Voice Search is a crucial behaviour change in customer’s today

Voice search

Have you ever heard of Voice Search? Maybe you didn’t, but to know how important it has become, you must know.

Voice search is something you should know as a digital marketer. What is voice search? 

Well, Voice Search is the search of a query using your voice which AI( Artificial Intelligence) recognizes and gives the best result based on your word and intent.

You may think, how is that different from your regular search? Well, voice search is more like a conversation. Like, Where is the XYZ restaurant? Questions like that are conversation and come under natural language or voice search.

This isn’t your regular search type, in which you can type ”restaurant Xyz” and Google shows SERP. It has more communication between people and AI than the then previous way of typing.

To tell you the truth! Typing has become old. People prefer to talk to their smartphone devices and get results. Most likely in any Sci-Fiction movie AI provide all support to humans. Have you seen the movie “Her” very close to that is on track!.

As humans, we like to be in society with others and communication is a major part of it. Many people who use Voice Search experience a conversational or a social friend experience. Now let’s talk about statistics. India’s voice search is currently growing to 270% per year due to digital push recently as per a joint report by Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and digital agency Isobar.

Digital marketing has grown from 47 billion rupees (2015) to 199 billion rupees(2020). Due to pandemic

the digital marketing world has grown more than before and will grow more in the coming future.

Some of the day to day Artificial Assistance we use in smart devices are:

Google Assistant

Amazon Alexa/Echo

Google Home: Google

Siri-iPhone

Microsoft Cortana

All AI has one thing in common: it tries to understand us and communicate better with us to give a better user experience.

Google holds a major share when it comes to voice search.

Some marketing people believe that this is the end of SEO when it comes to voice search, but it’s a matter of perspective what you see, a problem, or a new market to thrive.

Traditional marketing still exists either is used by Giant Co-operation or local Shop Owners. So we can believe that anything that works’s to make brand awareness, loyalty, consideration to buy will make Traditional and Digital marketing exist for aeons. Both will exist as long as customers exist

Things to consider to make sure your website shows up in SERPs also based on voice search. Make sure you see that the following things are done.

1. Questionnaires(Q&A):

Why I kept Questionnaires at the top? because it has conversational content, which Google uses for providing a user with content matching the voice search query. 

Like, Someone may ask Google Assistant “what is voice search?”  And maybe you see this article as relevant because at the beginning of the sentence “what is voice search?” keyword is there. Google will present this in SERP results for the user to read. Which in turn increases the traffic.

Questionnaires are most common for voice search with a complete sentence which usually starts with who, when, where, which, how. That’s why there has to be FAQ in a website which only help user to find information for there common queries but also help Google crawlers to find relevant content for the user. 

Questionnaires are part of the natural language because it’s more like a conversation. It is the best way to find the intent of the user. Rankbrain and Hummingbird work together to understand what is the intent of the user query. Let’s just say, Rankbrain is thinking, and Hummingbird is the memory of that program. One more program that works on natural language is BERT (Bi-Directional Encoder Representation from Transformers). It helps what the word in the sentences mean.

Long-tail keyword length is better for voice search. On average, 29 words are in voice search. Voice Search-based keywords will help to take the content to the user and conversational content will make users engage with content.

2. Local SEO

Mostly the voice search is done to find a local service by the user, which could be a product or service. 

But it has become crucial for giant co-operations that intent to make sure they get in touch and influence their customer easily.

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My Google business, Just Dial, India Mart are the product that does local SEO. These products show results based on the location, what service or product they provide, query, the timing of shops, etc.

What else matters in local SEO? It’s the rating of your local SEO page and your response to it. (need to search more on Local SEO).

3. Use Structure Data:

Google always preferred structured data on a portal be it for customers or Google’s crawlers. Structured data can be confusing to some people between words like schema, HTML sitemap, XML sitemap can mean the same thing with different synonymy.

Well, they don’t have the same functionality. Lets us understand what’s the difference between HTML Sitemap, XML Sitemap, and schema markup.

HTML Sitemap is to create a map for the user who has visited the website and couldn’t find a particular thing for which he clicked on your website. This sitemap will help him as a roadmap. It’s a  graphical way of outlining a website’s structure in a tree or outline format.

XML Sitemap is kept for Google’s crawlers and to study the website. It has an indirect effect on your SEO result. It helps to compete with other sites. If your website has good content for user experience, you need to make sure that Google understands your content better. This is how the XML site helps users indirectly, unlike other HTML sitemaps.

Schema Markup is a whole new level of making Google see the content of your website with recognition of nouns and adjectives. It provides extra info on SERP for the user regarding the website that becomes a rich snippet.

It can be anything contact info, address, review or small personal info depend on which type of schema is needed. There are different schema markup for varied purposes used in the industry.

Pick your schema mark up based on your organization or what details you want your customer to see. Below is some example of type schema used.

   This is E-commerce schema                           This is a Person schema

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This two are just examples. You can change your schema based on your needs.

4. Mobile-Friendly: 

27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile (by Google). So, having a mobile-friendly based website is better.

Even without voice search, it is still considered a crucial factor for your local SEO, SEO, etc. An AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page) or a viewport meta tag in your website is a must thing to make your digital content presentable for your user, hence increase user experience.

One more thing that helps to be more mobile-friendly is a website whose speed is good. Always make sure your website speed is optimal to make your content shown on a device is faster. Without it, Google may choose a website whose speed is much better.

5.Videos:

Do you know second largest search engine is YouTube?. Videos are more interactive than articles makeit more easy to consume content for user than any article. 

Videos info graphics witheasy to understand content will be more easy like for anyone to make food by seeing video on “How to make vegan meat with wheat” than read an article about it and understand it. 

When ever you ask for something to AI with voice search there are some result with videos as well. That makes sense to AI because it (soon to be he/she) want to give a better user experience. That’s why Local SEO in YouTube (mostly) or any video streaming platform has become important. 

Make sure to keep your content not just in article form but also in video format ,making possible to reach maximum user with different medium.

AI will automatically will show your content if has all the ingredient to give better user experience

Conclusion:

As you can see in the two images as shown below. When you type in Google with the keyword “ how to cook vegan seitan, it shows the article, then Q&A and last comes videos. 

And if you plan on making content in just one type of format, you may end losing a lot of users because your customer includes a different set of people who love reading, have a question, or want to watch a video instead of reading it.

So, don’t settle for one type of format content, let your different kind of users reach you. 

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Based on keywords, Google decides what to show you. The above example need not be the same for all keywords, either voice searched or typed.

When it comes to food keywords, appearance makes users consider an action maybe buy, or try out dish. Mostly, for food, people prefer videos as they are more intimating than articles.

Voice search is important, but other factors also influence SERP results greatly. Keeping all factors into account is the best way for you to reach your target audience.

Remember Voice search is the future for searching content on the internet, and your title, description, format, etc will decide your ranking. Hope this article was informative and useful for you.