Are Saber Tooth Cats Still Alive? ... When Kids Discover Voice Search

Walking into our living room the other night, I got the shock of my life –

I could hear my 6-year old…

“How much time to Neptune and back?”

Who is he talking to?

And then, a response,” According to…It took Voyager-2 twelve years to reach Neptune”

He had discovered Google voice search on the phone!

An earlier prediction that 50% of all searches by 2020 would be voice has fallen flat. However, voice search is growing fast and has interesting potentials for the SEO landscape.

The biggest disruption being that with voice search, it’s the number 1 rank or none.

The winner takes all the traffic.

Unlike text search where a high ranking is still good enough.

At the moment, both text search and voice search results are pulled up from the same set of pages.

This could change in the future.

Traditionally, SEO has optimized text search. But voice search is different:

• The text searcher is fine with researching within the search results presented. But the voice searcher is looking for a quick answer to a specific query.

• Voice search uses a conversational style and has more words in a typical query. ‘Headache relief’ in a text search would become, ‘how can I get relief from headache’ for a voice search.

• 1 in 5 of all voice searches use a set of just 25 keywords. The top 3 are, ‘how’, ‘what’, “best’.

• Voice search tends to be more local. As much as 3X of mobile voice search is local versus text search.

Voice search is still in its infancy. It’s exciting to see how it unfolds. And who drives the future…

“Are Saber tooth cats still alive?”