot of people forget about voice search – or fail to completely take into account – is that most of the time, voice search queries aren’t posed directly to a search engine. While it’s possible to open up Google or Bing on a smartphone (or even a desktop) and carry out a voice search that way, for the vast majority of users, it’s more convenient to simply say, “Hey Google/Siri/Cortana…” and pose their query to a voice assistant.
And of course, for anyone who owns a smart speaker like Amazon Echo or Google Home, all tasks (including search) need to be accomplished through a voice assistant.
Thus, voice assistants are the go-between for the vast majority of voice searches, meaning that results will be returned from whatever search engine is baked in to that assistant.
Microsoft is well aware of this, and has moved to capture a significant percentage of the voice search market by striking deals with Amazon and Apple to make Bing the default search engine for Alexa and Siri, while also pushing its own assistant, Cortana.
This has put Bing’s share of the voice assistant market on a par with Google’s, even as Google announced in early January 2019 that its own Assistant would be on one billion devices by the end of the month. On the heels of the news – and a similar announcement from Amazon that Alexa was now present on more than 100 million devices – Voicebot.ai produced a graph showing the share of the voice market held by each assistant:
As you can see, when added together, there are as many devices whose assistants use Bing as their default search engine as there are devices that use Google.
Even when we look solely at smartphones – where Google should have a huge advantage thanks to the sheer number of Android devices that are available – the split is remarkably even. According to a 2018 survey of more than 2,000 mobile phone users carried out by HigherVisibility, less than half – 48% – of smartphone users have Google’s Assistant on their phone, while a comparable percentage – 42% – have Apple’s Siri. A surprisingly high percentage – 17% – have Amazon’s Alexa.
Only 6% reported having Microsoft’s Cortana, which is unsurprising given that Microsoft has discontinued its line of Windows smartphones, but altogether this means Bing-using assistants have a presence on 65% of smartphones. (It’s safe to assume that some of the respondents to this study had multiple assistants on their phones).
So, as we’ve seen, marketers optimising for voice in 2019 shouldn’t neglect Bing and the voice assistants that use it. But how does optimising for Bing (and associated voice assistants) differ from optimising for Google?
Here are five tips to bear in mind.
Tip #1. Use schema.org markup
Using schema.org markup is solid advice for any marketer wishing to optimise for voice search in general, but particularly because it’s understood by all search engines – not just Google.
Schema.org was created jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex as a universal vocabulary to help search engines interpret webpages. As I write in Econsultancy’s ‘Getting to Grips with Voice Search’ report, “This understanding translates into being able to serve the perfect content to satisfy a searcher’s query, particularly important for the single-result environment of voice search. [M]arketers who are aiming to optimise for voice cannot afford to overlook schema.org markup, as the more confident that search engines and voice assistants can be about the exact content of a webpage, the more likely they will serve it as a voice result.”
If you want to make sure that your schema.org markup is Bing-friendly, you can use Bing’s markup validator to check your code.
Tip #2. Maintain an up-to-date Bing Places for Business profile
Optimising for local search is an important consideration for voice, as a significant percentage of voice searches are local: a 2018 study by BrightLocal found that 46% of voice search users searched for a local business on a daily basis.
Smartphone users can use voice while on the go as a quick and easy way to carry out a “near me” search, and the increasing availability of voice assistants in cars could lead to an increase in local voice searches carried out on the road.
For this reason, marketers should make sure that their local SEO efforts include Bing as well as Google. Setting up a Bing Places for Business listing is free, and requires little extra effort to maintain alongside a Google My Business profile. It will also give your business a presence on Bing Maps, which is the default for local searches carried out through Amazon’s Alexa.
Tip #3. Claim and optimise your Apple Maps listing
For similar reasons, claiming and optimising your business listing on Apple Maps is worthwhile to ensure that you show up in local searches made through Siri, whose results are drawn from Apple Maps by default. As we saw in the earlier graph by Voicebot, this accounts for more than 500 million devices.
Business owners can add, claim or update their business information on Apple Maps by visiting Maps Connect – an Apple ID is required to sign in to the service.
Tip #4. Use Bing’s SEO tools
Just as Google has Webmaster Guidelines and Tools, so does Bing. Bing’s Webmaster Guidelines will help you get to grips how Bing approaches search, and check for individual points of difference in treating search results.
Signing up to Bing Webmaster Tools will also give you access to SEO Reports and the SEO Analyzer tool – both useful for checking your website’s “Bing-friendliness”. Users of Bing Webmaster Tools can also submit their website to Bing to be crawled, which is useful for ensuring all pages are indexed on Bing in a timely manner.
Tip #5. Test with multiple voice assistants
One last piece of common-sense advice: when optimising for voice search, don’t just test the outcome with one voice device or assistant. Make a point of testing on different devices – both smart speakers and smartphones – with different voice assistants to understand how users of those devices find and interact with your business via voice.
Learn more
Subscribers can download Econsultancy’s Getting to Grips with Voice Search briefing for more analysis of voice search trends and practical tips for optimisation.
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Source: Customer Experience