A parent asks a smart speaker in the kitchen to look up a recipe for baked halibut as dinner hour approaches. At work, a senior manager speaks to a virtual assistant to troubleshoot an issue with a business application. While tinkering in a garage, a hobbyist calls out to their smartphone and orders some replacement parts for a motorcycle.
It’s hard to imagine an easier or more convenient customer experience than voice search. After decades of having to type in the most common questions and look up information, we’re reaching a point where it’s possible to interact with technology as though we were speaking with a friend or family member.
Five years ago, a national survey found roughly 40% of English Canada was already using voice search, and about a third of French Canadians were doing the same. That was before a slew of smart devices and applications became voice enabled through technologies such as natural language processing, which sets the stage for even greater adoption.
The rise of voice search creates a huge opportunity for marketers who want to ensure they’re engaging with customers and prospects at the time of need. In many ways, voice search makes reaching out to a brand more accessible than ever before. Even when you’re driving a car, for instance, voice search offers a viable way to get the answers from a brand that customers might need.
Optimizing for voice search is not unlike the way marketing teams once had to refresh or revise their website content based on search engine optimization (SEO) in order to be ranked by the likes of Google and Bing.
Whether they use Apple’s Siri, Google’s Alexa or other forms of virtual assistants, responding to voice search queries should be a priority for marketing departments. These are some of the steps you should take if you haven’t already gotten started:
Determine the customer journeys that will involve voice search
If your brand primarily offers products to be enjoyed outdoors in nature, a lot of the voice search queries may happen on mobile devices. There are other customer journeys where customers will be calling out questions in a public gym, their living rooms, a boardroom, bedrooms or even the bathroom.
These details matter because depending on where they are, customers may be multitasking or more distracted than when they’re typing a search into a desktop browser. The better you understand the context in which voice searches happen, the more you’ll be able to develop content that saves people time and provides the key details they need (by making content more mobile-friendly, for example).
Align natural-sounding content with the right keywords
Brands often spend a lot of time on establishing the right tone in their messaging. As more people shift to voice search, however, the terms brands use might have to be replaced with what you hear in everyday speech.
This could be as simple as adding a phrase like “near me” to the products and services you carry, since customers might be looking for options while they’re on the go. Talk to your team, such as your customer service agents, to get a sense of the most common questions people ask and weave them into the content you publish through digital channels.
Focus on the way people talk to people. They tend to use sentences that begin with “How can I,” “Where can I” and “What’s the best,” among others. They might also issue commands such as “Find,” “Play” or “Show me.”
Developing content based on conversational long-tail keywords is a great exercise – not only to power voice searches, but to put yourself in the minds of your customers and deepen your understanding of what they want and expect.
Develop content experiences that work like Q&As
Imagine someone asks you a complicated question. Your initial answer might only be a sentence or two. Then you realize you need to provide more background and detail to prove you know what you’re talking about. The responses you offer to voice searches should have a similar feel.
Instead of leading people to a traditional section of your website that will require them to dig deeper, for instance, consider setting up a landing page that summarizes the essential facts for them at a glance. You can then provide much more comprehensive resources if they need it.
Optimizing for voice search means thinking holistically about everything on a page of web content. The headlines you use, for example, could echo the kind of questions a person might ask. Editing down blocks of texts into bullet points or shorter, concise responses should also be on your to-do list.
Meet customers where they are by localizing responses
When customers turn to voice search, they are doing so within a particular place. They may be Canadian, but their needs might reflect a more specific part of the country’s geography.
For certain searches this could mean optimizing content to highlight products and services you offer at a provincial level. In other cases you might want to include municipalities where customers tend to look up brands like yours.
The more localized you can be, the more relevant you’ll be when people conduct a voice search.
Beyond the tips mentioned above, make sure you get all the digital fundamentals right. These include having a site with pages that load quickly, with schema markup that is easy for search engines to index, and that is responsive across a variety of device types.
The proliferation of smart speakers, wearables, and other forms of embedded computing will only make voice searches more common in the years to come. It’s how you’ll literally be “hearing” from your customers. Be ready to show you’re listening, and ready to help.
