Voice search is becoming one of the new SEO buzz terms digital marketers are talking about. It’s reported that there are 118 million smart speakers now operating in US homes, which is quite remarkable as it is believed that today, two in five adults now uses voice search at least once per day, and it is estimated by 2020 at least half of all searches will be focused on the microphone.
SEMRush conducted an in-depth analysis of over 50,000 queries to see what the important findings and conclusions were from the study. 70% of all answers returned from voice searches occupied a SERP feature (with 60% of those returning a Featured Snippet result).
Here are the other key findings of voice search in 2019:
Backlinks
• Almost 50% of voice search answers had backlinks with anchor text that appeared in the question. Linking matters!
• Page Score, along with Trust Score were slightly higher for answers URLS.
Page Speed
• Page speed is critical for all devices as the answers chosen by Google loaded faster than the average page speed for all other results in the SERP.
• Some voice search results were over ten times faster compared to the average of non-answers.
Text complexity & readability
• According to the survey, 80% of American people can understand/read the answers generated from voice queries.
• The content returned for voice queries on Flesch Kincaid Grade scored around 8.0 which means it was easy to read.
Conclusion
It is somewhat clear the indications Google is looking for in terms of returns from voice search queries like page speed, ranking in the top three results, and featured snipper position. The study did not include any conclusions about the schema, HTTPS, and URL depth as these should already be implemented. As voice search continues to increase, marketers will start to heavily focus in voice search marketing strategy to stay ahead of the game.
If you are interested in gathering more information related to voice search study, check out the full study here.