How Voice Search Impacts Online Presence of Businesses and Brands

This article explains my approach in leveraging content and structured data on websites which can optimize the digital presence of business websites for voice search and data consistency online while providing a foundation for evolving technologies of the future.

Empower Your Customers
Voice search digitally empowers people to multitask, offering substantial freedom to access. Voice technology has been emerging and on a constant path of evolution. Voice search has given users the ultimate accessibility of multi-tasking by simply using their voice to prompt a command or question, and get an answer in return in just a few seconds.

It’s not a surprise that voice search has been adopted so quickly as it is fast and easy to use. Leveraging voice as a medium for technology has made it more natural for users to integrate technology into their lives.

How does voice search add value to your digital marketing efforts?

• Brings new meaning to search, pushing businesses to adapt
• Is natural and easier for customers to find your business
• Is an eminent transformation of digital marketing strategies
• Harnesses AI and machine learning capabilities to make your business visible

Drive Your Brand Voice
Consumers are becoming more comfortable speaking to voice-activated devices and digital voice assistants. According to Google, owners of voice-activated speakers are open to receiving all kinds of information from businesses, such as:

• 52% in receiving information about deals, sales and promotions from brands
• 48% wanted personalized tips and information to make their life easier
• 42% for information about upcoming events and activities
• 30% looked for for access to customer service or support

Just the same way a logo or color can visually represent a brand, the voice of brands will become more important as consumers increasingly engage via voice and build brand loyalty and recognition through voice activation.

By taking brand voice into consideration when writing website content, ensure that the brand voice is heard. And while the incorporation of a brand’s voice may still be in the future for most businesses, it will give businesses the ability to personify their brand and use it to drive more engagement from their customers.

Voice Search: As a Part of Customer Journey
Voice search truly is part of the customer journey and as consumers interact more with businesses through voice, the more actions they seek to be able to take directly via voice.

The Voice Search for Local Business Study by BrightLocal found that:

• 46% would like to hear local businesses’ prices in voice search results
• 41% would like to find out which products and services a local business sells or offers
• 40% would like to find out which products a local business has in-stock

Here we can also ascertain that there is a real desire to use voice search for purchases, which again underlines the importance for businesses and brands to start leveraging this technology to expand customer reach.

It’s Time to Get Discovered
The race for the best digital voice assistant technology has just begun, and the use of voice technology is already having a significant impact on the customer journey.

According to Key Marketing Elements, here are some user statistics for digital voice assistants:

• 19% people use Microsoft Cortana
• 36% users prefer Apple Siri
• 36% of users favor Google Assistant
• 25% are already using Amazon Alexa

As these technologies race to win more usage, there will be a focus on making digital assistants increasingly intelligent and adding more advanced capabilities.

Digital assistants are growing more complex, the use of structured data will remain crucial for search engines to find authoritative answers for voice search queries.

Structured data itself will also evolve to include ever more types of data and data-driven interaction, such as scheduling, further blurring the line between what consumers interpret as voice search and digital voice assistance.

Leveraging voice as a medium for technology has made it more natural for users to integrate technology into their lives.

Voice technology is also faster — as humans can speak to digital voice assistants three times faster than they could type the same search query.

To put it simply — business websites need to be more advanced than ever before, to ensure they succeed in being found via voice search.

Optimizing Websites for Voice Search
Your focus is to ensure that website content is structured to be easily crawled and understood by search engines, as well as secure the highest level of performance in terms of load speed, mobile responsiveness, W3C validation and more.

Website content is a crucial component in providing users with a relevant search result.

The claims that voice search will make websites irrelevant is short sighted and often fails to consider how the technical set up of how search queries are processed.

Even more so than other types of search, voice search requires authoritative and structured content in order to give a single answer that is accurate and relevant. This makes websites’ use of structured data and schema.org mark-up crucial to effectively answering voice search queries.

What should you consider while working on a voice search strategy?

• Understand Your Audience: Who they are (consumer segment, age, gender etc.) and how they talk about your business (keywords)? Remember, for Google, it’s a matchmaking game. Help in creating the website content based on how a target audience perceives a business and optimizes the chances of becoming the end-destination for relevant search queries.
• Reviews Builds Reputation: Popularity is a strong ranking factor in search engines. When searching, the reviews combined with location, make a stronger chance for finding a relevant result.
• Consistency is Key: Having an updated address and basic company information is vital, as varying information across the internet can confuse Google (and the user) and incorrect business information may be shown, or worse — show a competing business.
• Natural Language: When users speak to, for example, a Google Assistant, they formulate search queries differently than in writing. Therefore, ensuring that the website copy is written using natural language and by making use of long tail keywords, increases the chance of relevance it has to a voice search query. Creating dedicated pages or blog posts based on frequently asked questions (FAQ) is a great example of natural language content.

From customer journey to brand loyalty, voice search has a clear impact on digital strategy including how customers use their website.

Structured data is also evolving to include even more types of data and data-driven interaction, such as scheduling, further blurring the line between what consumers interpret as voice search and digital voice assistance.

Voice search is a real and viable channel for businesses and brands to drive leads and convert customers. Combined with artificial intelligence (AI), voice search empowers intelligent and personalized answers for consumers.

To put it simply — business websites need to be more advanced than ever before and making use of structured data in the website is vital for small and enterprise businesses alike to succeed in being discovered via voice search.