How to Grow Your Business with Voice Search Optimization - Cpitalism

• Updated on: 2019-02-02
• Read original article here

Voice search is the ability to perform a web search by speaking your query to the smart device (i.e. a smartphone or a smart voice-activated assistant).

Voice search has been around for a few years now (with many consumers using their smartphones to search by voice) but it has recently started growing at a faster pace due to the recent advances in voice recognition technology and the fast adoption of smart home assistants.

Consequently, voice search is quickly becoming a major marketing trend in 2019 and beyond:

Finally, by 2020, nearly half of search queries will be done by voice (Source: Andrew Ng, former Chief Scientist at Baidu). Nearly every article on voice-related search starts with this one, so I felt compelled to mention it here too.

Note though that this number goes back to 2015 and while it’s still a very valid prediction (until we hit 2020 to be able to verify how true to life it is), the voice search adoption rate has been influenced by smart speaker adoption recently, so the number may even be higher.

The most obvious challenge voice search is posing to the digital marketing industry is a much tighter organic search competition. While just a few years ago, being in Google’s “top 5” was the ultimate search marketer’s dream, these days we are competing for one top result because that’s what voice search users are being served.

Let me spell this out for you:

Moreover, that single position we are now fighting for is not always #1 organic search listing. In many cases, what is being read to a voice search user is the featured snippet, i.e. a selected search result that is picked by Google’s algorithm as the one that answers the query in the best possible way.

More often than not, Google features a web page that is already ranking #1 for the given query. But in many cases, the featured result is being selected from top 5 (and in rare cases from top 10) organic search listings.

Google introduced featured snippets a few years ago, as one of the ways to accommodate the voice search users better. The featured snippet revolution causes a major change in SEO mindset:

Now, tighter competition is not the only challenge marketers are going to deal with due to the fast growth of voice search.

What most digital marketers are worried about these days is: Where are the clicks going to come from?

And it’s a good question because the future of search looks mostly screenless: Consumers will never even see the served page (they will only hear the answer and move on), let alone click to visit it.

In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2020 almost 1/3 of web searches are going to be done without the screen. That’s a huge amount of searches, and a huge amount of search engine result pages resulting in 0 clicks.

The good news is, where there’s a challenge, there’s almost always an opportunity, especially for brands that are flexible and ready to embrace trends quickly.

To help you out, here are all those opportunities you can start pursuing now to get ahead of your competition and benefit from the voice search revolution.

While we are being forced to compete for holding a single organic position these days, there’s a different – more positive – phenomenon we should take into account:

With voice search, search queries are getting longer and more varied. They are no longer influenced by Grammar rules or Google’s search suggestions. Consumers are freely speaking their questions to a smart speaker, so their queries become more natural and diverse which drives more ranking opportunities than before.

This means that you can still get a lot of exposure from organic search, provided you are targeting those long-tail natural-language-driven search queries.

Consequently, marketers need to embrace new, smarter keyword research tools and optimization tactics in order to catch those less obvious ways your target customer may be using to word their search query when speaking it in voice.

TextOptimizer is one example of such advanced software that pushes you to include all kinds of related concepts and terms into your content to optimize for a wider variety of keywords. To help with your research and optimization, TextOptimizer goes straight to THE source, i.e. Google: It uses Google’s search snippets for your target query and extracts keyword context from those using semantic analysis:

[TextOptimizer is a good example of new SEO software to embrace in order to optimize your site for voice search]

Furthermore, applying schema.org to better point Google to your content structure is another good idea helping you stand out whenever Google introduces new search improvements geared towards mobile and voice search. It’s also a fairly low-effort tactic thanks to the variety of plugins and generators helping you effortlessly implement structured markup.

The majority of voice search results are local, as many sources reveal including Search Engine Watch and Bright Local. In most cases (i.e. in 88% of cases) voice search users are taking action, i.e. they are using the driving directions to visit the business after making a voice search.

Local businesses don’t need a click, so screenless searching is not posing an issue to them. On the contrary, voice search allows customers to find a nearby business easier then ever. In fact, as AI-empowered search assistants are getting smarter, a human being is not really required for your local business to be discovered. Soon your consumer’s smart device will find your business and interact with you on his/her behalf.

What it means is that managing your local rankings and listings is becoming more important than ever:

Finally, use local business management software to monitor your rankings, reviews and citations. Bright Local is a solid option to use as it stays up-to-date with local marketing trends providing a comprehensive and affordable suite for small businesses to monitor all the important elements of their online presence:

[Use Bright Local to keep an eye on your organic and local rankings, manage reviews and build citations]

Like with local search, getting a click is not always the goal, at least it shouldn’t be, especially with voice search growth.

With the new AI-driven technology, the buyer’s journey becomes more fragmented. These days consumers can both search and buy products by voice, while on-the-go. Or they can add products to the shopping cart by voice and buy later from a different device.

This means shopping behavior becomes faster and in many cases impulse-driven.

First and foremost, make your on-site shopping experience as easy as possible (i.e. eliminate all unnecessary steps) and mobile-friendly.

Secondly, join Google’s shopping actions platform (currently only available for the US-based businesses) offering a multi-device shopping experience to the consumer. Business Insider explains the platform the following way:

“A shopper can add an item to their cart after searching for it on Google.com, and then add something else to the cart via voice shopping later, for example. Consumers are then able to purchase everything at the same time. The ability to mix and match their shopping processes may make them less likely to abandon their shopping carts.”

With Google shopping actions you can:

The search industry is in constant flux with new trends and updates disrupting the way people perform the search, interact with it and proceed to an action. In most cases, those trends bring about challenges for some brands and opportunities for others. It’s no different with this trend which is already upon us.

Voice search revolution is coming faster than brands are willing to prepare for it. This means now is a great time to gain some competitive advantage and get your site optimized for this fast-emerging opportunity. Be the first in your industry to provide a voice-search-optimized experience and you’ll get far ahead of your competition.

Ann Smarty is the brand and community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of Viral Content Bee. Smarty has been into digital marketing for over a decade, she is the former editor-in-chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Smarty is also a frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of the weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz