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Voice search – the new Booster for Branding
Innovations keep pouring in, improving the quality of life, opening up new
opportunities, and urging businesses to catch up. The next big innovation
that is poised to change the Internet experience is voice search.
This single functionality addition to your website can dramatically increase
your search ranking.
If the market analysts are to be believed, by the end of 2020, voice search
will account for 50% of all searches. With the incorporation of natural
language processing (NLP), this is going to be a game-changer for digital
marketing.
What is voice search?
It’s a technology that understands a voice query and serves it with the
right answer. The user is saved from typing the query – genuinely required
in some situations or conditions besides adding to comfort and ease of using
the Internet.
We have already seen the technology making inroads into the home appliances
segment by the name of “voice assistant” available in various brands that
include Siri, Alexa user, Google Assistant, and Cortana, among the leaders.
While these are the independent products with links to their parent
databases through the Internet, the same concept is being replicated in
websites to make them more flexible and inclusive.
How does it function?
Voice search works differently from the ways the conventional web search works. Let’s throw some light on this.
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Unlike the web searching process, a voice search doesn’t require a screen to help users scroll, select and type. It is conversational – expects a clear question and provides a straight answer.
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Voice search expects longer sentences in order to understand the query clearly. In web searching, we use short and basic lines of keywords and depends upon the search engine to provide all related results.
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Voice searches offer only one answer and not a list of probable combinations to choose from, like the way web searches do.
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A voice search uses the featured snippet for the closest answer, instead of keywords matching as is the case in web searching.
Featured Snippets will be more sought-after than mere ranking.
Featured snippets are prize recognitions from Google and therefore precious in digital marketing. This helps you gain more attention than the competitors even if your organic ranking is lower than them.
If Google chooses your site for a quick answer to a specific query, it displays the corresponding part from your content as a reference answer with the link to your site for further reading. This is called featured snippet and is placed on the top of the search result. Naturally, the featured snippets enjoy maximum clicks.
Digital Marketing strategy will be changed
The competition will go a notch higher. Featured snippets are difficult to
obtain. It requires high-quality content to impress Google for selection,
and as a reward, it occupies the position zero in the search results.
The traditional SEO marketing is rather complacent with high ranking or a
place in the top ten.
The addition of voice search will invite more voice queries. This will
increase the demand for the featured snippets, as they will be the only
choice for the voice answers. The competition for the position zero spots
will be fierce.
Benefits of featuring voice search in your web site
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Increase in brand awareness – Google responds to the voice search with a shout-out of the source of the information, such as “According to ________”.
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Increase in traffic to the website – Google also gives the written dictations of the voice search results. This increases the organic traffic as the users navigate to the site for more details.
Voice search is slowly picking up to become a regular feature of website optimization. The early bird companies that adopt this technology are expected to leapfrog the competition with a huge gain in their brand popularity.
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