Owners, it’s Time to buckle up from Text Based Search to Voice Search

Today, with the continuous emergence of technologies like mobile personal assistants, Amazon Echo, Google Home, Cortana, there’s no doubt in the fact that voice search is on the rise. At present consumers can send text messages while driving or make use of a mobile personal assistant to complete simple actions. According to Gartner, around 30% of searches will be conducted without a screen by 2020 out of which voice search will account nearly 50% of searches too!

About Voice Search

Voice Search is a mixture of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text-to-speech (TTS). In simple words, it is used to recognize and process a user’s voice search request. As soon as the user’s voice is recognized and parsed, the search query is entered into a huge database that intends to come up with the most relevant answer, reverted back to the user’s device.

Being a professional, one must think of adjusting your current way of thinking and employ new techniques that allow voice search to command your content results. The moment you have mastered the technology, I am sure you will fully learn regarding its advantages and how to match the content in order to make the most of it.

Down below I would like to shed some light on the few ways to optimize your content for the voice search revolution.

1. Create content that talks back
   With the increasing use of voice search, a query or command gets a response: "Alexa, order more yogurt." "Siri, where is the nearest park?" So come up with something that keeps the conversation going, rather than ends it.
   
   
2. Focus on mobile search
   Meeting a consumer’s demand is your job, so find better ways for it! There are certain keywords that will be used very often via voice search than traditional. Make sure you find such keywords in prior. In fact, use keywords built around the following: "when," "how," "what," "who," etc. Always keep this in mind that most of them will be used in mobile searches.
   
   
3. Add FAQs
   As more and more search queries come from voice search, the number of questions searched through Google will continue to rise. Simple Q&A style content is well equipped for meeting user intent for queries like this. I am sure you must have come across Quora, a website based on user-submitted questions and answers. Its tremendous SEO results are largely considered as a by-product of their Q&A format.
   
   Most pages on Quora are geared for long-tail keywords, and the responses are often of high quality and well written. These are the crucial factors which play a big role in bringing Quora to the top of search results time and time again.
   
   
4. Thinking like a marketer, not anymore!
   Marketers always tend to share their news far and wide. On the other hand, voice engagement is the antithesis to these kinds of interruptive, overt push messages. In order to optimize your brand for voice search, it is very important for you to think like the customer. What provides them value? What do they need? After all, no one would like to speak to their devices for some kind of marketing messages. Think service first and optimization will naturally follow.
   
   
5. Optimize for More than Google
   Have you ever made use of iPhone’s application Siri? Take any task into account, from finding a restaurant nearby to buy latest apparels online, Siri will return a list from Yelp. This is one of the best examples of how voice search extends outside of Google, and as a business, you may need to be optimizing your listings in places other than just Google.

For instance, Amazon optimization is becoming increasingly important as Echo becomes a go-to device for ordering products with voice search. One must examine how users are finding your products and services with voice search. Maybe it might be time to position your offerings on different platforms.

There is a long way to go…

The rise of voice search deserves your attention and action. It’s still one piece of your content marketing strategy. Just keep this in mind that create content that helps solve your audience’s problems.

By creating quality, conversational and structured content, you won’t just optimize your content for voice search, but for the future, too. Why? Because voice search is not the end of the search revolution.

[Ed:] To learn more about the author, visit her Experts Exchange Profile Page