One of the things that drives SIA is that we want to stay on top of SEO. Getting a handle on voice search is important to all of our livelihoods. An initial question that came to me was “What is Google using to answer voice search questions?”. After doing a quick couple of searches, it looked like Google was using featured snippets. Featured snippets are the results that you’ll see from time to time at the top of the SERPs, above everything. For this test, more like a case study really, we wanted to see if we could confirm that Google voice search results are pulled from the featured snippets.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
What Does Google Use to Answer a Voice Search?
This test was my pet project. As we know, voice search is capturing more and more search traffic and my thought process was that in SIA, we want to stay on top of things. As Google zigs, we could zag along them and where they might be grabbing those voice search answers from. Cause when we start to identify that, we can optimize for that and we can then, if its important for you and your clients and goals, we can start to work out how we can get at the forefront of voice search. I did a couple of voice searches for fun to see what is going on. I got a Google Home for Christmas and it looked like Google Voice Search answers were coming from the featured snippet. What I decided to do was I found 30 snippets – there are three types of snippets. You’ve got a paragraph answer, a list - that can be a bulleted list or number list, and last is a table which is a grid and often has product specs and prices on it. My thought was, Google probably could not do a table very well but I would think that maybe the list and the paragraph might be the featured snippet but I wanted to see what we were playing with so in this set up, like in this example – passive income - there is this snippet.I took a screenshot of the snippet and then I asked Google home – passive income - and Google Home matched that. I then phrased it as a question – what is passive income – in case the question would come up with a different answer, and this is what the spreadsheet looks like – the queries and snippets, what I was looking at, what type it was, the answer, and the paragraph, if it matched or not, and if not, what the source was that it came from.
The results were kind of all over the place. The answers were close. Six out of the ten came from the featured snippet, in terms of the answer. But then it got a lot worst. For the list, it was only three out of ten, and for the tables, none of them were in it although there were some table answers that Google was able to give but it did not come from the featured snippet table.
This first run was kind of eliminating what it was not. Probably not exclusively the featured snippets. Probably something similar and that makes a lot of sense to me – a similar concept because they do not really want to make new technology all that much other than build on what you have but there is a lot of overlap.
In the dossier, you can go and see what I did. My hope is that people would jump in, look at these things and think about the featured snippets in your own niches cause there might be a niche thing going on or searches that you are familiar with and try them out. Maybe we can crowdsource this a little bit. This is kind of a first step in, it is not exclusively the featured snippet which is kind of a bummer cause it would have been great to be – aha, it is the featured snippet – but it is also good because it doesn’t necessarily mean that you would need the featured snippet to get the answer. There might be other techniques that could be done if it is important for you to win that type of search. That is where we are in right now.