Voice search is at its peak in popularity among millions of users. According to an OC&C Strategy Consultants market research, Voice Shopping is projected grow to be a $40 billion plus segment in next two years. Numbers alone are a proof that voice assisted interactions are no longer exclusive to accessibility.
Your customers are now speaking more to Google assistant and Siri than to your website’s chatbots for their product queries.
In such a scenario, voice search will help your customers to visit your website, look for their product, and make the purchase (if only it was that easy). But you can make it easy for your visitors.
Google’s insight says a lot about the current consumer mind set about shopping and smart speaker.
According to Google, almost half of the people who own a smart speaker are willing to receive information related to deals, promotions and sales from brands
People are willing to share and receive information via these devices. Now the question is, how to optimize your ecommerce website for voice search? Scroll down to find the answer to this question.
Here are 5 actionable tips to optimize your ecommerce for voice search-
1. Prioritize Long-tail, Contextual Keywords
In voice search the keywords are not just 2-3 words, instead it’s a complete sentence. The reason being, when we ‘speak’ to our devices, we are considering it to be an actual life conversation and therefore frame the queries accordingly.
Your visitors have a high probability of saying, “Siri, where can I find toys for my 5 year old child?”. When a person types the same query, it goes something like, “Toys for 5 year old”.
Voice search revolves around the illusion of having a conversation with your search assistant or search engine. Additionally the typing effort is absent here, so a person subconsciously speaks more as compared to typing the same query. Thus, long tail and contextual keywords come into the spotlight here.
2. Decrease your website’s load time across platforms
A lot of your traffic will be from mobile devices, thus you should optimize your website’s speed for mobile. A speedy website benefits from higher engagement from visitors, they will be able to see various products offered, and thus improve the overall user experience.
Tools like PageSpeed Insights will provide you information about all your webpages, which ones are slow and possible recommendations to increase the speed as well.
Optimizing your website’s speed is even more essential as Google is now deploying the mobile first ranking system.
For improving the speed, you can start by doing these tweaks:
- Compress your images but do not compromise on the image quality
- Deploy caching technique
- Constantly look out for broken links
- Select fast web hosting platforms like A2 hosting, Hostinger
Google tends to rank those websites higher from where it can readily extract the information requested for and this is done via structured data, more on this later.
3. Target the Local SEO first
The voice queries from mobile devices have 3 times more chances of being locally based according to Search Engine Watch. And it fits well because mobile searches are done when on the move like driving and the query is done hands free.
Phrases like, near me, within x meter range, etc are popular ones. Cracking the local SEO will help in such situations. Your visitor will appreciate this as they will be directed to the right place within minimum time limits.
4. Focus on your website’s content
Your website’s content needs to be educational, easy to understand, relevant and in line with your consumers thought process. This can be done with paying adequate attention to your FAQ page, product descriptions and content for featured snippets.
Your FAQ page will answer the what, where, how, when, why type of questions which are conversational in nature. This means that when your potential customers are looking for these answers, say while driving, they will be directed to your website.
When writing your FAQ page, you will be able to think of numerous questions that your customer will have as they come across your products and services. When done right, FAQ pages will increase your visibility chances.
Your product descriptions also play a vital role here. They should follow a natural conversational tone and sound like a conversation between friends. When elaborating the features of your products, you should aim for a more friendly sounding tone instead of a salesy one.
Your FAQ page and product descriptions can also be taken for Featured snippets by Google if you are close to answering the questions that customers put in. And who does not wish to be on the top of the search results page?
The content that resonates with the way your customers converse will win at the end of the day.
5. Schema markup for your website
Using Schema markup or structured data helps Google in extracting the most important information about your products and sending the same to your customers upon related search queries.
A well structured website facilitates easy discovery of key information for Google and thus your website can be ranked a bit higher, giving an upper hand over your competitors. When necessary information is highlighted on the search page itself, people will be more inclined to pay a visit to your website.
You can visit Schema.org for getting started and to see how well your website is structured, you can test using the Structured Data Testing Tool.
There is no denying the fact that people have shifted to voice search and will be relying heavily on it in the future. Once your ecommerce website is optimized for voice search, you can leverage it to increase your sales and who knows, you can hope for reductions in your churn rate as well.
Reach out to us for our expertise in building optimized solutions for all your ecommerce woes.