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Innovations keep pouring in, improving the quality of life, opening up new opportunities, and urging businesses to catch up. The next big innovation that is poised to change the Internet experience is voice search.

This single functionality addition to your website can dramatically increase your search ranking. If the market analysts are to be believed, by the end of 2020, voice search will account for 50% of all searches. With the incorporation of natural language processing (NLP), this is going to be a game-changer for digital marketing.

What is voice search?

It’s a technology that understands a voice query and serves it with the right answer. The user is saved from typing the query – genuinely required in some situations or conditions besides adding to comfort and ease of using the Internet.
We have already seen the technology making inroads into the home appliances segment by the name of “voice assistant” available in various brands that include Siri, Alexa user, Google Assistant, and Cortana, among the leaders. While these are the independent products with links to their parent databases through the Internet, the same concept is being replicated in websites to make them more flexible and inclusive.

How does it function?

Voice search works differently from the ways the conventional web search works. Let’s throw some light on this.

• Unlike the web searching process, a voice search doesn’t require a screen to help users scroll, select and type. It is conversational – expects a clear question and provides a straight answer.

• Voice search expects longer sentences in order to understand the query clearly. In web searching, we use short and basic lines of keywords and depends upon the search engine to provide all related results.

• Voice searches offer only one answer and not a list of probable combinations to choose from, like the way web searches do.

• A voice search uses the featured snippet for the closest answer, instead of keywords matching as is the case in web searching.

Featured Snippets will be more sought-after than mere ranking.

Featured snippets are prize recognitions from Google and therefore precious in digital marketing. This helps you gain more attention than the competitors even if your organic ranking is lower than them.

Digital Marketing strategy will be changed

The competition will go a notch higher. Featured snippets are difficult to obtain. It requires high-quality content to impress Google for selection, and as a reward, it occupies the position zero in the search results.

The traditional SEO marketing is rather complacent with high ranking or a place in the top ten.

The addition of voice search will invite more voice queries. This will increase the demand for the featured snippets, as they will be the only choice for the voice answers. The competition for the position zero spots will be fierce.

Benefits of featuring voice search in your web site

• Increase in brand awareness – Google responds to the voice search with a shout-out of the source of the information, such as “According to ________”.

• Increase in traffic to the website – Google also gives the written dictations of the voice search results. This increases the organic traffic as the users navigate to the site for more details.

Voice search is slowly picking up to become a regular feature of website optimization. The early bird companies that adopt this technology are expected to leapfrog the competition with a huge gain in their brand popularity.