Voice-First World - Is Your Content Ready?

20% of global searches are currently are voice-based. In next 2 years, by 2020, this number will increase to 50%. If that does not bother you as a content creator or marketer, I am not sure what will!

Search is changing, and so is the way consumers choose to engage with businesses locally or globally. There is a distinct move away from screens and keyboards, and into voice-based interactions. Voice-search is becoming a fast growing habit across consumer segments, and fundamentally transforming how people and businesses transact on the internet.

I am doing a webinar next week on why and how businesses should prepare their content to serve voice search. Here’s a bit of what I will be covering in depth:

Voice Search is Picking Pace

Consider this:

• comScore predicts that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by the year 2020.
• According to Technavio, the voice recognition market will be a massive $601 million industry by 2019.
• Christmas 2017, the Amazon Echo Dot was the best-selling holiday gift

All this point to the fact that the future of search is voice-first. This is primarily owing to the fact that voice search is user-friendly. Voice assistants fetch you one answer, the best answer, to your query. And you can get your answers without distracting yourself from anything else that you are doing simultaneously.

What Does That Mean for Businesses?

Given the increasing popularity of voice-search, In the absence of a visual interface, or a list of options, customers increasingly rely on the voice assistants’ first answer.

This interaction design severely limits your chances of getting in front of your customers. Businesses should expect steep fall in site traffic, brand awareness and engagement metrics if they are not prepare to serve voice-based search queries.

So, how do you serve voice search?

The answer to get your content ready to respond to voice based queries. While that might seem like an obvious next step, it does require significant planning and forward thinking. Also, it’s not as simple as feeding your existing content on web pages and blogs and ebooks into a VoiceBot database.

Let’s take a look at the key considerations to get your content ready for a voice-first world:

Voice-based content needs to be created differently

The way we speak and understand verbal communication is markedly different from the way we understand written information. The content you create to serve voice search has to conform to certain standards:

Concise: People have lower attention span for verbal information, especially in the absence of a face to anchor the conversation. While responding to voice-based queries, your content/ information snippet has to be one short answer, to ensure attention and retention.

Clarity: While voice-based answers have to be short, they also have to give enough information to make the answer clear and understandable.

Provide Context: Since voice-based content is only heard and not seen, all contextual interaction clues are missing. The context has to communicated verbally, to the user to know the next steps.

Voice-based content has to be optimized differently

Voice-search optimization is heavily focused on usability and creating an intuitive search experience. Some of the key tenets for voice optimization would be:

• Leveraging long-tail keywords: Because voice-search is easier, the search queries are more conversational and longer than typed queries. So long tail keywords, that perfectly align with user intent, should be targeted while preparing voice-based content.
• Featured snippets: Coming at the top of the search pages, even before rank one results, these snippets are very often used as the answer for voice searches. With only a few tweaks, it is possible to create segments in your content that be picked by Google as the featured snippet, thus increasing your chances of being the answer to a voice-search.
• Answer questions: Voice-searches are often articulated as specific questions. So creating shot content pieces that answer expected consumer questions is the best way to leverage voice-search. Even after offering an answer, voice assistants should prompt relevant expected questions, to lead users to other results.
• Use microdata markup: Markups like schema.org and Dublin Core can be used to mark-up your HTML code, to structure your metadata. Just like it works for text-based search, this markup can also optimize portions of your content to be picked to serve voice-based queries.

Voice-search is easy, convenient, and reliable - everything that customers want while they’re searching for something. They are fast moving to that mode of interaction and businesses have to keep up with that, if they wish stay relevant.

Join the webinar to get an in-depth view of how to get you content ready for voicebots

Voce-First World - Are Your Ready for the Bots?

26 September 2018 | 4-5 PM GMT

REGISTER NOW

You could also check out:

Blog: Owning Amazon Alexa Skills: Is Your Enterprise Keeping Up?