How Voice Searching Will Affect Your SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing Plans

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How Voice Searching Will Affect Your SEO, PPC and Social Media Marketing Plans

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All the questions you traditionally type search into Google, could you ask them aloud? This is done through voice search. We will be analysing how this will affect your SEO, PPC and Social Media Plans

A Survey in to Google carried out by NorthStar Research discovered that 55% if teenagers and 41% of adults use voice search more than once a day. Recent studies have predicted that voice recognition will double in the next 5 years.

Regardless of how you see it, it is evident to see that your future customers will be verbally asking about your product/service, as opposed to typing it into a search engine. This is a great change for search marketers and engines. While Google, Amazon and Microsoft passing this changes in the market, they are also influencing the way people use their services.

Google who has been the leader of search innovation for years has made it clear that this is their next logical step in evolution. They have consistently added and altered their technology to further understand what we are putting into their engine. With voice search, we are not simple typing In questions and getting answers back- we are having literal conversations with something, with is also amazing and scary.

How Do We Plan, Perform, and Report On What Users Are Asking Their Devices?

From a commentary angle, Google implied in the previous year that voice search reporting will be arriving to search console search analytics report, however there is no specific time on when that will start. Google and other engines already gather this data; they just haven’t found a way to describe the problems yet, so we, could still be looking at a long time until this ability arises.

How Will This Affect You?

The real issue we want to know is; How will this impact all of us going forward and how our users interact with us?

Whilst there will be a movement away from screens, the voice search will not eradicate screens- similarly how mobile did not eradicate desktop. They are training artificial intelligence to behave like humans so that it will look at something, assess it, be familiar with it and answer back. Users are willing to interact with artificially intelligence if the can make them forget they are not human. Artifice Intelligence however will have to find content somewhere to teach itself to communicate with us in a considerate way.

So, let’s assess how voice search will affect organic and paid search as well as social media.

Organic Search Shifts Every Few Years

Voice search is yet another great innovation in technological change. What will change here is who and what is actually viewing our content.

This will be more of a change in insight of a fraction of our audience than a move in strategic implementation. We will still need to generate content, but we need to comprehend that a growing number of our users won’t really read that content. Rather, they will ask their virtual assistants to find an answer or response and tale back to them.

While this a complete new way of thinking, it is going to happen. Therefore, we must change.

What Approaches Excel With Voice Search?

  • From a SEO viewpoint, we should all be concentrating tactics around answer box results. An answer box is a SERP feature, usually shown above all organic search results, that directly answers a search query. Most people don’t know that home helpers such as Google Home and the Amazon Echo pull from these results for answers to questions.
  • Google has copyrights for taking out things from queries, returning factual answers in reply to searches, and for recovery of information to better understand how, and when, to produce an answer box — in other words, it’s at their will to honour an answer box to a site for any given query.
  • A common error in organic search must be avoided here, which is disregarding the rest of your audience to cater to a new trend. SEO’s love new things. They make a point of running and embracing them like a cat to a mouse, and it’s an easy mistake to forget about are main audience. While 30% is a substantial number to people, it’s not everyone, and you still must serve your present audience, not just the growing one.

The Issue With Paid Search

How do you show an ad to a user that isn’t looking at a screen? That is an issue that will affect strategists heading into the voice search realm. As the number of people using voice search is on the rise, the audience for people and businesses using paid campaigns will wear away more than others, simply because there might not be any screen or device to interact with, so far.

The first launch of voice search will largely be people speaking to their virtual assistants. We do not include phones in to this because users are holding the device and there is always a screen involved, making it not entirely true voice search- that’s more verbalised search. This only relates to people who are speaking to a device without holding it in their hands without a screen to view results on- just two things talking to each other like normal people and computers do.

Paid search may see some knock down during the first year of voice search, but eventually it will find new ways to advertise through user’s devices that they speak to in.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing will see an impact in a similar way to SEO, with more device incorporation and ways to gage what users are asking them, when that information becomes available.

SEO and social media marketing will see the affects around how businesses and marketers and developing content. Many people will use voice search to ask specific questions for e.g. ‘how do I remove wine stains from a carpet’. Businesses should be keeping an eye on related queries and begin to integrate content like blogs and videos into their strategy that answers these questions face on. As more people start to use voice search, business that are using this to their advantage will experience more traffic and engagement when pushing it out through their own social networks.

Furthermore, we expect platforms like Snapchat to integrate voice search into their app. They recently improved their search functionality with the ‘Our Story’ feature that allows users to easily find Snapchat stories in their area. We predict Snapchat launching a feature allowing people to find Stories using voice search as opposed to having to type it in.

This would lead to a great advantage for social networks as it will make it so simple for people to share their lives and experiences on different networks without having to open apps.

To Conclude!

Irrespective of what network you currently exist in, voice search will eventually influence you in some way, shape, or form. Change brings problems for some and solutions for others. A lot of the scenarios talked about above are real strategies that you can start using today, whilst others are a glimpse into the future based on what we are seeing now in the world.

Either way, voice search is a hot growing topic, and you should be part of the conversation.

 

 

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Safa Ahmed
I'm currently a social media intern at ClickDo and having lots of fun as well as learning new skills everyday, sharing these with you by making cool videos or informative blogs 🙂
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