How can your business prepare for Voice Search in 2019 and beyond?

How can your business prepare for Voice Search?

By Jill Lush

What is Voice Search?

There’s lots of talk about Voice Search and making sure your business is ready for it.  According to Forbes: “Voice search essentially allows users to speak into a device as opposed to typing keywords into a search query to generate results. Audio technology uses speech recognition to understand what users are saying with extreme precision. It then delivers results orally to the user.”

What does this mean for your business?

Good question!  It means that if users are no longer typing in key words to a search engine, such as Google, they are speaking their request to the likes of Alexa or Siri.  So, what does this mean for your business?  Your website at the moment might be built for certain words, called key words, to be picked up when search engines crawl the web.  However, the content might not be written in a conversational tone.  What we mean by this is you might type in a search differently to how you speak it.

For example, you might type into the search engine “Dublin weather forecast”.  Whereas when you ask the question orally, you might ask “what is the weather like in Dublin today?”  See the difference!  If your website content is written in a more conversational tone, then the search engine can match the users question and answer a bit easier.

How can I make these changes?

Quite easily thankfully!  If your website doesn’t have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on your website, it might be time to introduce one.  If you already have one, then review the questions and make sure the questions and answers are in a more conversational tone and natural.  This will help to capture the voice search results.

If you don’t want an FAQ section on your website, then make sure the rest of the content is covering types of questions and answers that your customers are looking for.  If you’re not sure what your customers are searching for, then ask them!

Be sure to use heading and sub-headings in your content.

If you have a local business make sure you’re listed with Google my Business.  This will help local searches to find you easier.

Why is Voice Search important?

Voice search is becoming more important in the world of the internet.  Predictions indicate that voice search is significantly on the rise – as much as 50% of searches are predicted to be voice in 2020 (next year!).  However, adoption of this function is a little slower than anticipated.  SUMO Heavy carried out some research in the United States recently.  They found that nearly half of respondents never use virtual assistants (i.e. voice search), but nearly 30% were using it daily or weekly.  The other 20% were rarely using it.

However, as a human race, we can be slow at adopting some technology changes.  So, being prepared for when Voice Search is more common will have your business ready.

There are already millions of queries coming through on the likes of smartphones and smart speakers.  If your website is not optimised to help the user find their answers, then you could be missing out on potential or future business.

Also keep in mind that virtual assistants will read the first result of a search and rarely get a chance to read out any further than that.  The importance of ranking high in search engines is becoming even more important for your business. Make sure your content is useful to the user/searcher.

Need some help?

No problem!  Helping customers to overhaul content on their website is something that offer.  Your website and its content should be part of your overall marketing strategy.  So many of our customers believe that once their website is built that they can leave it for years untouched.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  Your website content needs to be constantly reviewed and updated to keep your business relevant, especially with the increases in voice search.

Get in touch with us and we’ll help.

Jill Lush is the owner of Lush Marketing – www.lushmarketing.ie and happily wrote this article for Irishtech News.

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