A recent study about the effectiveness of voice assist application showed that Google Assistant has scored about 93% whereas Siri and Alexa trained with 83% and 80% respectively in terms of accuracy. During olden times, experts referred searches as the universal interface, which is the role taken over gradually by the modern-day voice assistants.

Another recent study shows the fact that the count of users relying on voice assistants now is nearly 112 million, whereas it was about 102 million back in 2018. This is characterized as the "critical mass," which we put in the article title, even though it may be a minority (40%) by counting the whole internet population. The projection shows that by the year 2021, about 123 million users may be taking the support of voice assistants each month.

Among the studies held, Google Assistant remained on top of Siri and Alexa, all of which are constantly improving. The study also showed that the biggest gap of scores between these three had been in commerce-related search queries, in which Google Assistant scored about 92% accuracy whereas the respective scores for Alexa and Siri were 71% and 68%. Studies also showed a surprisingly high increase in the accuracy of all these voice assistant applications.

So, Google Assistant is ultimately in the strongest position and can be expected to become the most dominant voice assistant overtime. This will have a huge impact in terms of the e-commerce and advertising platforms online, and the marketers need to consider optimizing for Google Assistant as a priority.

Doing SEO for Voice Assistants to rank higher

As we have seen through the studies conducted, digital assistants are now changing the ways of online search and redefining the concept of SEO and SERP listings. Unlike conventional text-based searches, digital assistants have their own definite way of doing it. As the popularity of digital assistants are increasing day by day, and more people are relying on this more comfortable and quicker option, you can soon see its impact on the search algorithms of the search engines. So, here are we are going to look into how you can rank better or digital assistants.

The concept of voice-assisted search

In order to understand voice search with digital assistants, you need to know a bit of its history. As discussed above, digital assistants have undergone very dramatic changes over the past few years compared to any other modes of search people use. With the introduction of Google Assistant, we can see a new era of technology is creeping into your daily lives, especially in terms of search.

Digital assistant's precursor was voice-activated assistants like Cortana and Siri, which are primarily some software applications. These helped people to do the basic tasks and perform various searches through voice commands. The businesses who wanted to get better positioning for voice searches through SEO services should change the keyword strategies to fine-tune it more with the spoken language. Google first took voice controls to create the Google Now application, which was the first form of the digital assistant.

Speech recognition technology advanced at a faster pace, and the early versions of digital assistants were released like Amazon Echo. The functionality of such voice assistants had a lot of similarities with the Google Assistant and Google Home. All of there were primarily focused on voice interactions for podcasting, plays music, audiobooks, preparation of to-do lists, setting alarms, and providing updates on traffic or weather, etc.

On the release of Google Home and Google Assistant, these used a find combination of the major elements of both voice search and Echo. Unlike the functionality of Google Now, the assistant was not only for voice command but to initiate a conversation by setting forth a 2-way conversation model with users.

Sometimes, Google Assistant is also considered as an upgrade of Amazon Echo but with more features and functionality. But in fact, these have many differences. You can see that Google Assistant is now built on Chrome, and search is run at the very core. Assistant is not just meant for search, but to bring forth a complete picture of the searches and do some online interactions.

Google Assistant changing search engine result pages

The SERPs for digital assistant searches cold be different from what you may actually see for the browser-based searches. Assistants will work on streamlining the tasks and simplify them as much as possible against the searches. As digital assistants further evolve, it may be possible that it can expand the results to two of three top options, and as of now, it provides the best match only. However, it may be unlikely that 10 or 20 results could be used as it may be too much info to comprehend in this mode of search. So, you have to really rethink over what a SERP should look like when the search assistants take over the search spectrum and how to rank on top for it.

So, in order to rank best on any Google Assistant search, one should first understand exactly how the users may interact with the software. Most of the skills in terms of ranking for voice search will be applied to the strategy of SEO for Google Assistant. As like conventional SEO, the major element for this could be the use of phrases and keywords. We have already learned it with Siri and Cortana that the users may tend to word the search queries differently each time in spoken language when compared to written queries.

The major example of this type of very searches is the use of complete sentences. A user looking for an SEO Services in Houston may type, “best SEO services at Houston." But when it comes to doing a voice search, users may raise a question as "which best SEO service to be found in Houston?” or “find me a good SEO service in Houston” etc.

So, ranking for voice search needs thorough thinking and proper strategizing as to how people may phrase the spoken language question and use the long-tail keywords for searching. Also, as we have seen above, Google Assistant is more focused on initiating online conversation. So, this also needed to be taken care of in order to get comprehensive voice search result benefits for your business.

Author's Bio: 

Lucy Jones is a Business Tech Analyst. He is very responsible towards his job. He loves to share his knowledge and experience with his friends and colleagues.