Do you know that Google stated that every 5th search made by mobile is made by voice and the numbers of voice searches are only going to increase by 2020? It makes it clear that the audio searches in the future are going to be more intuitive, natural, and more vocal.
There are a lot of voice assistance devices that are hitting the market, and voice tech is getting more advanced and natural. The current Google voice search is 95% accurate. You must have heard the popular voice assistance names like Amazon Alexa, Google Home, but there are many others such as Windows 10 Cortana, Apple Siri, etc.
Currently, the Google voice search is dominating the voice-search industry therefore, more and more online shops are deciding to benefit from this trend.
77% of U.S. adults have started relying on voice search for their daily tasks due to the COVID-19 lockdown, as per the Spring 2020 Smart Audio Report
The number of voice-assistant users has increased from 46% to 52% during the Coronavirus outbreak and this trend is going to stay and there will be a significant increase in voice search in ecommerce industry in the upcoming years.
As you are reading this article, you must have been wandering for how you can leverage voice search for your ecommerce and how you can optimize your ecommerce store for the voice search trend? In this article, we will guide you to prepare your ecommerce store for the voice search and get the best out of it.
How Voice Search changed the traditional way of searching?
A customer can have a very different way of searching through the voice search in comparison to how he used to search traditionally. Suppose a customer wants to buy a pair of Nike shoes. In traditional search, he would have simply written a phrase like “Nike Shoes”. However, in a voice search, he is more likely to use a conversational phrase such as “Hey Google, I want to buy Nike Shoes” or “Hey Google, show me where I can purchase a pair of Nike Shoes” or you can enquire about the weather “Ok Google, how is the weather today”
As per the PPC report, users are more likely to search their queries or questions for the answers in voice search. Hence, you can consider the voice search to be a top-funnel activity. It implies that you can aware of the new customers of your store but the basis on what you are selling, it will not always result in immediate purchases. For this, you should have a plan to follow-up with website visitors after they find you.
How to prepare your online ecommerce store for the Voice Searches?
If a customer searches for a particular product or service that you are offering, and you want to be discoverable, then what changes you must follow to make sure they can find you?
Firstly, you should be followed the proper search engine optimization techniques, and are already providing a good user experience. More or less, even a voice search is ultimately a search, if your site appears in the search engine result pages (SERP), then you are more likely to be found by the users. Here are some strategies that you can adopt for your online store:
1. Questions are part of most audio searches
As mentioned above, most of the voice searches are in the form of questions rather than the usual phrases. So if a user wants to buy shoes near his home or office, he will search “Hey Google, where is a shoe store near me?” So you need to consider such facts while optimizing your site for voice searches. You can structure your content like blog posts, FAQ pages, etc. in such a way that they can answer the queries of your target audience instead of just considering keywords or phrases.
You need to also pay attention to the “trigger words” for voice searching and include them too in your content. Some of the general trigger words are how, what, best, where, top, free, new, who, when, why, types, do, etc.
It essentially means that you have to target the long-tail keywords which may have low search volume, but also quite less competition. You can think logically about the questions that one may think while searching for your products. You can also use the Google Analytics tool for determining the impact of voice search on your ecommerce store and getting keyword ideas. It may be tricky to find out the exact stats of how many users are landing on your store using the voice search, there are a few things you can also look for…
- Conversational Keywords: If the keyword searches show plenty of conversational keywords, then it is an indicator that the searches were made using the voice.
- Queries Length: If you aren’t able to find the exact keyword data, then you can check the length of the queries. Longer queries length represents that they are maybe of voice searches.
2. Aim for Featured Snippets
Snippets are a highly important factor that can drive your ecommerce business. A featured snippet is actually the zero-result for a Google Search and places it higher than any other search result in a query. You must have come across them but are unlikely to observe them. When a browser, like Google, takes a clip from a website and then highlights it, in its own box for answering any question or responding to a request, those were the snippets. Here’s an example:
It is a highly valuable feature as the user tends to open a snippet box first than any other search results. But yes requires a very high level of SEO. You can’t make the search engine to feature your site. The AI assistants behind voice search are programmed to use the featured snippets which search engines feed to them as the meat of their response to a question from a human.
Hence, if there is a snippet for a voice-search result the snippet and the website it comes from are what Google Assistant and Siri will read back to its users.
Amazon Alexa doesn’t come under this, as it is Amazon-driven and will deliver the Amazon shopping results, but the general web search is not its forte. There are many different ways of landing position zero. You can structure your content to answer the common search queries on any targeted topic. You should also look at the high-performing pages in the analytic results for identifying which pages are having potential for position zero.
