Powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, Voice Search Technology is transforming how businesses connect with their customers and prospects.
Users like Voice because it’s quick and easy, hands-free, and often a more personalized experience. Based on the skyrocketing adoption of reminder and list usage, the helpfulness of Voice is also important to many consumers.
Businesses who optimize for Voice like it because it’s more efficient for users, has better overall conversion (especially for fickle channels like Shopping and Social), and is typically more productive at getting users on renewal and loyalty programs. As you get better at Voice, you learn how to control the experience, which improves your metrics (for example, adoption and conversion.) Plus, it allows you to extend the life of your evergreen products and introduce new products more successfully. Streamlining your merchandising assortment is critical for the one-ask, one-answer future.
So, how do you optimize your Voice experience? Here are 8+ tried-and-true tips for making your Voice program a success. (Incidentally, if you’re looking for suggestions on improving your SEO for Voice, click here.)
Develop A Signature Voice Brand
Voice is a little wonky in that it’s used in/on mobile and desktop devices (phones, computers, and tablets); appliances; vehicles; and in Voice Assistants, too (Amazon’s Echo, Apple’s HomePod, Google’s Home.) Sometimes the device has a screen (like an Echo Show or your Apple watch), and other times it doesn’t.
Most users are relatively new to Voice which can make their initial experiences a little tricky/clumsy. (The more sophisticated users are at/with Voice, the more they tend to multi-task while using it, so the trade-off in user advancement can be minimal.) Bottom line? With Voice, you need to be able to communicate with words, not pictures. (If a screen is available, consider the pictures and written text as a bonus.) Since those words need to be spoken, you should develop a signature Voice brand for your company.
Do you have a spokesperson? What do they sound like? What’s their tone? Style? Are they casual or formal? Do they speak affectionately or scholarly? Do they have an accent, or are they generic or robotic sounding? Do they speak fast or slow? Loud or soft? Do they laugh? You need to decide which/whose voice/style will represent you. You’ll also want to determine your sonic statement/expression. Do you have a trademark sound? A jingle? Special music for specific actions?
I know. You’re probably wondering why you even need a Voice brand if/when you don’t always control the devices. It’s simple. You’ll want a Voice brand because, ultimately, Voice is about what you say, how you say it, and all the sounds (intro/outro and background music, for example) that support it online and offline. You’ll want to use your Voice rules on your site(s), videos, podcast/radio ads, live chat, chatbots, and things like V-chat (video chat), call center hold messaging, and the transcription voice for your videos.
Your Voice brand should be consistent wherever your visitors see, hear, and watch you. Companies that don’t set up a solid structure at the beginning often regret it. (When things go haywire, they start over from scratch, which costs a lot of time and money, as you can imagine.) It’s much more efficient to figure out how you want to sound from Day One and then continue to tweak and iterate as you go. Please keep in mind that Voice is typically a more casual medium. If nothing else, as Voice grows, your content will also evolve.
Make Sure Your Answers Are Easily Digestible and in Your Brand Voice
Have you ever asked your Voice Assistant (Alexa, Cortana, Siri, etc.) a question, and the nanosecond they started reciting their answer, you barked STOP because you knew in just a couple of seconds that it was launching into a War and Peace style description from Wikipedia when all you wanted was a one-word answer? Research shows that we know whether the answer will be “right” for us from the first few words… and that we’re not afraid to abruptly cut wrong answers off.
When scripting your initial responses and answers to your Frequently Ask Questions, write them with Voice in mind. A good exercise is to read the PPAs (People Also Ask) questions on Google for your products. Write your answer to the question(s). Next, have someone ask you the question so you can read your answer out loud. You’ll quickly learn what to add and, more importantly, what to cut. You’ll also learn how to stack your sentence (so the user wants to keep listening) and how to best – and most respectfully – answer the question for your brand. (Developing a consistent brand voice and tone is very important for Voice.) The key is to ensure your answer is clear, concise, and in your voice.
Please note: working with your traffic team on this project is best, as it can have a huge impact, especially on SEO.
Determine Your Trigger Commands and Questions
While creating your Voice brand, you’ll want to determine how you want to be addressed. Do you have a name for your Voice entity? (Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Bixby, etc.) When a user wants to initiate a discussion with you, what do you want them to say to start the voice process? Yo, X? Howdy, Y? Wassup, Z?
You’ll also need to figure out which questions, commands, and phrases you want your users to be able to say to initiate things on your site. (Example, “Alexa, ask NPR One to recommend a podcast.”)
Most voice assistants/software have their own set of commands. (Hey Siri or Ok, Google, for example.) This shouldn’t preclude you from creating your structure. Again, what does a visitor need to say to get your attention? How do you want your commands structured? What scripted questions do you want to trigger specific actions? (For example: Ok, Google, talk to Dominos.) This may sound inconsequential, but it’s much easier to establish your system upfront. This allows you to control your voice experience and keeps things consistent between the different providers.
