Being an Early Digital Adopter Part 4: The Voice Search Edition

We’ve reached the final part of our exciting four-part blog series “Being an Early Digital Adopter”. In our first instalment, we discussed the pros and cons of being an early adopter of digital marketing technologies: Early Digital Adoption Part 1: How To Get Ahead of Your Competition. This was followed by our second blog post which looked at Natural Language Programming (NLP) and how this concept relates to conversational marketing. In case you missed that one, you can read more on this here: Early Digital Adoption Series Part 2: The NLP Edition. The third article, Early Digital Adoption Series Part 3: The Video Edition, looked at the importance of implementing video as an integral part of your digital marketing system.

In this instalment, we are looking at a relatively new aspect of digital marketing – voice search. Though voice search has been around for many years (Google Voice Search was initially released in 2012), it has only gained popularity in the last few years, and until recently it hasn’t been something marketers have primarily optimised their websites for. Optimising for voice search was slated by many as an important strategy for digital marketers in 2020. If you’re not already optimising for voice search, you should think about doing so because your competitors might already be doing this – and if they’re not, you’ll benefit by being one step ahead of them.

How to optimise your website for voice search

In a recent blog post, we explained how you can optimise your ecommerce website for voice search. This includes optimising your website for mobile, improving your site speed, and using longtail keywords, questions, phrases and natural language throughout your content. Optimising for featured snippets will also help you gain more traction from voice search, and Moz offers a comprehensive guide for doing this. Finally, schema markup will also help Google to understand the content on your website, which can give you more visibility both on SERPs and in voice search. We offer more tips in our blog post “Is Your Website Ready for the Voice Search Boom?”

The importance of conversational content

There is a running theme here highlighting the importance of conversational content. We previously discussed conversational marketing in our second instalment of this series, where we explored the difference between push and pull marketing, and the later transition to marketing interactions becoming more like conversations between two humans, rather than a business broadcasting about their wares. We explained that Natural Language Programming (NLP) helps to facilitate conversations through chatbots, and the idea arises again when talking about voice search. As the way people phrase questions when speaking differs to how they search when typing, the case for conversational marketing is strengthened by highlighting its importance for voice search.

Speaking personally, the more I have read, written about and worked within digital marketing over the years, the more apparent it has become that there is a huge amount of overlap between disciplines. We know that creating SEO content can help the same landing pages to gain a higher quality score in your PPC campaigns targeted towards those keywords. We know that your website should be the central hub for all your content, with channels such as social media platforms ultimately leading users back to your site where they can make a transaction. And similarly, we know that optimising for featured snippets can help with both traditional searches and voice search. We know long-tail keywords can positively affect your SEO anyway, before we factor in voice. And page speed and mobile responsiveness have been important for good SEO for a long time now. This all means that you may already be taking steps towards optimising for voice search without realising it. If you know you need to make improvements in any of these areas, their effect on voice search should be a further reason to do so. By optimising for voice search you may be improving your website in other ways, and vice versa. There’s no better time to consider how you can improve your website both for voice search and SEO as a whole, in order to keep up with and overtake your competitors.

We hope this blog series has helped you to decide where to focus your digital marketing efforts next, or to identify any new areas where you may just be beginning to optimise your website. If you would like help with any of the issues raised here, or any other aspect of your digital marketing system, get in touch with SilverDisc.