What is Voice Marketing?
Voice search is the process of using spoken words to perform searches, ask questions and give commands using compatible voice recognition technology. There is an ever-growing market of devices that use voice recognition, including smartphones, computers and smart home assistants.
Voice search marketing involves optimising your website and its content for voice searches instead of manual searches.
Why is Voice Search the future?
Voice search has seen an exponential growth due to a number of key factors:
- It is quick and convenient
- Voice assistants from the big tech giants (Amazon, Apple, Google) continue to be popular in homes
- New product launches including cars, appliances and wearable devices use the technology
As a result, optimising your website for voice searches is now becoming something of a necessity. If you don’t start to consider a voice search strategy now, you risk your business falling behind.
How to optimise for Voice Marketing
A successful voice marketing strategy is based on 4 steps:
1: Answer The Question
Unlike traditional search, people use voice search to ask Google questions directly. They think of Google as a person, so expect a clear answer back. For Google to select your content as the answer to the query, your content must be clear, simple to understand and most importantly, straight to the point. If your content is longwinded and bares little substance, you won’t succeed at voice SEO.
2: Keyword Research
Your content must answer the users’ question but also be optimised with keywords to show relevance. To find the most relevant keywords, put yourself in the shoes of the person who’s looking for your product/service – what would you be searching for and how would you say it? With voice search, users tend to search with long-tailed keywords as it is most conversational so you must optimise for short-tail and long-tail keywords to cover all bases.
These long-tail keywords should include questions keywords, i.e. phrases and questions that include “what”, “how”, “why”, “which” and “where”.
3: Enhance Your FAQ Pages
Including a FAQs page is a great way to have conversational answers present on your website as well as addressing any questions potential customers may have. Not only does it optimise your website with question keywords which will benefit your SEO, it also provides customers with an enhanced user experience.
4: Use A Conversational Tone
To be ‘voice search’ friendly, try writing your blog and social media content in a conversational tone. When you’re writing, imaging you’re talking to a friend. This softer language tone is more widely accepted on voice search platforms as it makes the user feel you are speaking directly to them, rather than reading from a page of information.
If you’d like to find out more about the benefits of voice marketing, speak to one of our team today.