Voice Search: Google’s Guidelines for Quality Answers

Voice search keeps growing in popularity. It’s fast, more accurate every day, and people love it. Just look at how many voice assistants there are now: Siri, Google Home, Alexa, and more. Since everything suggests the trend will keep growing (see these voice search statistics from 2018), it makes sense to prepare our content for this new breed of searcher (and for Google). To help, the Mountain View company recently published its guidelines for voice search.

Google has offered search engine optimization guidance for years, but until now it hadn’t shared any advice on voice search. That has changed. The new document explains what kind of content Google considers high quality for spoken answers.

Voice Search: 4 Pillars

To judge the quality of a voice answer, Google relies on four pillars: user satisfaction, length, formulation, and elocution. Let’s take a closer look.

User Satisfaction

People who use voice search usually have a very specific goal in mind. It may sound obvious, but Google stresses the importance of meeting the user’s need, in other words, answering the question. Put simply, the content has to be relevant.

Length

Someone browsing the web the usual way can skim a dense page in seconds to find the paragraph or sentence they need. That’s not the case with voice search. If the answer doesn’t get to the point quickly, the listener will likely lose patience. So keep your content concise and to the point. Google Assistant often reads its spoken answers from Google’s featured snippets, which reward short, direct answers.

Formulation

Reading a poorly written, badly structured text full of errors is unpleasant. Listening to one is even worse: no punctuation, ideas going in every direction, no beginning or end. That’s why the way content is phrased is especially important for voice search. Our SEO content writing tips apply here too.

Elocution

Along the same lines, a sentence has to be easy on the ear. For example, avoid strings of words that sound alike, and watch out for sentences that are too complex.

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