Have you started considering voice search in your SEO Strategy?.
Personal assistants (PAs) aren’t just digital assistants that can be used to perform routine tasks. They’re also the future of SEO.
Consider two of the most popular PAs: Siri and Google Assistant. People often use those assistants to retrieve information.
Results are tailored to users:
Another reason that digital personal assistants represent the future of SEO is that search results are tailored to the needs of their users. That’s for two reasons.
First, as we’ve seen, people often use PAs on a smartphone. That means results can be (and often will be) location-specific.
Second, PAs are equipped with a bit of artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure that responses are in line with the expectations of their users. You can expect to see the quality of AI in digital personal assistants improve in the coming years.
Fewer results on a PA search
How many times have you Googled a phrase only to find out that there are something like 38 million results? Even people who have a lot of free time on their hands will find it difficult to sort through all of that information.
By contrast, PAs typically return one to four results. That makes it easier for users to find the answers they’re looking for without scrolling through page after page after page in the search results.
Example:
Search or Asked to my phone - Where to go skiing?
I get one result, as well as options to click “Search results,” “Aspen Colorado skiing” or “Send feedback.”
As you can imagine, US News & World Report is going to get a ton of traffic from that listing.
If you click the “search results” button, you get the normal Google search results page.
If you click “Aspen Colorado skiing,” you get local results:
This is why PASO is so important — with fewer results being presented to the searcher, the returns will be massive for those who are able to secure one of these limited spots.
Personal assistant results likely have high click-through rates
Here, we see an example of a personal assistant result for my company’s website, Ignite Visibility. The query here is, “How do I translate a YouTube video into a new language?” Just as in the example above, only one result is shown.
Though there isn’t data on this currently, I suspect that in most cases, more users will click on the single search result provided by their digital personal assistant than on the other options at the bottom, especially as Google becomes better and better at honing their search results to provide the best answer to a user’s query.
