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Is Voice Search eCommerce The Next Big Leap?

Aiswarya Madhu
January 15, 2022 |
voice-control ecommerce

Consumers’ search dynamics are changing constantly. The advancement of AI innovations has brought rapid transformation in the eCommerce industry. Voice search eCommerce is an emerging trend. Nearly 5.5 million US adults make purchases with their smart speakers regularly. It’s high time to utilize voice search trends to streamline the eCommerce site organic traffic.

voice search facilityToday’s voice search algorithm is highly capable of understanding natural language. People are more driven to ask questions than typing long keywords. According to the Gartner survey, one-third of the 3.5 billion google searches in 2020 were done through voice search. Hence, voice search is considered one of the top funnel activities to optimize your eCommerce search potential. The proliferation of devices and software like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri has made consumer life effortless. The future of the eCommerce trade is going to be more conversational.  

Voice Search for eCommerce: Everything You Should Know 

The boom in eCommerce has brought customers enhanced comfort to shop by sitting inside the comfort of their homes. The speed, convenience, and personalized experience are driving factors that have amplified the eCommerce revolution. 

Read More: 8 Best eCommerce Site Search Practices to Personalize User Experience

For increasing the conversion rates and influencing purchase decisions, it is necessary to provide eCommerce customers with convenience and customizable assistance. The rise in voice search eCommerce has brought in ample opportunities to make onsite search dynamics more conversational and natural. In a way, voice search assistance is also helping eCommerce vendors recreate the in-store experience through natural search techniques.    

According to a comprehensive research report by Market Research Future (MRFR), the voice search market is growing rapidly, North America being the forerunner in adapting the trend, and it is expected to grow at a healthy rate of 23.05% CAGR by 2025.

And considering the ease of use and functionality, voice search is expected to gain more control in the coming years. Here are some of the crucial factors that have instilled the growth of voice search in eCommerce:

The Growth in Smart Speakers

Smart speakers are going to set the next technology wave. Like television and smartphones, 55% of American households are expected to own a smart speaker by 2023. 62% of smart speaker owners have already used them for voice commerce. With smartphones leading the world and fastening voice assistant adoption, in the coming years, it is expected to rise abundantly. 

The Rise in AI-Based Voice Technology

The advancement in Bert Model ( AI language Model) has powered voice technology with a deep understanding of the natural language. Now voice search results have gained 95% accuracy in understanding the spoken languages. Moreover, market giants like Google and Alexa are constantly engaged in improving the capabilities to predict users’ tone and mood to leverage the accuracy in results. 

Voice enabled searchThe Demand For Contactless Shopping Experience

The onset of the pandemic has brought an unprecedented change in the way consumers respond to the market. The demand for a contactless shopping experience has also fuelled voice search-activated purchases. But, is this trend going to fade away? No, the voice assistant is the new normal. It will add lifetime value to the customers’ shopping journey. The hands-free nature of contactless shopping bridges the gap in the consumers’ shopping journey, encouraging customers to make a purchase anywhere anytime without multiple clicks.   

The Shift to Customer-Facing eCommerce

Consumers want a frictionless shopping experience. Thanks to the voice assistant, its dynamic conversational ambiance is helping retailers mimic the physical store experience, making it more interactive. Pure textual chatbots and eCommerce experience might be time-consuming for consumers. The screenless and thumbs-free experience in voice search trends will amplify customer experience. 

How Does Voice Search eCommerce Affect Future Market?

Branding Is No More Entirely Text & Visual

Text and visual content have a great role in optimizing your brand value. The advancement in voice search has also augmented eCommerce brands to upkeep and expand brand awareness through oral content that is more conversational. Spoken words have a significant impact on boosting brand recognition. Calling out a name instead of typing will also help popularize the whole brand category instead of a single product. The amalgamation of oral, textual, and visual content can bring dynamic changes to the market by helping brands reinforce their market value by appearing on the thumb tip and tongue tip. 

Recommended Reading: 9 Simple Ways To Optimize Images for eCommerce

Personalizes Customer Journey

As the personalization drive is getting momentum, customers are looking for more advanced features, tools, and services that will fine-tune their eCommerce journey without any friction. The AI-supported voice search for eCommerce provides advanced and personalized search results that are more inclined with customers’ interests. The AI algorithm and boom in big data helps voice search technology to analyze customer behavior and past shopping records in-depth to provide relevant and accurate results. So optimizing your brand to get discovered on voice search is the next level challenge every brand in the markets needs to tackle for providing customers with a personalized purchase journey.   

Flexible on Multiple Devices

Voice search assistance is easy to integrate on every smart device. Customers don’t need technical assistance or complex software installation to turn on voice assistance. Convenience and ease of use are what customers look forward to in this digital landscape. smartphones and voice searches go hand in hand, helping customers multitask. With smartphone users always rising, brands need to ensure website content and architecture are built to sustain in the mobile environment.  

Time-Saving & Easy to Review

Customers are always a little bit reluctant to share feedback. Spending time on writing feedback is a tough game for most of them. But for retailers, good or bad, authentic reviews are crucial to boosting brand loyalty and responsiveness. Every customer looks at the reviews at least once to ensure the product they are buying is worth the price they are investing in. In such cases, voice assistance helps customers quickly register their reviews without the hassle of having to type and log in.     

