For many years, Google had been warning webmasters about the importance of going mobile friendly, as more and more search queries were done on mobile devices.  Now, webmasters should be considering the role of voice queries.  During the keynote for Google I/O, Sundar Pichai revealed that 20% of mobile search queries are actually voice queries.

We are pushing ourselves really hard so that Google is evolving and staying a step ahead of our users.  All the search queries you see behind me are live queries coming in from mobile.  In fact, today, over 50% of our queries come from mobile phones.  And the queries in color you see behind me are voice queries.  In the US, on our mobile app in Android, one in five qeuries – 20% of our queries – are voice queries and that share is growing.

Also worth noting is the fact that Google didn’t include iOS users who are using voice search through Chrome or the Google Now app.

Of course, it is hard for site owners to tell what search queries their sites are receiving. While Google is considering offering it in Search Analytics, there is the problem that search queries tend to be much longer and are likely not searched for specifically as many times as usual typed queries.

It does show how the role of SEO is potentially changing.  We are already seeing SEOs creating pages specifically for the longer voice style queries and many are combing through their mobile Search Analytics to attempt to identify likely voice queries to ensure those pages meet users needs.