“1 in 6 Americans now own a Smart Speaker”
“20% of mobile queries are now voice-based.”
“By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice-based.”
These voice search statistics present a compelling fact – voice assistants like Alexa, Cortana, on Google Assistant are going to drive the digital businesses of today’s times. So if you are a forward-looking marketer, it is necessary to build content optimisation practices into your voice search offerings, so that you can be comfortably ahead of the curve as the technology expands exponentially. SEO experts suggest making use of existing resources to spruce up the voice search’s efficacy delivered to a brand. Below are three key ways in which this can be done.
1 – Don’t ignore the power of featured snippets
In keeping sync with the natural language mandate for voice search, featured snippets are improving every passing day. These snippets are used by the voice assistant to read out contextual, authoritative, and helpful information in the form of answers to voice commands. Here is a workflow to earn featured snippets on a broad range of topics and questions.
- Find trending or frequent questions that are predominantly asked in your market sector.
- Assess the most suitable, relevant, and interesting topic out of the above for your brand.
- Now that you have narrowed down an elite list of “target question”, you can now create a bunch of closely related and relevant questions that users may be interested in.
- Now you know which questions are likely to pop up, you can write a detailed content that answers most of these questions in an interconnected way.
2 – Build a skill
Skills or actions are a set of steps that the voice assistant is trained to perform in response to a particular query. They can be compared to mobile apps in terms of usage or functionalities. With a good tech expert working by your side, it becomes easier to build skills for a range of functions.
Even though there are thousands of skills (on Amazon) and Actions (on Google) available, there are still huge avenues available for developers to build skills for specific functionality, features, or action for your specific brand.
3 – Build persona models for voice apps
Marketers know the importance of segmenting the target audience based on their persona. It makes targeting easier with the help of personalised marketing messages and ads. There is a similar underlying principle associated with building a persona for voice apps.
A good voice assistant is sure to have a distinct persona that is different from the other platforms, and yet consistently same across all devices on its own platform. Developers can target characteristics like gender, voice modulation, and inherent aspects (extrovert or introvert for example) to build unique personalities for their voice apps.
With these tips, you can optimise your existing content to target the voice users. With this, it becomes easier to target voice users and improve your brand visibility among your intended audience.
