Episode 2: Voice Search Is Changing the Game
Episode 2: Voice Search Is Changing the Game
Voice search in 2018 was the most visible symptom of the shift the #SEOisAEO series was built to document. When someone asks Alexa a question or speaks a query into Google Assistant, they’re not getting a list of ten blue links. They’re getting one answer, or none. The economics of that difference are stark: in a ranked list, position two still gets clicks. In a voice response, position two doesn’t exist.
Eric Enge, Dawn Anderson, and Jo Juliana Turnbull joined Jason Barnard for Episode 2 to examine what that shift meant for content strategy, for keyword research, and for the way brands needed to think about their relationship with search.
The conversational query format that voice search made mainstream has a different structure from typed search. Typed queries tend to be compressed - two or three keywords, no articles, no punctuation. Spoken queries are full sentences, often with explicit question words: who, what, where, when, why, how. That difference matters because it surfaces intent directly. “Best running shoes” is ambiguous. “What are the best running shoes for flat feet under £100?” is a complete brief. The answer engine that processes the second query has far more to work with, and the brand that structures its content to directly address that kind of question is making a clear claim on the answer.
Eric Enge’s contribution covered the content implications: long-form, question-structured content that mirrors the conversational queries voice interfaces were producing was already outperforming keyword-optimised content for featured snippet capture - and featured snippets were the primary source of voice responses at the time. Dawn Anderson brought the technical dimension: page speed, mobile performance, and structured markup all fed into voice answer selection, because the machine was selecting from a smaller candidate pool and needed higher confidence in each candidate. Jo Juliana Turnbull framed the user behaviour shift: voice wasn’t just a new input modality, it was changing the expectations users brought to all their searches.
The presentation deck used during the episode is preserved on Anton Shulke’s SlideShare archive.
Jason’s own position had been shifting in the weeks before this episode, Jason’s own position had already been evolving in the weeks leading up to this episode. What voice search was making undeniable was the same thing the whole series was arguing: the machine was moving from retrieval to recommendation, and the brands that understood recommendation logic were going to be the ones that got recommended.
Published by: Semrush. Host: Jason Barnard. Guests: Eric Enge, Dawn Anderson, Jo Juliana Turnbull. September 11, 2018
