Where I work, I've been tasked to research voice search options to implement into our overall marketing strategy.
Lots of research has been done and corresponding data has been released over the last several years about voice searching and its place within society and marketing strategies.
Here are some of those figures:
- Google reports that 27% of the online global population is using voice search on mobile.
- A Gartner study predicts that 30% of all browsing sessions will include voice search by 2020.
- According to Google, 52% of smart speaker owners keep them in a common room such as a living room. 25% of these people keep them in their bedroom, while 22% keep a smart speaker assistant in their kitchen. Among smart speaker owners who regularly use them, 62% will make a purchase using voice technology.
- A 2018 study from BrightLocal found that 58% of consumers used voice search to find a local business in 2017, and 46% of people using voice search daily are searching for local business.
- According to an Adobe Analytics survey, the most common voice searches on smart speakers are asking for music (70%) and the weather forecast (64%), followed by fun questions (53%), online search (47%), news (46%), and asking directions (34%).
In other words, voice searching is on the rise.
There are several companies that walk you through the process in getting set up, how to update, how to access analytics insights and more. This is not a pitch for either of those. But when I was looking through options, I noticed some companies are more difficult than others in terms of how to set up your profile. One company I found lets you make a refundable down payment so you can speak with a marketing expert for onboarding. That person will walk you through the process of set up, integration and analytics. Then you can make a decision to proceed or not. I suggest finding a company that does that, especially if you're someone like me that is new to the side of the technology.
But when thinking about voice search, it got me thinking again about SEO, or search engine optimization.
During that onboarding, the company finds out from you what keywords you'd like to use to help trigger your result when someone does a voice search. That's why I got thinking about SEO.
Search results focus on keywords. The most common way to address SEO is through a process called on-site SEO. That is where you have keywords and/or phrases directly on your website. When someone puts in a search term or phrase, Google crawls websites that are indexed (which you do through Google Search Console, a free tool) to help the person potentially find what they're looking for. The on-site SEO is one of the easiest SEO fixes one can make.
Another way to improve your SEO is working on external strategy, such as through email marketing or social media marketing. Sending links via email or posting direct links on social media are other ways to drive traffic to your website.
An extension of the external strategy is doing something called a website audit.
There are several free or paid-for companies that offer website audit services that can scan your website for detectable errors. Those errors can include:
Site auditing tools can scan your site for important search ranking factors such as:
- broken links
- indexing
- page speeds
- page headings
Click here for an in-depth look at SEO Best Practices by DBS Interactive (FYI. It is a long read.)
Also, an audit can tell you your website's health through a score. Click here to read more about website health scores and why they're important.
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