How will voice search impact your content marketing?
Searching information online is the most common thing many people do today. But, how do you do it yourself?
Do your type the search question or phrase on the search engines or simply talk to your phone using a digital personal assistant like Google, Siri, Alexa, or Cortana?
According to the latest announcements from Microsoft, the search is greatly growing and the use of voice search is projected to be the new frontier in SEO and content marketing. In the announcements, it was indicated that chatbots are now embracing “conversation” as the new user interface rather than the common text search to get what they want. According to Northstar Research, over half of US teens and 41% of adults use voice search on a daily basis.
What exactly is voice search?
This is a digital virtual personal assistant or entry point that uses voice to search for information on the web such as Siri and Cortana among others. Using such virtual assistants and activating with voice simply means that you are engaging yourself with voice search.
The number of voice search is ever increasing probably due to its ease of use because it is easier to use especially when using tiny screens and buttons of the smartphones or other gadgets which make it difficult to navigate through the keyboard.
How will voice search influence content marketing?
Mary Meeker, an established venture capitalist and trend watcher, researched why many people are using voice search as opposed to the text search. It is out of the answer to the question “why” that you might as well understand how crucial this type of technology is crucial in your content marketing.
From her findings, voice search is mostly usable when users are hands tied or their vision occupied especially when driving or carrying out home chores. From her report, more than 80% of the users are either in their cars or at home carrying out their errands. She further states that this percentage is likely to fluctuate slightly but will immensely continue to influence digital marketing especially because there is continued increase of virtual assistants and smart homes.
With some voice search services in use, the competition is high thus posing a challenge to content marketers to ensure they create content that will enable them to rank better in voice search results by first identifying the voice and conversational style of the target audience. Below are some of the commonly used voice search services.
| Voice search service | Owner | Powered by |
| Alexa voice service (AVS) | Amazon | Bing |
| Siri | Apple | Initially by Google Currently by Bing |
| Google Voice Search | Google search | |
| Cortana | Microsoft | Bing |
Content marketers using these voice search services should look into the following objectives, challenges, and solutions.
Objectives
- Creating content that will enable their sites to rank better in voice search listings
- Recognize the voice and conversational technique of the target audience
Challenges
- Find out how users search by voice, for instance, the devices they use, when they search and the semantics surrounding the whole process
- Identify the search terms and phrases used by various people
- Permit for tone variations in different markets such as business settings
- Website optimization for voice search
- Creation of content that applies to both text and voice searches
Solutions
- Marketers to ensure creation of optimized websites for both voice and text searches
- Use analytics to determine the various types of searches
- Use analytics to find out where users are searching from for instance the use of “near me” phrases
- Use long-tail and conversational terms in their content
- Looking more into where people use voice sear5ch service like in cars or home
- Create question and answer style of content that engage users in a conversational manner
The semantics of the questions or phrases used by users is by large the main difference between text and voice searches. Due to the speed of typing, most times users skip the core wording or keyword or phrase and sometimes misspelling some words which are not the case with voice search.
While the voice search is conversational, the phrases used are natural. This way voice search seems to be taking digital marketing to another level.
How to optimize your content for voice search
Having understood how crucial voice search is in the modern content marketing industry, it is important to understand how to go about it to ensure your content is optimized for voice search. This is because in 2017 and beyond, voice search is projected to be a key player in content advertising. Remember that brands that take advantage of new technological advancements get ahead of the competition and prosper. If you are a brand marketer, think into the future and optimize your content for that.
- Use conversational keywords
Your website content needs to be conversational and smart. It is time to let go the exact-match keywords and start using voice queries that capture the exact expectations of the users. For this reason, it is time to re-think about your website content. As a content marketer, understand your target audience’s conversational speech and create content that focuses on delivering the results they need. Simply, speak your customer’s language.
- Focus on location of users
Voice searches are more of location-focused than typed phrases or queries. It is for this reason that you need to ensure that your website is correctly set for local searches. In this case, you will have to focus more on customer reviews which are critical for better ranking by search engines. You, therefore, need to encourage your customers to leave reviews and responding to all both negative and positive ones.
You also need to register with Google My Business Page ensuring all the business details are up-to-date with a unique business description and choosing the right categories with photos uploaded.
- Embrace change
Voice search services are a little bit new in the content marketing industry and without a doubt will continue to grow. For that reason, you need to embrace every step taken further to enhance the usefulness of voice search services. It is important to stay up-to-date to ensure that you have all new advancements are applied to advance your content marketing
- Using unique keyword
It is true that internet users search with different vocal chords the same way with text searches using keyboards. It is, therefore, crucial to use such tools as the Rank Tracker to ensure you get the most common voice queries used by researchers so that you can align your content in the same direction. The various questions you get from such a tool will enable you as a content marketer to have the right content for the target audience.
There are many other ways content marketers can use to optimize their content but the main point to understand is that optimizing for voice search is quite different from text search and that the technology is evolving with the effort to understand the intent of users.
Voice SEO is becoming quite popular among the young generation but also the adults are trying to catch up with the technology. This is an important point to note while trying to attract customers using the content published on the website. In this regards, it is crucial to focus SEO efforts on long-tailed keywords and phrases to try as much as possible to answer the questions asked by users instead of focusing only on targeted keywords. What is needed by content marketers is to understand how people phrase their queries out loud and the terms commonly used by users.
Publishing content that is more of conversational tone is all content marketers should focus on including the use of FAQ type pages to promote the content and the specific websites at large. With proper voice search SEO, the chances are high that a specific website ranks better and that means more traffic which translates into customers and more returns at the end of the day.
The major focus of any website is content marketing and the various strategies used such as SEO and link building, and now voice search is critical. It is, therefore, crucial to stay in line with the various ways of optimizing micro-data and content to offer the appropriate context including contact details and location.
Conclusion
Without any doubts, voice search is becoming crucial in content marketing. For that reason, it is important that all content marketers use the service themselves to understand how it works and the kind of results that come along with it. Voice search is projected not only as a technology of the future but also a major frontier of content marketing to be taken into consideration today.
With many benefits of voice search like ability to make easily make spelling corrections, ability to follow up with what’s been previously said, giving answers based on context of location and app-based context, it is crucial that you start using this service to get right ahead of your competition and improve Google ranking, alongside with rankings on other search engines.