How to include voice search marketing in your overall strategy and get in on voice search results
You’ve almost certainly used some type of voice-assisted technology within the past few years — or maybe daily — whether as a navigational aid while driving, to run a smart house, or as a virtual office assistant. Voice-assisted technology, and now voice search marketing, has changed the landscape of how we live our personal and professional lives today, and find services via the internet and phone apps.
Estimates are that slightly more than 4 billion digital voice assistants were used on devices throughout the world in 2020, and it’s estimated to reach 8.4 billion units by 2024. There are approximately 110 million users of such devices in the United States alone.
Given the increase in the use of this technology, it should not be surprising to also see an increase in the number of searches being conducted via voice-enabled devices. Google found that approximately 27% of searches are now performed using voice search, such as, “Where is the nearest chiropractor?”
Voice search vs. text search
Voice search technology uses speech recognition software to identify what the user is saying and then translates it into a search that is then provided to the user. However, there are some distinct differences between a voice search and a text search in terms of search, your website, search results and customers finding you.
A voice search will be much more conversational and natural in tone than a text search. It may also be longer compared to a text search.
For example:
- Where is the nearest pizza place to me that delivers? — voice search
- Pizza delivery — text search
Long-tail keywords and tailoring your website
If you are looking to optimize voice searches, think about long-tail keywords, which are designed to capture the conversational nature of voice searches. Such keywords will tend to be longer than standard SEO keywords, which are based off text queries, and frequently target smaller search volumes so that they build over the long term.
Long-tail keywords have a couple of definitions on the web, and differ between short and longer SEO keywords, but they all target lower-volume searches. For example, a lower-volume search such as “chiropractors who specialize in orthopedics” (20 monthly searches) rather than “chiropractors near me” (550,000 monthly searches). If you’re a chiropractor who specializes in orthopedics, this search term connected to your website will grow in search volume over time.
“Keywords with fewer than 10 searches per month account for almost 95% of our U.S. keyword database. This should not really come as a surprise, given that 15% of daily Google searches are new and have never been searched before,” writes Tim Soulo of Ahrefs, the popular SEO education and search website. “But to qualify as ‘long-tail,’ a keyword doesn’t necessarily have to get fewer than 10 searches per month. And there’s no specific search volume threshold, which would define a keyword as ‘long-tail.’ It mostly depends on the ‘head’ keyword that you’re comparing it to. What is a big mistake, though, is to define long-tail keywords by their length in words. The thing is, there are many one-word keywords that get fewer than 100 monthly searches. There are also keywords five words long (or more) with hundreds of thousands of monthly searches.”
Long-tail keywords, as seen in the example above, are also often answers to specific questions that are posed in voice searches. One way to incorporate answers to these questions is to incorporate them into your existing website content.
For example:
- Blog posts discussing your menu of services
- A contact page with your location, address, phone number, email and social media links
- A FAQ page with common questions asked about chiropractic care
In other words, the more specific your content can be, the more likely that it will be able to come up in response to voice searches.
Think locally
The majority of voice searches are done locally, and on mobile devices. One marketing survey discovered that 56% of voice searches are conducted on smartphones. The same study also found that 46% of voice search users were looking for local businesses.
If you decide to capture some of that market, you will need to look at how to make your digital marketing campaign more mobile-friendly and tailored toward voice search marketing.
Some ways in which to do this might include:
- Redesigning your website to load in a mobile-friendly fashion
- Improving your website’s loading time
- Partnering with complementary local businesses, such as yoga studios or health food stores, to promote each other
No matter how you look at it, our society is becoming faster-paced, with greater mobility, and the use of voice-assisted technology, including voice searching, is part of that shift toward connectivity. Incorporating voice search marketing into your digital marketing planning will help you stay abreast of this rapidly changing shift in online technology, and you won’t see your website (and efforts) getting left behind.
TINA BEYCHOK is a freelance writer for Chiropractic Economics.
