How to Measure If Your CPG Brand's Voice Search Strategy is Working

POSTED BY Greg Keating

Voice assistant device.

You may have spent a lot of time putting together a plan to optimize your searches for voice, and it is absolutely appropriate to do so, given how fast voice searches are rising as hundreds of millions of people buy voice assistant devices each year.

Here's a sticky issue, though: Can you measure your voice searches separately from overall searches so you can see whether your SEO plan is working?

It's not easy to measure voice searches, CPG marketers are finding. But there are some things you can do to get at least an idea of whether your voice search optimization is working. None of these methods will be a perfect measurement, but there will be indications you can use. 

Download Google Search Console Data

Google Search Console data can be downloaded from your site, and this is the best data to work with when trying to identify and measure voice search data. If you have the capability to use APIs, it will make your data mining somewhat easier. But even if you don't, Google Search Console is your best bet.

Measure Conversational Search Terms

Voice search terms are typically full sentences that are phrased as a question, so if you measure search terms that are more than four words, the majority of them should be voice searches. You can further separate out search terms that begin with the following words:

  • Who?
  • What?
  • When?
  • Where?
  • Why?
  • Which?
  • How?
  • Are?

These modifiers are part of most voice search terms, which are typically phrased as questions. If you look at results for these terms before you optimized for voice search and after, you should see higher numbers after optimization if it is working.

Giving a voice command to a phone.

A caveat: longer conversational searches could result from using Google's autocomplete tool and might not be 100% reflective of voice search in all cases. But looking at results before and after voice search optimization was implemented will show the growth that comes from these efforts. 

Look at Location Data

Voice searches are strongly concentrated around locations and local results. Looking at local results and whether they have increased in recent weeks since implementing voice search optimization. You can also look for increases that come from Google My Business if you have recently optimized it. 

Tracking Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are typically a go-to for Google voice search results, so tracking the performance of any content Google uses for featured snippets will point to voice results in most cases. Featured snippets can show up in traditional searches as well, however, so once again, it's a good idea to look at increases in results.

Knowing exactly what to search for in measuring voice searches can give you some indication about the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, even though measurement tools can be spotty at best with voice search. 

Hangar12 can help your company develop SEO targeted to voice search and customized for your CPG brand. Subscribe to our blog to stay up on the latest CPG marketing trends.

Want to learn more about using voice search? Fill out the form beloe to download our free guide, "Optimizing Your CPG Brand for Voice Search," to get started. 

Download our Optimizing Your CPG Brand for Voice Search here.

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