Voice assistants are becoming an integral part of customers’ lives. Source: Shutterstock.

Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Bixby don’t understand your SEO

WHEN you launched a website, your digital strategist, most likely, put together a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy intended to drive traffic to your website through search engines.

However, it might be time to re-evaluate that strategy, especially if you’re in the e-commerce or consumer goods space. Why? Because your SEO strategy might need an update as your customers are searching for things differently.

Online shoppers, especially millennials and the subsequent generations, now seem to prefer to search for products through digital assistants.

“Hey Alexa, I want to get Brian a medium-sized light-blue dress shirt. Can you find me something?” is how they’re looking for the Baby-blue Summer 2018 Office Shirt that you have on your site, with size options on a drop-down menu, and dress shirt removed from the description because it’s a keyword that’s difficult to rank for.

In today’s world, where customers are increasingly relying on using their voice assistants to find things, marketers must change their SEO strategy.

Alexa, Siri, Cortana, and Bixby don’t fully understand your SEO – but they’re not the ones who’ll lose a customer because of this. You will. In order to save your business, you need to change your SEO strategy a little bit.

Who does voice search impact?

When we first discussed how companies need to revisit their SEO strategy because customers are increasingly using voice searches (via virtual assistants) to discover products, we spoke primarily of e-commerce companies.

However, the change is applicable to brick and mortar businesses with a digital presence too.

Customers are just as likely to ask Siri to recommend a good Italian restaurant for dinner or find a good dentist near their office, and for this reason, marketers in all businesses need to pay attention.

How to optimize for voice search?

To be honest, there’s no defined formula for what works best for virtual assistants and voice search, simply because there are too many platforms at play.

However, there’s one thing that’s common to all voice search assistants: They understand natural, human language.

As a result, experts recommend that businesses start optimizing their pages for voice search by writing up content in a way that’s natural, clear, easy to understand, and as descriptive as possible. It’s as simple as that.

So, instead of calling it a Baby-blue Summer 2018 Office Shirt, label it as a Formal Dress Shirt, and create 30 variants of it, each with a description mentioning the color, size, sleeve length, fabric, pattern and texture, thread-count, and everything else you can imagine, all written up in beautiful sentences instead of as keywords.