With traditional text search, the search engines have done a great job of training us to destroy the human language. For example, let’s say I’m a 30 year-old man, I’m into bodybuilding and I’m curious about eating peanut butter as part of my training.
Common sense says I would search for something like “what’s the best peanut butter for a 30 year old male bodybuilder”. But if I search for that, I’m going to get scattered results that are of no help to me.
That’s because both searchers and marketers have been taught to avoid common sense language. Instead, we’ve been taught to search for (or try to rank for) text-based keywords that are truncated, incomplete phrases. For example, “peanut butter bodybuilder” would be the suggested text-based keyword phrase for our bodybuilding friend.
But with voice search, people use natural, common sense language – not text-based keywords. No one says “Okay Google, peanut butter bodybuilder”. Instead they say “Okay Google, what’s the best peanut butter for a 30 year old male bodybuilder.”.
And therein lies the golden opportunity of voice search. No one (until very recently) has made any attempts to rank their websites for the common sense language used by voice search. As a result, the top spots for voice search in virtually all markets are wide-open. And whoever gets there first, owns the traffic.