Few trends grew so fast and required so many adaptations in Digital Marketing strategies as voice search. A technology that barely existed at the beginning of the 2010s is now in the hands of almost every American — and it can be activated by a touch or a single “hello”. But what exactly does the surge in voice search mean for your content? How can you adapt and gain visibility by appearing more frequently as an answer to your audience’s inquires? In this post, we help you find some insights into the future. We discuss and understand the following topics: What is voice search? Why is it so important? How to optimize your content for voice search? What is voice search? When we start talking about the technology that enables a machine to hear and understand a human inquiry, we need to go way back. In fact, the first device created for that purpose was the IBM Shoebox in 1961. But you don’t have to know how technology evolved and how it works to make it part of your strategy. All you need to know is how it affects your marketing from now on. Nowadays, voice search is a system or software that uses A.I. not only to hear but interpret the user’s intentions so it can return results that are relevant for that specific question.
For example: if a person is about to Whatsapp Number leave home and asks Alexa, “Should I grab my umbrella?”, the software understands that this question should be in the context of wanting to know the weather. So voice search is getting better by combining automatic recognition and sophisticated interpretation. And the more advanced it becomes, the more people start using it. Why is it so important? Yes, voice search is cool, and a lot of people prefer it as a convenience. But why does that matter for CMOs and their plans? The thing is, knowing the weather is just one small practical benefit for users. The majority of voice search systems today automatically Google what the user asks and return the first, most relevant result. So SEO is the key to be prevalent in this new era. As the input demands some content optimization (we will talk more about it below), those who can shape their plans to embrace the technology will be ahead of the competition in a constantly growing field. But will voice search surpass text? That is the trend calling for your attention. Google reports that a little more than a quarter of the world is using voice search in 2020 — that means 2 billion people. And 62% of those say they are likely to buy something through a voice-activated speaker in the next month. And those numbers are far from stagnating.
Amazon claimed at CES 2020 that they had sold more than 100 million Alexa-powered devices around the world — a number that doubled only in 2019. Beyond even that, we are seeing almost every smartphone bought in the U.S. leaving the box ready for voice search. If we look at the estimated number of 275 million active devices in the country, we can surely say the technology is now mainstream, and we will only use it more in the future. How to optimize your content for voice search? One important statistic that perfectly explains why you should optimize your content right now: the majority of requests made via voice aren’t like the typical keyword searches we do in text. voice search type of language That means marketers need a new approach when planning content and SEO now, and even more so in the future. Let’s take a look at what some of the most prominent names in the area have to teach us about the actions you have to take to improve your visibility via voice search. Focus on snippets Snippets are direct and concise results Google features when they are recognized as a relevant and useful answer to a determined search.
For voice, as most of the time there isn’t even a screen on the device used, most results will always be returned from these. They may come as a straight answer: snippet Or they can provide some steps to guide the user: snippet This content is usually taken straight from your blog or website, and link your audience with your brand without even visiting it. It is a great way to raise brand awareness and be seen as an authority on that subject. Snippets are so powerful they are called Position Zero, a result before the results. And they are even more important for voice search. Brands looking to reach consumers using verbal answers from their assistants must learn to answer questions simply. Structure your content better Featured snippets tell us a simple truth about voice search: direct, short, and easy-to-understand answers are more prone to be chosen by Google as the first result. Then a great tip is to pay closer attention to meta descriptions, lists, subheadings, and introductions that are more natural and direct to the point. A well-structured content results in double benefits for your company: it appeals more to Google’s indexation tool and grabs your audience’s attention quicker. Both reinforce your brand’s authority and generate more traffic. Optimize for questions Consumers using voice search usually do so in the form of a question — a lot more than when they are writing. And that means marketers should optimize at least part of their content for question-specific searches. Most of those phrases start with who, when, what, why, how. They do that to get instant answers like the weather, to look at the traffic.