Why your Brand needs to Consider Voice Search

Voice Search and your Digital Strategy

2018 is the year of voice search. Pushed by Google and Amazon through their home assistants, the trend of voice search is becoming an increasingly popular way for people to access information online.

What Is Voice Search?

Voice search is a way of allowing users to search the internet by speaking into a device, such as a mobile or product like a home-assistant. The results can be served up to the user without them even having to look at a screen – which means the way people are searching is completely different to traditional search formats.

This new format means that brands are having to incorporate a different strategy into their search engine optimisation, to avoid losing visibility on these voice searches.

As one of the new emerging trends in SEO, many businesses are still finding aspects of the process murky. It can be difficult to measure the success of your website in voice search. However, as an early-adopter voice search also provides the most opportunity; embrace it now and you’ll have a huge advantage over competitors who are yet to understand or act on the process.

How Popular Is Voice Search At The Moment?

With the rise in popularity of home assistants (Adobe Data Insights found that voice assistant sales grew 103% year over year in the fourth quarter of 2017) voice search is growing fast. A Comscore report estimates that by 2020, 50% of all consumers will be using voice search. That means that if you haven’t already identified voice search as a big part of your future marketing strategy, you’re at risk of losing out on a huge potential audience.

How Can I Implement Voice Search Processes Into My Marketing?

• Gear your marketing towards longer tail keywords. For example: if you’re a florist, you may have previously been targeting keywords like ‘flower delivery services’. With voice search, think about optimising your content towards a longer variant that a user may search by, like ‘where is the nearest flower delivery shop to me?’
• FAQs FAQs FAQs. There’s no better to way to optimise for the specific questions people may be asking, than to create answers for each one individually. To get started you can write a list of the most common things your users ask, and then write a paragraph answering each one.
• Drop technical terms. For voice search you need to optimise towards a more casual-style of language. Remember that your audience may not have much knowledge of your field – so write for even the most basic level of experience in your services. Instead of writing from your point-of-view, write with the customer in mind. What would they be searching for?
• Prepare for a more conversational approach to providing information online. As consumers treat their voice assistants as a human counterpart, expect them to treat communication in a more personable way, instead of as a machine.
• Optimise your individual products. Voice assistants recommend products to users based on their queries, so it’s important you make sure that your products are prioritised.
• Make local SEO a big focus of your strategy. A large amount of voice searches are local, around terms related to ‘nearest’, ‘near me’, ‘close-by’ etc. Optimise your local SEO through a range of techniques including: Google My Business optimisation, local link building and local keyword acquisition.

Voice search is still a relatively new form of consideration for your marketing. To find out more about techniques that can help your strategy, get in touch today.