Alexa… why is voice search so important for content marketers?”
Whichever voice search service you have at home, your intuitive house mate has been used more than ever this year. With no signs of slowing down, you need to know how to harness the power of voice search for your content marketing.
Have You Used Voice Search in the Last 48 hours?
If you think about voice control, it’s not just on our phones today, but in our cars and homes, on our TVs and watches, it has subtly come into our daily lives.
In a recent report from September 2020, of 1,000 people asked, 80% of users are searching for product and service information, 70% are asking for information about specific brands and businesses, while 40% are buying products via voice.
On a global scale, around 8 billion people will be using digital assistants by 2023 with predications that 5 billion will be using voice by the end of this year.
What are People Using Voice Search to Do?
1 in 4 people are using voice search for fitness, health, retail, travel, food and drink areas and we’re becoming more familiar with it.
How Can You Integrate Voice Search into Content Marketing?
Firstly, wear your customers shoes, think about their problems and the solutions and what they may be asking using voice search. There are many tools that can help you listen to your customers, from Google Search Console to customer reviews.
With voice search, you need to focus on questions rather than keywords, simply because that’s how we use voice control. So more than ever, it’s important to think about the most natural form and how we communicate and connect with our audience.
The main difference between voice technology, compared to text-based search, is that when we say something out loud, we naturally ask full questions (because let’s face it, it’d be weird to just randomly shout out keywords).
Why Voice Search is Different?
Voice devices will only generally read out one answer; the answer it deems best answers the question. So, rather than replicating your usual aim to rank in the top 10 links of search engine results, you need to be at what’s coined ‘position zero’.
Position zero is above those top 10 links and is the only position the audio device will read out. In addition to this, different voice devices could give different results too.
How to Achieve Position Zero with Voice?
Using the content we are already creating with blogs, video content and podcasts, start with your usual key terms associated with your brand and then focus on questions, people may ask.
Most voice searches are looking for content, so focus on optimising your applications, video, and audio content to answer your customer’s questions. If you do this well, it becomes extremely powerful, as you’ll be the only result the device will present.
At the moment there is no advertising on these platforms so position zero has to be worked for organically, with quality and well-positioned content.
No matter how you decide to conduct voice marketing, your content must be helpful. The whole point of this technology is to provide quick and accurate information, so the algorithms are programmed to search for the most helpful answer.
Once you’ve developed a voice marketing strategy and started to create content, there aren’t many tools to track whether searches on your page are coming from voice devices. But don’t let this stop you!
A key indicator is whether long-tail, question-based keywords are driving people to your site. If this is the case, this traffic is likely coming from voice. Tools are being developed each day, so if you can start recognising voice traffic now, you’ll be ahead of the game once tracking tools are fully developed.
How Can You Keep Learning About Voice?
So, 2021 is the year of ‘voice’ and we need to keep learning from this. One of best ways to learn is to start using it yourself, see how and what you find it useful for.
Alexa has a resource and skills website, but it’s also good to set up Google alerts for ‘voice search’ so whenever there’s new stats or hints and tips released you get to know them.
Voice search is here to stay!
SocialB are an Award-winning digital marketing agency, specialising in digital marketing services and social media training.
