Voice Search FAQs

Considering that 27% of the world population and 58% of the population of United States of America are using voice search to find their answers, apparently 75% of questions asked are about local businesses, optimizing your website content to suit voice search answers (with local-flavored content wrapped with relevant schemas) is imperative to cover all possible touchpoints with your potential customers. In fact, 2 out of 3 voice search questions are about shopping and if you’re a location-based business, being the pick of voice search answers is crucial.

To appear in voice search results, you should optimize your website for Featured Snippets. With schemas, search engines understand your content better and thus displays your business in position zero or as a rich snippet or featured snippet. This makes schemas a very important strategy for performing well in voice searches. To understand which schema types are most effective for voice search, lets first look at commonly asked voice search question types that are relevant for local businesses:

• 'Ask for' directions
• 'Near me' searches
• Research product or service

Trends indicate that voice search users are increasingly searching for local results. Keeping the above questions in mind, it’s essential that your business implements the following schemas:

• Speakable Schema: Currently intended for use in news articles, the Speakable schema indicates that a particular section of the web page is “Speakable”. This schema is utilized by voice assistants to “speak” the text using text-to-speech conversion.
• Local Business and its specific types: This is perhaps the most critical schema to indicate that the content is about a local business and relevant for ‘near me’ searches. Local Business schema has many specific types (such as AutomotiveBusiness, FinancialService, MedicalBusiness, Store, ProfessionalService) and you need to identify the type that suits your business the most. Include useful properties such as openingHours.
• Product Schema: Useful to indicate that the content is about any product or service that you offer. Includes useful properties such as aggregateRating, offers, sku, reviews
• FAQ Schema: FAQ schema is useful in implementing FAQ markup. FAQ markups are especially useful for appearing as FAQ rich snippets - that occupy a lot of real estate on the search page, and lead to high CTR. Especially useful in voice searches.
• How to Schema: Similar to FAQ schema, the ‘How-To’ schema mark-up helps you appear for “How to..” text & voice searches.

Here are some of the most recognized and used voice search apps across the globe:

• Google Assistant
• Siri
• Cortana
• Amazon Alexa
• Bixby
• AIVC (Alice)
• Hound
• Lyra Personal Assistant
• Extreme Personal Voice Assistant
• DataBot
• Butleroy
• 24me

For most sites, you will have to sign up and download the voice search presentations and studies.

• eMarketer - https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-voice-assistant-users-2019#page-report
• ai - https://voicebot.ai/voice-assistant-seo-report-confirmation/
• Think with Google - https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/data/google-assistant-user-statistics/
• Statista - https://www.statista.com/search/?q=voice+search&qKat=newSearchFilter&sortMethod=idrelevance&isRegionPref=356&sortMethodMobile=idrelevance&statistics-group=1&statistics=1&forecasts=1&infos=1&topics=1&studies-reports=1&dossiers=1&groupA=1&xmo=1&surveys=1&toplists=1&groupB=1&branchreports=1&countryreports=1&groupC=1&expert-tools=1&cmo=1&mmo=1&co=1&tmo=1&amo=1&dmo=1&accuracy=and&isoregion=0&isocountrySearch=&category=0&interval=0&archive=1
• Strategy Analytics - https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/ux-innovation/consumer-sentiment-analytics/reports/report-detail/smart-speaker-sentiment-2018?Related
• SEMRush - https://www.semrush.com/blog/voice-search-study/
• National Public Media - https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/insights/reports/smart-audio-report/

There is plenty of research that proves that there is a paradigm shift in the way search is carried out, as a good portion of the population are already relying on voice assistants to find their answers. You can refer to some of the top and reliable studies on voice search from:

• eMarketer - https://www.emarketer.com/content/us-voice-assistant-users-2019#page-report
• ai - https://voicebot.ai/voice-assistant-seo-report-confirmation/
• Think with Google - https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/consumer-insights/voice-assistance-consumer-experience/
• Statista - https://www.statista.com/search/?q=voice+search&qKat=newSearchFilter&sortMethod=idrelevance&isRegionPref=356&sortMethodMobile=idrelevance&statistics-group=1&statistics=1&forecasts=1&infos=1&topics=1&studies-reports=1&dossiers=1&groupA=1&xmo=1&surveys=1&toplists=1&groupB=1&branchreports=1&countryreports=1&groupC=1&expert-tools=1&cmo=1&mmo=1&co=1&tmo=1&amo=1&dmo=1&accuracy=and&isoregion=0&isocountrySearch=&category=0&interval=0&archive=1
• Strategy Analytics - https://www.strategyanalytics.com/access-services/ux-innovation/consumer-sentiment-analytics/reports/report-detail/smart-speaker-sentiment-2018?Related
• SEMRush - https://www.semrush.com/blog/voice-search-study/
• National Public Media - https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/insights/reports/smart-audio-report/

While you can’t really decide whether the content will be picked as a voice search answer or not, you can at least improve the chances by publishing content that is optimized for featured snippets that voice search algorithms love. Here is a sample schema deployed that has helped one of our clients’ content show up as featured snippet on the website:

To carry out a voice search on Google Chrome, open a new tab (CTRL + T) and click on the microphone by the search bar and ask a question.

While Google Now which is the app and Google Assistant share similar functionalities, Google Assistant has a deeper artificial intelligence than Google Now and serves answers in a more convenient, accessible and conversational format. However, it seems like a merge between Google Now and Google Assistant seems to be on the cards, according to experts.

Voice assistants rely on speech recognition technology combined with complex natural language processing systems to deliver an answer to a voice search. Voice search has adopted Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) as the core technology and Recurrent Neural Networks to deliver an answer even in noisy environments. The DNNs employs the Connectionist Temporal Classification and Sequence Discriminative Training Techniques to understand the nuances of a language and speech, and delivers a result as accurately as possible. In simpler terms, the voice assistant uses these complex technologies, understands the intent and delivers a result that is a most apt using entity recognition. Most often, content that is displayed as a featured snippet, in the Knowledge Panel, Google My Business, People Also Ask section, as a rich snippet, etc., are fetched as the answer to voice searches.