Apart from answering the queries, you need to incorporate the relevant keywords in the URL of the page, plus the H1 tag. STAT found that featured snippet URLs included an exact match query in the tag 21% more often than regular results.
3. Improve the structure of your website
When the data on your ecommerce website is properly structured it gives information to the search for indexing your site. This strategy gives you higher search engine rankings, as Google is now using structured data the most.
For e.g. reviews. You must have encountered with the stars shown below the site in Google results like this:
This is the result of schema markup implementation on the website. You can clearly check that there is a review score provided with the number of reviewers. You can implement many different schemas.
4. Enlist your products on Google Shopping
Google voice search, as mentioned above, is the most widely used voice search among the users. Hence, when the customer does a Google voice search or uses Google Assistant (Google Home), so for your products easily discoverable by the users you can enlist them on Google Shopping. There are many extensions available for different ecommerce platforms that can sync the products of your online store to Google Shopping. Those extensions can map the product data, content, price, variations, etc. It will also save you precious time and eliminate any additional resources for managing the products on different channels.
5. Create a well-mannered FAQ Page
It may initially sound weird as FAQ Pages are getting obsolete and many companies have stopped using it. But still, many ecommerce stores persist to use FAQ pages redundantly. The FAQ pages can save your time as you can easily list down all the potential questions that a customer can ask on a single page which is more easy and less energy-consuming. Implementing your FAQs with structured data is also a good idea.
You can even stuff all the keywords on a FAQ page without looking odd. When someone searches on a Search Engine for something using voice, the questions are quite closer to the ones listed on a FAQ page.
Also Read: How To Develop A Mobile-Friendly eCommerce Website
6. Implement voice search into your ecommerce store as well
You should not only rely on the voice search of the search engine but also integrate it into your ecommerce online store too. If your ecommerce store comprises of thousands of products and you want to provide a streamline experience to the users, you need to use an AI-enabled voice search option in your menu or search bar that will cleanly take your customers where they want to be in your site.
You need to understand the logic, as your customers are coming from the voice search they will definitely expect from your ecommerce to get their products without requiring their fingers to tap on the screen. There are also chances that when you will optimize the content of your site for voice search, you will unconsciously do the same job for the search engines that your customer will make.
It would be great if you can combine the voice search of your site to the customer service feature such as voice-activated chatbot to conveniently and easily answer your customers’ questions and complaints.
Also Read: How AI Chatbots Are Benefiting The eCommerce Industry?
7. Register your business on Google My Business
You can provide all the relevant information about your business to Google, such as website, location, products, etc. by Google My Business. Hence, when a user searches for your business, the results appear on the top of the mobile screen and voice search. It is easy to Sign up on Google My Business but it requires verification, so you shouldn’t expect quick results. It’s also important to keep your profile up-to-date since users rely on accurate data.
8. Not every voice search is the same
Currently, there are many different popular devices which are offering voice search features. However, they are not the same and don’t use Google search by default. They come with the ability to change the default search engine by users, but most users don’t change. These are the default browsers of some of the popular search devices:
- Apple Siri: Apple Inc.
- Microsoft Cortana: Bing
- Google Assistant: Google
- Amazon Alexa: Amazon
You can understand that there is no single strategy for voice search preparation. You need to analyze what your audience most use. But alike with traditional SEO, you can put all your efforts into the Google Search engine optimization. However, check your own site’s data as well as the trends of your target demographic to determine your focus.
9. Use Social Media and Customer Services for Research
For preparing your site to the voice search, you need to find what are the questions people are asking, what expressions they’re using, and how they use the language for finding out the products your site is offering. It may ostensibly seem quite cryptic but, fortunately, there are plenty of solutions to this problem.
You can leverage social media for finding out what is that your customers are looking for. It provides a direct link between the customers and the ecommerce company. It can work like an in-store conversation that people have in the brick and mortar stores. If you use social media prudently, you can begin to paint a pretty clear, verbal image of how people are discussing your products which you can then use to make your content match.
Final Words
You must have got a clear image of how voice technology can be influential for your ecommerce business. It has become a part of the customers’ daily life and is transforming the traditional way of searching on the web and on smartphones. If you’re looking to keep up with consumers voicing out their search queries, now is the time to do it. We at Emizentech, are having a very wide experience of developing ecommerce websites and mobile apps with trending ecommerce technology ranging from Augmented Reality, Chatbots, to Voice search. Let us know your ecommerce store requirements and we deliver you the best you can imagine.
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