How to Optimize Your Online Store for Voice Search eCommerce

1. Rank In Position Zero

Position 0 is the rich snippet or answer box that appears on the search engine result page (SERP). Being a zero hero is the dream of every marketer and eCommerce vendor. The rich snippet has brought in no-click searches that help customers find relevant and accurate results right on the SERP without going for multiple clicks. Moreover, search engines love to read out loud snippet content to consumers. 40% of spoken results come from featured snippets.  

SnippetBut how could you mold your marketing efforts to rank in position zero on the search engine? The primary concern is about understanding your market and competitors’ snippet trends. SEMrush will help you analyze competitor snippets and snippets you are already ranking for. Here are some stellar ways:

2. Optimize Product Content & Pages

Rich and informative content is vital to power your website for voice search-led eCommerce. For sharing accurate information about the product, it is necessary to collect, organize and distribute your product data. When it comes to personalized product data management, spreadsheets can become a nightmare. You need a robust product information management solution (PIM) to consolidate your product data to augment voice search eCommerce. 

Suggested Reading8 Reasons You Need A PIM for Marketing Your B2B eCommerce

3. Provide Consistent HTML Code

Structured data or schema data is HTML code that helps search engines understand website content. It analyses the relationship between different entities on your website and showcases information through rich snippets. The advancement in the speakable schema will also augment audio playback using text-to-speech within the next few years. At present, it is in the beta stage.    

4. Limit the Paragraph to 50 words & Use Headers

According to SEMrush, 40-50 words is the ideal length of a snippet. If you have long content, slice it up into a data table, numbers, or bullet points to help search engines find relevant and exact snippet matches for the users’ queries. Or else you can use headers (H1, H2, H3) and chronological order to break down long-form content for searchability. Also, make sure your snippet is a compact explanation of your keyword.    

5. Focus on Semantic Strategy

Voice search semantic SEO is all about optimizing content based on particular topics irrespective of focusing on stuffing keywords. Google ranks websites that provide results by understanding users’ intents. Today most high-ranking websites have adopted a conversational tone to match with users’ voice commands.      

Hey Google, help me find the best winter sweaters! This is how shoppers are going to interact with a search engine in the near future.  

Voice search users are more likely to ask complete questions. In such cases, using tools that help to analyze users’ intent is more important to deliver meaningful value-added results. It doesn’t mean keywords are unimportant. Keywords do have importance in voice search. But optimizing long-tail keywords is necessary to match with users’ natural queries.  

6. Optimize Your Website for Mobile

The average voice search result page loads in 4.6 seconds – 52% faster than the average page – suggesting page speed is a key factor in voice SEO. Voice search eCommerce businesses are mostly aligned to smart device users. According to voice search users statistics, mobile users are 3 times more likely to use voice search. 

Typing long queries on the mobile is a cumbersome task for customers. Typing long phrases on Whatsapp or Voice Chat, What do you prefer? Voice-based conversation creates a stronger bond than text messages. This behavioral pattern is the same in eCommerce too. In voice search eCommerce, voice allows customers to search faster and buy more.  

mobile eCommerce7. Utilize Google My Listing

As near me searches are gaining momentum, profiling your business on Google My Listing helps you leapfrog in the eCommerce market. Google My Listing is a key ingredient in boosting your local SEO. It also helps to improve accuracy in voice search. Customers usually seek details like contact numbers, opening hours, and other business details about brands. Though your structured data collect         

essential information, creating a brand profile on Google My Listing will help you deliver the exact information your customers are looking for through voice search.  

8. Include a Detailed FAQ Page

In voice search eCommerce, the search engine delivers top concise answers to the customers mostly in 29 words. Understanding consumer behavior and intents are vital to making your brand rank higher for voice search. Customer satisfaction is everything in the digital platform. Creating a detailed FAQ page helps to address customers’ queries and convince them of your product and services.    

As question keywords are on the rise, it is imperative to create voice search FAQ pages on your websites. It can easily rank for 100s of different search queries. Moreover, you can easily combine the keywords with voice search FAQ pages naturally to rank for relevant keywords also. The 5Ws and 1H are basic question formats customers use in voice search. Curating relevant FAQs in this question format will help you create FAQ pages that rank well for voice search.    

Optimize Voice Search eCommerce to Make Your Business Customer Facing

The hands-free voice search eCommerce trends are changing market dynamics. With more customers demanding a hassle-free and contactless shopping experience, it’s time to shift our perceptions towards voice search eCommerce to provide customers with a personalized experience. Excellent product information is crucial to optimizing your eCommerce platform for voice search capabilities. If the products are well organized and rightly described, it would help to match with the customers’ exact queries. A PIM solution can help to organize your product content to augment voice search capability.  

DCKAP PIM product information management solution will help eCommerce retailers, manufacturers, and distributors optimize eCommerce stores to augment voice search. So, are you up for the game? Manage and optimize your eCommerce store for voice search. To know more about product information management (PIM) and our eCommerce services, connect with us

Aiswarya Madhu

Aiswarya Madhu is a highly skilled and experienced content creator with over 2 years of expertise in developing engaging and informative content for eCommerce enthusiasts and distributors. She has a deep understanding of the dynamic world of eCommerce, with a focus on eCommerce integration and ongoing distribution trends. Aiswarya is committed to delivering high-quality, insightful, and engaging content to her readers beyond the DCKAP blog -- channeling her strengths in social media, Medium, Quora, video and more

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