"Hey, Alexa, place an order for my daily items from Amazon Fresh?"
Alexa and Siri have given a different approach to day-to-day searches, and it is evident that users are gradually gravitating towards artificial intelligence. Virtual Assistants and AI are part of everyone’s life nowadays; hence, numerous marketers are getting excessive attention.
With an Average Conversion Rate of 2.6%, Voice search has become a prominent trend in the last few years. If you are an eCommerce executive, voice search optimization should be one of your main focuses to make marketing decisions that eventually count. In the present online shopping scenario, it is normal for the customers to have a full-blown conversation with an inanimate object and respond. Around 23 percent of online customers prefer voice assistants to explore local businesses or products of their choice.
With a growth rate of 13%, it is estimated that there will be millions of voice assistant users in the coming years. Delivery date information, guest checkouts, instant shipping rates, diverse payment options, and more make the commerce journey convenient. And Voice search is recently gained natural attraction as it has become an essential aspect of convenience in eCommerce.
Let’s glance at how voice search and assistant drives convenient and customer-centric purchases for retailers across industries.
Are you curious about what voice search or assistant we are talking about
Well, Voice Search is a technology where users use a voice command to perform a search rather than typing them into a search field.
Alexa, Siri – these are all Voice Assistants, or you can call them digital assistants that you will find in every modern house today.
It listens to specific voice search commands using language processing algorithms and voice recognition technology and performs a relevant function based on the command. Voice assistants can give relevant results by focusing on keywords and filtering unnecessary information.
With the inception of new voice assistants like Alexa, Google Voice Search, Cortana, Siri, voice searches have become a new way of resolving queries.
Do you know there is a connection between voice search and eCommerce?
It won’t be wrong to say that people enjoy voice shopping because of its comfort and convenience. Amazon is the trailblazer for the voice commerce industry by powering voice interactions with its Alexa AI feature. Based on shopper data and reviews they trust, customers can browse and make a purchase decision without ever having to type their product/service name. Voice shopping brings a whole new level of personal convenience to online buying, provides an optimized end-to-end purchase cycle – from product recommendations, adding products to shopping or wish lists, reordering essentials, and recommending different options for a product.
Understanding Voice Search Technology
People started searching for the closest diner, important events, and shopping through voice. The next time a user does the voice search, the AI algorithm updates itself to provide better results. Let see how Voice technology works. Voice search is a combination of three-way interactions – UX (interaction), AI (services), and IoT (devices).
Two Major Factors behind Voice Technology are:
To improve the user experience, a branch of linguistics and logic is used known as Semantics. They are responsible for analyzing word meanings and relations between them and help give reference, implications, and presuppositions.
Natural Language Processing is the second factor. It helps to reason the ‘voice search query, its interest, and behavior by taking semantics.
Voice search is an emerging trend for online shoppers, may still not be on your radar, so let us start researching and planning for voice search to provide an optimized customer experience. You have a busy life, maintain an ideal work/life balance, and want increasingly convenient things. To allow people to search for items without typing, Voice search uses AI voice recognition that merges the fields of computing and linguistics. A customer can initiate a voice search by clicking a simple icon/tab. Mistakes may happen when customers manually type and search a product/service. But on the other hand, with AI-based voice search, customers get suggestions about what it thinks the customer may have mispronounced.
Tips to Optimize your eCommerce with Voice Search
Especially when attracting customers, the voice search option is getting popular. It makes perfect sense to optimize results from voice searches as traffic continues to increase with it. While eCommerce is coupled with mobile Voice search is a combo pack of convenience with speed as rather than typing the query, the customer has to say it. And you can see that voice searches implementation makes excellent business sense. When the technology is already here, why not optimize it to reap benefits.
Recognize how we type-search: When content creation product categorization, voice search optimization requires a philosophical shift. The main idea of this shift is that rather than thinking of voice search as a connection between an index and an inquirer, we have to treat voice search like a conversation as if they are human beings. More long-tail keywords will be prioritized for your keyword strategy as voice search queries are typically longer than text queries. Suppose someone who is typing searches it will be like – “Jack Ryan Season 1”. However, we will ask our digital assistant something like “Alexa play Episode 3 of Jack Ryan Season 1”. Long-tail keywords are more specific and have a higher conversion value because they are more detailed but typically get less traffic.
