Why voice search is important for Digital Marketing?

The emergence of voice search technology has brought about a sea change in which digital marketing professionals optimise their websites to rank in search engines.

Studies have shown that about 40% adults make use of voice search every day and in the year 2020 half of all searches will be performed through voice search.

The usage of smart phone assistants, smart speakers and digital voice assistants has increased manifold.

Moreover voice search improves the user experience of search engines as they become more convenient as well as faster.

When users change their search behaviour and move towards voice search it is important for business owners and digital marketers to change their strategies accordingly.

To capitalise on this paradigm shift in search behaviour one has to adapt and needs to take care of the following factors.

Adapt your content – With voice search, the way in which people use words and phrases in search engines is significantly different from typed searches.

They tend to use more question like phrases instead of two or three words of query. Instead of “weather in Delhi”, it is quite possible that a searcher would use the spoken question – “will it rain in Delhi today?”

Therefor it becomes imperative for you to add such sentences like content in your website.

Focus on long tail – With voice search you have to give more importance to natural language patterns, which would mostly be long sentences.

As a digital marketer you will have to focus on such long tail keywords while creating website content and make sure that you optimise more pages with such long tail content.

Your search strategy must thus include more long tail keywords that answer spoken questions rather than short-term typed queries.

Focus on user intent – Just understanding the keyword phrase that a user uses is not enough and instead you need to understand the user intent behind the search questions if you want to win during the times of voice search.

Understanding the psychology of the user and the purpose behind the query is equally important.

The content of the website must satisfy the user intent and must give the user the answer he or she is looking for.

It is often found that voice searchers are actually looking to find a place and buy things rather than just seeking information on anything.

That would mean that if you could create content that help the users in buying what they are looking for, you could beat your competition.

More local queries – Voice search is more likely to have an influence on local search as most of the queries would be about local markets.

Make sure that you add local indicators in your website content like your city, state, country, region etc.

You should also makes sure that you build your local citations by adding your information in major local business directories.

A business owner must also make sure that NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) of the website is consistent all across the web.

Claim your Google My Business (GMB) listing – You must be knowing the importance of claiming and optimising your Google My Business listing for local SEO.

As voice search is mainly about local search, if you are optimising for voice search it is important that you have claimed and optimised your GMB listing.

Make sure that you have added all the details about your business in GMB, including your products and services, your exact address and contact numbers, your opening and closing timings etc.

Speed of the website – The speed with which your website loads on a mobile screen is one of the important factors in deciding your search engine rankings after Google introduced their mobile first indexing update.

The speed of your website is of particular importance in voice search. Most of the time a user who uses voice search would be looking for immediate answer and if you are unable to give an answer quickly enough, you are bound to face loss in the competition.

Are you ready for voice search?

The prominence voice search is receiving has posed a unique challenge for digital marketers and if they can up the game they can definitely drive benefits out of it.

If you aren’t ready till now, this is the time to jump in and make immense.