What Google’s Pixel Event Means for Voice Search

This week Google announced a whole host of new products at their Pixel event. The Google Home Mini, Home Max, Pixel Buds, Pixel 2, Pixelbook, Daydream View 2, and Clips. That’s a lot of products but there’s a underlying thread in all of them that any SEO will be familiar with.

Machine learning and voice technology. Obviously having the huge resource that is the worlds largest and most popular search engine behind it is beneficial. It means that the volume of information needed for both to prosper is there. It’s the voice technology and therefore voice search that get’s a shot in the arm here.

It’s been a long time coming, voice search has been on the horizon and hailed as the next big thing for some time yet it has never really ‘clicked’. So when are there going to be VSEO Agencies? The answer is – no one knows, but Google are doing their best to make it: “soon”.

It’s a tricky one for Google. Not only does the technology and adoption have to improve – companies actually have to use the Google search engine. In recent years Amazon’s Alexa and it permutations have been the biggest selling smart speaker and the iPhone is the best selling phone. Up until September 2017 Siri on iPhone used bing as it’s search engine, when it switched to Google as part of a $3 Billion deal. Alexa still uses bing.

So you can understand Google’s push to put out the best possible voice products and be a service provider for the rest of the market. Looking at the Google Home products and striking a deal of Siri, points to a very bright future for Google’s voice tech.

The question for many in the Digital industry is “How can we use it?”. The answer to that is actually alarmingly simple. Be useful or get your wallet out. You’ll find that Google Home leans heavily on featured snippets, that sneaky ‘result 0’. Ask a question and the answer you get is likely the featured snippet. That means more than ever your SEO needs to be REALLY on point. Because the breadth of search terms you are served from a voice search is going to be much narrower than a desktop or mobile search.

More than ever you need to be in the right place at the right time. Targeting the right search intent and providing the content Google needs to use you as the most credible and useful answer. Intent targeting and content production is going to be the name of the SEO game. It’s easy to learn but hard to master. Simple but the execution is going to be an intense competitor arms race.

That is unless you just want to buy your place as the Google Home products being used to advertise. In March this year Home users got a “ friendly reminder” during their daily briefing that Disney’s Beauty and the Beast released in the theatres that very week. Google quickly denied it was an advert and pulled it. So you can safely assume that paid ads are well on their way to Google Home.