Answer questions clearly and concisely: Organize and customize your keyword research around questions and answers rather than single keywords and critical phrases. Focus on trigger words as much as you would on essential buzzwords. Trigger words are crucial to voice search optimization as they include words like how-to, more, free, as they are used to oblige someone to act. Once customers discover your store, their action will be to click a link, purchase a product, or provide an email address.
Prefer semantic strategy over a keyword-based strategy: Instead of circling individual keywords and broad topics, directly addresses the intent once you interpret searcher intent. Rather than relying on the customers’ exact words, a semantic strategy takes the context of the searcher’s query. For example, the questions “Magento vs. Shopify” or “compare Shopify and Salesforce commerce cloud” both fall under the intent of “compare eCommerce platforms” the customer may be looking for re-platforming or launching an online store, both suggest a plan to purchase. To provide a more diverse set of phrases and keywords, mix up your terminology covering all the relevant ways of asking questions.
Know your customer: Optimize your site for mobile as customers using voice search are often in a hurry. We also have to know WHO is on the other side of the dialogue, as we all know that voice search is a conversation. Accordingly, to change your marketing strategy, try to understand what these consumers think. To get honest feedback regarding a product or service and specific information about customers, conducting surveys is one of the best methods. You must define your target audience and understand their needs and solve them.
Leverage Voice Search for eCommerce
The popularity of voice search is rapidly growing among retailers. The key factors playing behind the screens are perfect for cross-selling and faster shopping. A considerable benefit of voice shopping is eliminating friction between customers and products. It reduces the search time by allowing you to add things to the cart just by asking.
From how your customer sounds, you can glean more info about them. You can increase customer retention rates by providing a personalized, tailored shopping experience with all this information. Customers are far more likely to make product recommendations or purchases as voice search is a relaxed way of interacting without bothering about typos or misspelling. Voice shopping accelerates your typical shopping and makes the journey easier for your customers.
Harness the power of Voice Assistant with eCommerce to:
- Provide recommendations based on individual preferences
- Personalize shopping experiences
- Reduce screen interactions as the average typing speed will be 30-35 words/ min whereas, through voice search, 100 words /min is also possible, so the time taken for checkout is comparatively less.
- Decrease the time-consuming task of typing long feedbacks, providing users with ease and convenience.
- Enable smart shopping by combining AI and ML with voice features
- Provide intelligent recommendations based on the user’s shopping behavior and purchasing history.
The future in search is now.
It’s time to start thinking forward — and fast. Think twice, even if you are skeptical about the idea! Start observing! Use it as a general marketing channel, rather than as a search channel only. The exciting thing about the future is – we can predict as no one knows what will happen exactly. There may be two scenarios:
1st scenario: Voice search becomes popular and becomes a simple search tool. This includes a user hearing more results, proceeding with their investigation, navigating the web page, switching to another website, and getting results for their request.
2nd scenario: Voice search becomes a stand-alone search result tool, mainly for fact-finding requests and questions. In the whole search engine optimization scheme, voice search will be limited, and it will only remain a minor channel.
But the ground fact is that consumers become more familiar with its pros and use it more often as the functionality of voice search increases. So, we expect its popularity to grow, whichever scenario may execute. Thus, it depends on brands and strategizing to make the most sense.
Voice Search optimization is necessary now. Now the trending question is how? The new trend is already at the door and becoming increasingly important to your eCommerce marketing strategy.
Getting on board now means you can optimize your voice search and strategy to maximize your site traffic. Get in touch with ETG commerce experts to start.
About ETG Digital
ETG is a Crest Level Salesforce Partner headquartered in Plano, Texas. We are ISO 9001:2015 certified company with a global delivery center in Hyderabad, India. We have dedicated teams of professionals spanning continents located in US, Canada, UAE, UK, Australia and India. Our ability to maintain talent hubs in multiple locations and working on projects for clients from various domains gives us a very unique advantage. An advantage to leverage proven technologies like Salesforce Commerce, Sales, Service, Partner and Marketing Clouds and using them to deliver tailor made solutions for clients to suit their business requirements.
If you are looking to take your business into the next league, you are at the right place. Connect with us at info@etg.digital or call us at +1 469 666 1119
