By Ashwin Ramesh, SynupVoice search: two words that makes it feel like we’re all part of a sci-fi movie. We're all living in the age of convenience where we can turn to our smartphones, ask about something, and make decisions that affect our everyday lives; by extension, voice search is enabling consumers to make informed purchase decisions.
Consumers are asking for local information like directions, help with recipes, movie schedules, eateries around them, you name it.
Every business owner out there needs to ensure that their business is ready for this transformation in the realm of search. You have to think in terms of making your business information discoverable.
But before we go any further, how are consumers using voice search?
Understanding consumer search habits can make it easier for you to map out the customer journey and help you create a plan of action. Here are some important insights you need to know about how voice search influences consumers:
- Consumer search has become “intent-based”. That is, they have preconceived intentions before they search for something online. This applies to voice search as well.
- People are searching for local information more and more to make informed purchase decisions. This also includes local business information like address, contact details, working hours, product availability, etc.
- Consumers expect answers that need to be absolutely relevant. They want information to aptly aid their process of discovery.
- Consumers are also starting to use search to make personal decisions. They are interacting with voice-enabled assistants and voice search to answer questions like “How often should I wash my hair”, or “How much money do I need to retire?” Search is turning out to be a personal advisor.
- Consumers are also looking for preset shopping lists and ideas (example: gift ideas for mother’s day). This shows that they are turning to search for ideas and inspiration as well.
These are some of the important search habits that you need to know about. This is also aided by the increase in usage of smartphones and their ubiquity; the rise of voice-enabled assistants like the Google Assistant, SIRI, Alexa and Cortana, people are far more attached to their mobile devices.
But if you think about what all of this represents, you’ll see that with search, consumers are becoming more and more empowered when it comes to making purchase decisions. And presently, no query is too trivial or small for search.
So, here’s the important question: what do you do to leverage these search habits to reach your customer. Your to-do’s range somewhere between “quite simple” and “How on earth do I do that?”
Here are some ways you can try to reach your Indian Consumers by leveraging voice search:
Get your business listed
You MUST get your business listed on directories, listing sites and social media sites to help your business scale for voice search.
Voice search (including searches conducted with voice-enabled assistants) fetches business information that appears on directories and social media sites like Zomato, Google My Business, Justdial, MagicBricks, etc.
You should make sure that all your business information is completely listed, and more importantly, you need to make sure that your business information is accurate and consistent across these sites.
Build your reviews
Now, listings are important but they won’t add to your voice search opportunities if you don’t have a good star rating.
If you take a look at the results that appear on your devices, you’ll find all the businesses that appear have a good star rating with positive reviews.
This helps search engines decide what the best options are out there for users. So, business owners need to make sure that they focus on review generation for the business.
Incorporate long tail keywords into your strategy
Let’s talk about your keyword strategy. You need to focus on long tail keywords as opposed to what you’re used to if you’re looking at voice search.
This is simply because the nature of search queries are different when they are typed out and when they are spoken. Voice search is very conversational like this. In pushing your existing keyword efforts in the “long tail” direction, you’re bound due north in terms of voice search. The task lies in finding keyword ideas to begin with.
Here’s a useful tip. Aside from the obvious long tail keywords, bring your focus to personal search queries as well.
For example, the business owner of a local restaurant will most probably be focused on keywords like “best restaurants in *area*”, or “restaurants near me”.
But it would help them get a clear shot at voice search queries if they adopt long tail keywords that are based on personal search queries like “Where can I find good affogato nearby?” or “Is it OK if I colour my hair?” If you use these kinds of keywords to scale, you are bound to appear on voice searches.
Add local schema markup to your websites
Simply put, adding schema markup (or structured data) on your website will help search engines understand your website content and how it needs to be presented.
As a result of this, you see neatly presented information in the search results that stands out amongst the other search results. Most marketers call it “position zero” as opposed to ranking first on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
There are different types of structured data that you can add to your website that will help search engines decide what your information will be presented as on the SERPs.
Be multilingual for Indian consumers
Unlike the western counterparts of the search environment, India is a melting pot of cultures, and that means that Indian consumers are multilingual. And this quality extends to the search habits as well; business owners need to make sure that they cater to non-English search queries as well.
Google has recognised this and added eight more languages other than Hindi for voice. If business owners want to prepare for the future that voice search is ushering in, they need to leverage opportunities with non-English keywords as well.
Optimize for Mobile
In order to complete a full lap in the voice search circuit, you need to make sure that you are mobile-first. This is mainly due to the influence of rampant mobile device usage that has aided in the growth of voice search in India.
This year has seen a formidable mobile phone usage among 340 million Indians. And the number of people using internet-enabled smart devices has grown by 28% this year. With respect to search engines, Google announced in December 2017 that their search algorithms will primarily use the mobile version of a website to rank on SERPs.
It’s about time business owners take the mobile-first index seriously if they want to scale for voice search.
Voice Search is the future
Making business information and any other related content voice-search-ready is imperative as it is only going to help businesses scale-up in terms of discovery.
Even though voice search is still in its nascent stages in India, it is going to be the future of search among Indian consumers. Business owners need to get on board now.
(Ashwin Ramesh is the founder and CEO of Synup. Views expressed above are his own)