Voice search is changing online marketing. Using the voice-activated technology added in computers, phones, TVs, and smart hubs, today’s customers can find information, shop, and get recommendations on the go. It’s time for the marketers to understand how this new style of search influences customers to find your business. In this blog, I am going to cover,
- Voice Search Landscape for Online Marketing
- Applications of Voice Search
- The future of Voice Search
- Tools & techniques for optimizing for Voice Search
If you’re a marketer or business professionals who are seeing the rapid growth of voice search and would like to embrace the future early on, so you can be well prepared and reap the fruit faster than other businesses. This blog is for you.
Why Voice Search is Important?
Voice search is speech recognition technology that allows searchers to use their voice to find things, rather than typing a question directly into a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Now we all know, that we can use voice search with our home appliances or devices like Alexa to command our household appliances. But, what it means for business and marketers? Voice search is also used to find business, to shop specific item, or and get product or service recommendations.
Here are some global stats that may entice you that how voice search had progressed.
- Over a billion voice searches per month happened in 2018.
- 41% of adults and 55% of teens are using Voice Search daily.
- 58% of consumers have used Voice Search to find local information in 2019.
- 46% of Voice Search users look for a local business daily.
- 27% visit the website of a local business after conducting a voice search.
- 76% of smart home speaker users conduct local searches at least once a week.
Why people are adapting to voice search?
Because someone like you and me can type 38 – 40 words in a minute, but we can speak to 100 – 150 words in a minute too. It’s faster and you’re getting the feedback in hands-free mode.
Voice Search Devices are predominately from tech giants, but you will find any smartphones with Apple or Google ecosystem has voice search enabled. Rumor says, Apple is also coming up with its own search engine, where homepod and Siri is currently using Google Search for their searchers.
Future of Voice Search
As with many of Google’s products, the adaption of Google Voice Search has steadily grown. Since 2010, the use of Voice Search and its associated commands have increased enormously. Currently the most common uses of Voice Search have been navigational queries and call functions, but we are likely to see not only increasingly sophisticated searches, but also a much higher volume of voice search queries in general. Popularity of Google home, Siri, Alexa has proved where we’re heading to. Even I used voice typing tool to write a few parts of this blog. The future of technology is going to be voice commands.
Tools and Techniques
You will find a common pattern that instead of deep research, people are mostly using voice search for something they want to get or they want to do. Which clearly shows buying intent from them. People search their nearby restaurants, product reviews, prices, local places using voice search. Now, as a business, wouldn’t you want to be the one who would like to come up in the recommendation list of the people who are looking to buy, to make a booking, or visit a place? That’s why you need to start exploring voice search from now on.
Featured Snippet
Now, one of the most important concepts you need to grasp is something called the featured snippet. Specifically for your business and your community, do a lot of research for it. Start to find examples. Eventually, you’ll realize that people are asking under that snippet. You’ll figure out some snippets that can add great clues. Go back to look at all the phrases that people are searching for, and you’re going to find some perfect ways to break through that snippet.
Content Optimization for Voice Search
One of the secrets to target voice search results is optimizing your content properly. Now, there are a couple of tricks and tips you need to remember. First, you want short, succinct responses. It’s generally pretty succinct if you think about what shows up in the featured snippet. Possibly 30 words or less. Now for this, check pages of FAQs, or voice search gold. You should get them easily because they’re great content and lures your attention right away. List of steps, structured data, statistics, schema markup – these are the best things to optimize your content.
HTTPS Results
HTTPS is a protocol that delivers Internet encrypted exchanges. The outcomes show that almost 80% of the search results that appear in voice search are theirs. Since it is a ranking factor, you need to know about it for a better search engine experience. Now under HTTPS, all your data is encrypted. All of your headers, all of your files that actually go back and forth so that anyone can see them are encrypted as well which makes it even harder for people to hack and get into websites. So to ensure that you have a secure SSL certificate, you want to clear out everything with your host or the web designer. And the good news is that a lot of web hosts are starting to install and send you an HTTPS site as part of their offering these days.
Don’t Forget the Site Speeds
For marketing, for user experience, for SEO, an important issue is site speed. What is site speed? When someone clicks on the name how easily your website or your web pages load. It’s always been a ranking factor for SEO, particularly on mobile devices where people need to search for things quickly. 80% of people leave the site if it doesn’t respond in 5 mins. So, to get a good ranking for voice search, you better put some effort into this.
The first step is benchmarking your website. The Google Site Speed tool, another one called Pingdom, and another one called PageSpeed Index, are some great free tools. These tools will show you exactly what’s going on in terms of how quickly your site loads and even some of the items that are going on to drag your site down. Now you can ask your tech team to make things work.
Google My Business Profile
Your Google My Business Profile is among the main local factors for voice search. And if you think about it, how people get directions, they say they find something near me, or they need to go to your Google My Business page for all these local signals to show up for voice searches. Over the past few years, 58 percent of users have used voice search to find local business knowledge. Let’s check it out. “Okay Google, find me the best Digital Marketing Agency in Mirpur DOHS, Dhaka, Bangladesh.” – “I found a Digital Marketing Agency near Mirpur DOHS. It’s HYPE Dhaka at road no 10 ………………..”
The best local foundation is your Google My Business. Make sure you’re claiming it. Get your correct name, address and phone number. Make your category right, explain your business, put all that data in the hours, the option for someone to call you and maybe even consider adding the option to text me. And don’t forget that your overall rating needs to be four-plus.
Adapt and Rule
When it comes to the future of voice search, there are still a lot many “unknowns.” One thing that is almost certain, however, is that voice search in verticals such as the consumer electronics market will continue to become more intelligent, sensitive, accurate, and precise, as well as more popular. While this uncertainty is never a welcome risk factor for marketers, it’s also a great opportunity to optimize your business accordingly.
What are you waiting for? Adapt the newness and rule your industry. If you need any suggestions, Contact me.
