Optimizing Your Ecommerce Site for Voice Search
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Maddie Davis is a co-founder of Enlightened-Digital and tech-obsessed female from the Big Apple. She lives by building and redesigning websites, running marathons, and reading anything and everything on the NYT Best Sellers list. |
Times are changing and that includes the way we’re searching for products online. As technology becomes more accessible and traditional tasks are reinvented for greater convenience, consumers are choosing to use voice for their queries and questions over traditional text-based searches. To remain successful in e-commerce, brands must adapt to meet these new demands. Here are a couple quick tips to get you to get started.
Putting your brand at the forefront of voice search results requires a new strategy than in years past. As more and more voice-activated devices hit the market, voice technology is continuing to mature and therefore alter how queries are interpreted by search engines. Achieving a strong placement in voice search results begins with understanding just how these searches are formatted.
For the simple fact that people speak differently than they type, it’s important to consider the variances between forming a typed query and a spoken one. “When people use voice search, it’s only logical to assume that they enter a query similar to how they speak in real life—typing requires more time, thus, we shorten our queries to the very minimum, whereas speaking doesn’t require much effort,” says SEMrush Content Producer and PR Manager Meri Chobanyan. This assumption is the key reasoning for adjusting your content to answer consumers questions, rather than just focusing on keywords or phrases. According to seoClarity, incorporating trigger words such as “how,” “what,” and “best” into your content is best for meeting these requirements, as is mixing up terminology to cover all potential ways of phrasing a question.
When in doubt, always revert to the most natural form of speech for voice search. Keeping in mind 41 percent of people who own a voice-activated speaker say it feels like talking to a friend or another person, you create content that can satisfy queries of the most relevant, natural phrasing.
Going beyond how people are searching, fully optimizing your site for voice search means being aware of what people are searching for. Research shows, 75 percent of smart speaker owners perform searches for local businesses on a weekly basis and up to 53 percent say they perform these searches every day. These numbers increase the importance of optimizing your site for the thousands of people searching each day.
To fully capitalize on the demand for local results, crafting web content that covers the entirety of your product or service offering is essential. Focusing on long-tail keywords that can answer localized search queries such as ‘where can I find art supplies in Portland?’ is especially important for local retailers. Should a Portland art store include the phrase ‘find art supplies in Portland’ in their web content, the chances of them claiming a top spot in this localized voice search greatly increases?
2020 is the projected year for voice search to fully take over text. In the time leading up until then, the competition for good placements is only going to increase. To best serve your customers in this sense, It’s important to figure out what works best for your business, simplify usability on your platform with tools like CS-Cart, and stay up to date on the latest in search trends and technology. Fully optimizing for voice search is certainly going to be an ongoing process with lots of trial and error, however, we hope this information helps in your preparation.
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Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.