The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets

The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets – Moz

Moz logo

Menu open

Menu close

Products

Moz Pro

Moz Pro Home

Moz Local

Moz Local Home

STAT

Mozscape API

Free SEO Tools

Competitive Research

Link Explorer

Keyword Explorer

Domain Analysis

MozBar

More Free SEO Tools

Learn SEO

Beginner’s Guide to SEO

SEO Learning Center

Moz Academy

SEO Q&A

Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides

Blog

Why Moz

Agency Solutions

Enterprise Solutions

Small Business Solutions

Case Studies

The Moz Story

New Releases

Log out

Products

Moz Pro

Your All-In-One Suite of SEO Tools

The essential SEO toolset: keyword research, link building, site audits, page optimization, rank tracking, reporting, and more.

Learn more

Try Moz Pro free

Moz Local

Complete Local SEO Management

Raise your local SEO visibility with easy directory distribution, review management, listing updates, and more.

Learn more

Check my presence

STAT

Enterprise Rank Tracking

SERP tracking and analytics for SEO experts, STAT helps you stay competitive and agile with fresh insights.

Learn more

Book a demo

Mozscape API

The Power of Moz Data via API

Power your SEO with the proven, most accurate link metrics in the industry, powered by our index of trillions of links.

Learn more

Get connected

Compare SEO Products

Free SEO Tools

Competitive Research

Competitive Intelligence to Fuel Your SEO Strategy

Gain intel on your top SERP competitors, keyword gaps, and content opportunities.

Find competitors

Link Explorer

Powerful Backlink Data for SEO

Explore our index of over 40 trillion links to find backlinks, anchor text, Domain Authority, spam score, and more.

Get link data

Keyword Explorer

The One Keyword Research Tool for SEO Success

Discover the best traffic-driving keywords for your site from our index of over 500 million real keywords.

Search keywords

Domain Analysis

Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool

Get top competitive SEO metrics like Domain Authority, top pages, ranking keywords, and more.

Analyze domain

MozBar

Free, Instant SEO Metrics As You Surf

Using Google Chrome, see top SEO metrics instantly for any website or search result as you browse the web.

Try MozBar

More Free SEO Tools

Learn SEO

Beginner’s Guide to SEO
The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.
Read the Beginner’s Guide

How-To Guides
Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.
See All SEO Guides

SEO Learning Center
Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.
Visit the Learning Center

Moz Academy
Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.
Explore the Catalog

On-Demand Webinars
Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.
View All Webinars

SEO Q&A
Insights & discussions from an SEO community of 500,000+.
Find SEO Answers

August 7-9, 2023
Lock in Super Early Bird savings for MozCon

Snag tickets

Blog

Why Moz

Small Business Solutions
Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.
Grow Your Business

The Moz Story
Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.
Read Our Story

Agency Solutions
Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.
Drive Client Success

Case Studies
Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.
See What’s Possible

Enterprise Solutions
Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.
Scale Your SEO

New Releases
Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.
See What’s New

New Feature: Moz Pro
Surface actionable competitive intel

Learn More

Moz Pro

Moz Local

Moz Local Dashboard

Mozscape API

Mozscape API Dashboard

Moz Academy

Avatar

Moz Home

Notifications

Account & Billing

Manage Users

Community Profile

My Q&A

My Videos

Log Out

By: Roger MozBot
February 21, 2019

The Influence of Voice Search on Featured Snippets

Search Engines
|
Content Marketing
|
Advanced SEO

This post was originally published on the STAT blog.

We all know that featured snippets provide easy-to-read, authoritative answers and that digital assistants love to say them out loud when asked questions.

This means that featured snippets have an impact on voice search — bad snippets, or no snippets at all, and digital assistants struggle. By that logic: Create a lot of awesome snippets and win the voice search race. Right?

Right, but there’s actually a far more interesting angle to examine — one that will help you nab more snippets and optimize for voice search at the same time. In order to explore this, we need to make like Doctor Who and go back in time.

From typing to talking
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and queries were typed into search engines via keyboards, people adapted to search engines by adjusting how they performed queries. We pulled out unnecessary words and phrases, like “the,” “of,” and, well, “and,” which created truncated requests — robotic-sounding searches for a robotic search engine.

Of course, as search engines have evolved, so too has their ability to understand natural language patterns and the intent behind queries. Google’s 2013 Hummingbird update helped pave the way for such evolution. This algorithm rejigging allowed Google’s search engine to better understand the whole of a query, moving it away from keyword matching to conversation having.

This is good news if you’re a human person: We have a harder time changing the way we speak than the way we write. It’s even greater news for digital assistants, because voice search only works if search engines can interpret human speech and engage in chitchat.

