Keywords and keyphrases are the backbone of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Adding such words to one’s copy, URL, and throughout one’s website allows for search engines to list your site or blog in prominent and relevant page ranks. That’s the way things have worked for a long time, but there’s a new change on the horizon, voice.
With voice queries a person asks the computer to find content. Like the popular Siri, this action doesn’t use text directly. This is now a threat to the standard use of SEO that does. Voice technology has been improving over the past ten years and it keeps getting better. The problems are the same with it regarding tone, clarity of the person’s voice, accents, and incomprehensible elocution. In other words, if you don’t speak clear standard of your given language your results will be confounding. In the U.S. You have dozens of regional languages and accents. Often computer voice technology can’t decipher and process them because the standard American English must be spoken and spoken clearly.
The same goes for Spanish in the U.S.. Regional and class differences calls for the voice recognition software to try to decipher what is said and complete an action.
To battle this, the software companies and search engines are working feverishly to develop software that can interpret and deliver. It’s about semantics too. The software keeps getting better and companies like Google know it and are pulling out all stops to make sure they have the top of the line voice recognition software.
The future is rapidly turning to voice recognition and SEO experts are fast developing Voice SEO. Those that aren’t on the cutting edge of this advancement are going to be left behind and lose a great amount of position and revenue. With statistics showing that 40% and higher are using voice to search for things on the web, the old saying that the “writing is on the wall” is an understatement. Google and the other SE’s are in a raging battle to optimize their search engine results to get rid of all the spammy results from years of people cramming their websites with keywords and keyphrases. The public doesn’t get relevant results, spend far too much time searching, and often fall prey to unethical marketers and webmasters who exploit the search engines. As the new software algorithms from companies like Google, the old days of SEO are quickly becoming obsolete, opening the way for new search options like voice SEO.
As this new approach to SEO grows, you can bet that there will be those who try to exploit it from the start. There are unscrupulous marketers out there right now devising ways to manipulate voice SEO but they might find it isn’t as easy as they think. As the top companies work fast to get this type of technology as standard, there will be safeguards involved that will thwart the exploitation of the technology and the public.
Overall, don’t underestimate the growing power of voice SEO, it’s the future right now.
