Voice Searches in Ecommerce: What You Need To Know
I don’t imagine it will come as a shock to you if I were to claim that people prefer using their voices over typing when doing basically anything. For the record, I am not one of those people. I am, after all, a writer and not a talker, it’s literally my job description. I am not the norm, however, and that means we need to start looking at all these devices we have now that we can speak to and make do things for us via voice and figure out how to use that for ecommerce. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the future of voice search in ecommerce.
How Will This Work?
The main thing when considering how to appear in voice searches is the tone of your writing. This is not just something that applies to making sure things show up when people use Alexa or whatever to search for products. The idea of creating a tone that will show up with voice searches also applies to having your products show up in a standard web search. Not everybody knows how to use a search engine to the best of its ability and will often end up searching for things in the way they would send a text to a friend, which is to say in a more conversational sort of tone. That tone is already a crucial part of your SEO, or at least it should be, and it will only become more important with the rise of these devices that allow people to buy their dog some treats by yelling at Siri.
How Big Could This Be, Really?
Well, question I made up so I can make my next point, over half the homes in the US have some form of voice assistant. This is a huge market sector that is using these devices for the convenience of being able to yell at a robot to buy things and it would be absolutely insane for anyone trying to sell anything at all to not be tapping into that specific market. Especially since it is so easy to do, which takes us to the next point I want to make.
How Do I Take Advantage of Voice Searches?
It all comes down to your SEO. In my opinion, an increase in voice searches will mean a shift in the way we write SEO for ecommerce that I have already been moving towards in my own SEO writing. If people are going to be talking to devices to buy things, that means we need to be writing our content in a way that focuses more on the way a conversation will flow, rather than focusing entirely on keywords and jamming as many of those as possible into everything. Keywords are certainly not going anywhere and there will still be a large focus on them, but what will be necessary is infusing those keywords seamlessly into what we are writing. Gone will be the days where an Amazon listing is just a string of keywords in the title and the bullet points. That tactic will be replaced in writing compelling listings that will hit more words that you would use in a conversation. This is great news for people like myself who got our start in writing in a more creative way, maybe not such great news for people that took a more analytical path to SEO writing.
Conclusion
Ideally I will have sold you on the idea of writing a more conversational style for your SEO to capture the market of people who talk to their smart devices like they’re people. There is an entire niche of the marketplace of people who can write their SEO content in a way that specifically captures these people. And that niche isn’t going to be a niche for much longer, it’s just going to become the norm. The smart devices we all have around us constantly, at all times, forever, are the way we are going to be shopping for things in the future. People such as myself who use an input device as their primary way of communicating with both people and search engines are going to become akin to writers that have been using typewriters in the 21st century. And before you ask; yes, I love a good typewriter, it is a very satisfying experience. It is critical for the future of our businesses that we can harness this more conversational tone that will be on the rise with the rise of these smart devices and infuse our standard keywords into that tone in order to show up in the searches these devices are performing. Until we finally get the nightmare reality of our devices that connect us to the world being directly implanted into our brains, voice searching is not just the way of the future, it is the way of the present.