What Is Voice Search Marketing, and Is It Important for My Business?

Embrace voice search when the time is right to reach more customers than ever before.

SEO remains king for helping consumers find businesses online, but it’s no longer as simple as selecting the right keywords and going to town. Now, consumers are turning to technology for more convenient and advanced search options.

One of the biggest mobile marketing trends emerging from this technological shift is voice search. Nearly a third (27%) of the online population across the globe use voice search already, and that number will continue to grow.^[1]

Understanding what it takes to meaningfully implement voice search, its advantages, and the challenges associated will help you decide whether it’s currently worth pursuing for your own business.

What is voice search marketing?

Voice search is a broad term for technology that utilizes automatic speech recognition to allow consumers to perform online searches using their voices. This includes voice search marketing in the context of search engine optimization (SEO) as well as technology like smart speakers and personal assistant devices e.g., Google Home, Amazon Echo, Amazon Alexa, and other smart speaker devices.

For our purposes, voice search marketing is when a business optimizes data and marketing content with the intent for it to appear in voice search results. This content can originate on many different channels, essentially wherever a user might search using their phone or another voice enabled device: social media, email marketing messages, local search, web content, etc.

Why is voice search important?

With a critical mass of consumers (84%) being smartphone users, adopting voice search technology and tactics to take advantage of this now-ubiquitous marketing channel is a must. Aside from general usage, smartphone users are also turning to their devices more than ever specifically for shopping. In fact, a whopping 79% of consumers use their smartphone while shopping, with 45% even using it to compare prices.^[2] Naturally, this means voice search should be a consideration for any business and their marketing strategy.

If consumers are seeking information in real time to inform purchase decisions, businesses should do everything they can to make that information accessible in as many ways as possible. This includes mobile-friendly websites, geotargeting, and technology like voice search.

Advantages of voice marketing

Enhanced accessibility and versatility

Voice search technology offers another option for people to complete searches on their phone, meaning those with disabilities that affect typing or sight can still search online easily. Additionally, with voice search being a hands-free method, consumers can also complete a search query whenever they're driving or otherwise occupied. If you’ve ever had a burning question to ask or a product to look up while doing the dishes and unable to text search, you’ve experienced what we’re talking about!

Put simply, this type of increased accessibility offers a better search experience for a wider breadth of customers, improving the user experience and adding another marketing touchpoint for businesses to connect with their audience.

Improved local SEO results

As you optimize your SEO strategy with voice search optimization in mind, including local SEO keywords is an excellent tactic to earn more traffic. This new traffic will also be made up of warm leads in that people searching for something near them are likely ready to make a purchase or are already on their way.

Thinking about semantics and how people seek out a search result—especially with their voice—it’s easy to see how terms like “near me,” “near X [neighborhood],” or “near X [street]” can be hugely beneficial.

Support for multiple languages

Along the same vein as accessibility and general versatility, voice search also has the benefit of supporting multiple languages. Companies developing voice search apps and hardware support upwards of 30 languages in some cases, making it easier for people from various backgrounds to seamlessly interact with the same search tools.

Businesses that operate in places that are multilingual such as large cities, tourist destinations, or areas with people from various cultures especially stand to benefit voice search. Ultimately, it serves to provide consumers with a more congruent experience no matter where they come from.

Challenges of voice search marketing

Consumer privacy concerns

Concerns around how businesses use consumer data have seen renewed interest since industry giants Apple and Google updated their policies on third-party data in recent years. This has led to nearly half (49%) of businesses believing the way they manage consumer data to be an organizational risk.

Consumers are becoming more and more savvy when it comes to how businesses collect data, personalize content, and market to individuals rather than large audience segments. 

It’s important to consumers that their data remain secure and, while 86% of consumers are open to personalized communication from brands, over half (55%) say they’ll stop doing business when a brand communicates in a way they find invasive with a further 44% saying they would stop doing business when they perceive a brand’s communication as merely irrelevant.^[2]

What this means for voice search marketing is ensuring your customers that—as you continue to expand the options available to them for engaging with your brand—you’ll do your due diligence in safeguarding their info to provide the best customer experience possible.

Requires restructuring of existing online presence

One challenge of properly implementing voice search is updating your existing online presence to be voice recognition friendly. This will be a lighter or heavier lift depending on how mature your current SEO strategy is and how well-established your website is.

It’s important to update your website and SEO keywords by incorporating structured data and a schema markup that’s optimized for voice search. Once this is done, search engines and personal assistants that accept voice search queries will be equipped to serve results from your business.

If you don’t have an SEO specialist on hand, you may need to hire a third party service to undergo this process depending on how complex your web presence is. Learn more about what it means to hire an agency, including good questions to ask, here: 6 Key Questions To Ask an SEO Agency Before You Hire Them

Less common dialects and languages may yield inconsistent search results

While voice search does excel at recognizing many common languages, more esoteric dialects, languages, and accents may pose trouble. Understanding your target market and if this may impact you is critical before diving headfirst into implementing voice search.

The good news is that this challenge likely won’t present itself if your business is based in a region where a more common language is spoken by the majority. Even if your business is based online, it’s unlikely that you have a fully global customer base given the realities around international shipping. As more languages are implemented and voice tech gets better at understanding different accents, this issue will be curtailed.

Resources needed to implement voice search marketing for your small business

In order to hit the ground running with implementing voice search in your own marketing program, it’s important to have some sort of SEO expertise on hand. Whether that’s an in-house SEO specialist, a marketer that can be tasked with learning the ropes through online resources, or a third-party SEO company, having support dedicated to the process will make it smoother and more effective.

Start by assessing the current state of your SEO strategy and web presence. You may discover there’s more or less work to do than you think. Also map out the structured data you currently have on your website. If you’ve never taken a critical eye to this aspect of your site before, now’s as good a time as any, and there may be basic SEO gaps that you can address in tandem with your voice search optimization.

There’s also the possibility that the challenges posed or resources needed are just too much for it to be worth implementing at this point. For instance, there’s a fine line between the example above (bringing up general SEO in tandem with voice) and it being too much of a lift to be currently viable. If you discover there’s a lot of work to be done re: basic SEO, take a step back, plan to strengthen that first, then return to voice search once you have a solid foundation.