Digital assistants and machine learning
By looking at how digital assistants do their voice search thing (what we say versus what they search), we can see just how far machine learning has come with natural language processing and how far it still has to go (robots, they’re just like us!). We can also get a sense of the kinds of queries we need to be tracking if voice search is on the SEO agenda.

For example, when we asked our Google Assistant, “What are the best headphones for $100,” it queried [best headphones for $100]. We followed that by asking, “What about wireless,” and it searched [best wireless headphones for $100]. And then we remembered that we’re in Canada, so we followed that with, “I meant $100 Canadian,” and it performed a search for [best wireless headphones for $100 Canadian].

We can learn two things from this successful tête-à-tête: Not only does our Google Assistant manage to construct mostly full-sentence queries out of our mostly full-sentence asks, but it’s able to accurately link together topical queries. Despite us dropping our subject altogether by the end, Google Assistant still knows what we’re talking about.

Of course, we’re not above pointing out the fumbles. In the string of: “How to bake a Bundt cake,” “What kind of pan does it take,” and then “How much do those cost,” the actual query Google Assistant searched for the last question was [how much does bundt cake cost].

Just after we finished praising our Assistant for being able to maintain the same subject all the way through our inquiry, we needed it to be able to switch tracks. And it couldn’t. It associated the “those” with our initial Bundt cake subject instead of the most recent noun mentioned (Bundt cake pans).

In another important line of questioning about Bundt cake-baking, “How long will it take” produced the query [how long does it take to take a Bundt cake], while “How long does that take” produced [how long does a Bundt cake take to bake].

They’re the same ask, but our Google Assistant had a harder time parsing which definition of “take” our first sentence was using, spitting out a rather awkward query. Unless we really did want to know how long it’s going to take us to run off with someone’s freshly baked Bundt cake? (Don’t judge us.)

Since Google is likely paying out the wazoo to up the machine learning ante, we expect there to be less awkward failures over time. Which is a good thing, because when we asked about Bundt cake ingredients (“Does it take butter”) we found ourselves looking at a SERP for [how do I bake a butter].

Not that that doesn’t sound delicious.
Snippets are appearing for different kinds of queries
So, what are we to make of all of this? That we’re essentially in the midst of a natural language renaissance. And that voice search is helping spearhead the charge.

As for what this means for snippets specifically? They’re going to have to show up for human speak-type queries. And wouldn’t you know it, Google is already moving forward with this strategy, and not simply creating more snippets for the same types of queries. We’ve even got proof.

Over the last two years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of words in a query that surfaces a featured snippet. Long-tail queries may be a nuisance and a half, but snippet-having queries are getting longer by the minute.

When we bucket and weight the terms found in those long-tail queries by TF-IDF, we get further proof of voice search’s sway over snippets. The term “how” appears more than any other word and is followed closely by “does,” “to,” “much,” “what,” and “is” — all words that typically compose full sentences and are easier to remove from our typed searches than our spoken ones.

This means that if we want to snag more snippets and help searchers using digital assistants, we need to build out long-tail, natural-sounding keyword lists to track and optimize for.

Format your snippet content to match
When it’s finally time to optimize, one of the best ways to get your content into the ears of a searcher is through the right snippet formatting, which is a lesson we can learn from Google.

Taking our TF-IDF-weighted terms, we found that the words “best” and “how to” brought in the most list snippets of the bunch. We certainly don’t have to think too hard about why Google decided they benefit from list formatting — it provides a quick comparative snapshot or a handy step-by-step.

From this, we may be inclined to format all of our “best” and “how to” keyword content into lists. But, as you can see in the chart above, paragraphs and tables are still appearing here, and we could be leaving snippets on the table by ignoring them. If we have time, we’ll dig into which keywords those formats are a better fit for and why.

Get tracking
You could be the Wonder Woman of meta descriptions, but if you aren’t optimizing for the right kind of snippets, then your content’s going to have a harder time getting heard. Building out a voice search-friendly keyword list to track is the first step to lassoing those snippets.

Want to learn how you can do that in STAT? Say hello and request a tailored demo.

Need more snippets in your life? We dug into Google’s double-snippet SERPs for you — double the snippets, double the fun.

About Roger MozBot —
Howdy, we’re Moz! The home of Roger MozBot, SEO resources and education, and software that helps you take full advantage of the power of SEO, whether you want to drive customers to your website or to your front door.

With Moz Pro, you have the tools you need to get SEO right — all in one place.

Start your free trial!

Mobile-First Indexing Explained: What You Need To Know

Using SEO Progress Report Templates on Semrush

The Ins and Outs of Competitive Benchmarking

How to Make Google Web Stories [2021 Study]

The SEO Marketing Guide for Events

Agency to Agency: How We Doubled in Size During COVID (and the Measures We Needed to Manage Agency’s Growth)

类似文章