Develop the Perfect Voice Experience for Your User
After establishing your Voice, you’ll want to develop your ideal Voice experience on and off your site. Again, it’s typically best to build your on-site and off-site user journeys in tandem for consistency and efficiency.
How do you want things to work if someone uses Voice on your site? What’s your protocol if they ask a question? What page(s) do you send them to? How is the information organized? How can you make it easier for users to maneuver your site/chat/call tree? If they have a Customer Service question, what’s the experience protocol? How do you want their question to be followed up? How are you allowing them to create preferences? How does your My Account area work? What triggers and commands do you want to use? What are your accessibility and privacy standards?
The same type of questions applies to Voice off your site. Admittedly you won’t have as much control over the process, but you’ll still need to develop your experience.
Many companies make the mistake of thinking they’ll just handle Voice queries like their internal text search. This sounds fantastic in theory, but 9 out of 10 times, it’s a complete dumpster fire in practice. For example: if someone searches for a popular category on your site of hundreds, even thousands of products, they’re not going to stay with you while you answer, email, push, or even text them all the information from your list. Or, if they ask what your shipping fees are, they’ll bail before you get through the first couple of lines on your shipping page, far before your shipping chart.
When you’re developing your Voice experience, you’ll want to figure out what queries you can handle, how you’ll respond to your users, and where or what you’ll send them. You’ll want to determine how to prioritize your answers, how to stack and maximize their usefulness, and what your plan of attack is for follow-up. (Follow-up in Voice should not be underestimated, especially when you’re first starting. It’s critical and also where you’ll make the most money.)
This process can seem overwhelming, just like in the early days of building your website(s). You can do it, however. Just start with your top question. When someone asks it, how will you respond? What, if anything, do you want to show them? (Example: Do you need to send them a link by text, push, or email?) How will you follow up? What’s your process for ending the conversation? How will you track/measure this conversation? Yes, there are eleventy bazillion things that you can structure but at the beginning, just focus on the key/critical ones. Then, rinse and repeat.
Develop a Handoff Plan Between Voice Assistants/Devices and the Phone
As you determine your Voice experience, you need to figure out your hand-off flow. Where does the user go if/when they have a problem? What do you do if they want further information or help in choosing a product or service? Are you transferring them to a call center agent? A robust chatbot? A live chat manager? Routing them to text or email for help? Dropping them a link? How do you escalate things? Have you built out a special hierarchy for Voice? How are you collecting the user’s name and other relevant information, and what will you do with it afterward? (Remember, follow-up is key.)
For many companies, the increase in Voice usage puts pressure on their call centers, specifically their customer service agents and backend technology. Customers and prospects are using their phones to ask questions they didn’t get satisfactory answers to and/or want more details about. They’re also calling (the horror!), texting, and instigating V-Chat to order and inquire about things they’ve seen or heard about on their Voice assistants and devices or seen on their cars, televisions, and appliances.
You must figure out how, when, where, and to whom you will hand off your Voice users. Additionally, you should map out your follow-up plan/strategy, including how you will gather and use the data. If you’re like most organizations, this should be coordinated with your call center.
Review Your Copy for Natural Language
One of the most significant differences between Voice and regular ole’ text searches is how different the language (words used) are. Not only are Voice searches much longer than text searches, but they’re also typically in a much more conversational and casual tone.
What does that mean for you? It means you will want to prioritize your products/services and review the copy for all the stuff that’s getting the most traffic and/or sales. Hint: reading it out loud to some (a colleague perhaps) makes it quicker and easier to spot possible improvements.
Adjusting/enhancing your copy to sound more like your users may seem like a Herculean task, but it’s pretty doable. Start with your top five products. Then, move to the next five. Rinse and repeat. Review the first products you wrote very ten or so. Have you learned anything new that you want to use to enhance the previous items? Do they use different adjectives? Shorthand or acronyms? Have your rankings changed? What are customers saying in their reviews that you should integrate into the primary body copy? What kinds of questions are they asking online or offline that you should address in the product copy? How is what you’re doing positively impacting your traffic?
Marketers often make “copy overhaul for Voice,” one massive project with a deadline. For example, “we’re going to review and improve all 2000 products by July 13th.” That’s a mistake. Continuous improvement is one of the biggest keys to your success – you have to read the results and then react to them. Writing blind creates many issues without knowing what’s working and what’s not.
Many companies treat this like an SEO project and end up over-optimizing their copy, only to end up in the search engines’ penalty boxes. If you’re reading the results and constantly iterating your copy based on your learnings, you’ll avoid being dumped on the naughty bench. You’ll also learn how your visitors and competitors react to your actions. Does enhancing your copy yield more/different questions? Do you get more/less adoption to cart? Are your competitors changing what they’re doing in reflection of your efforts? Are they doing something else that you could learn from?
Solidify Your Visuals
You may ask yourself: “Determine your visuals as a Voice search must-do; what are you even talking about?” But this is a biggie. One of the main (and very underreported) reasons Voice commerce isn’t growing as fast as it could/should be is that many users have difficulty buying something without pictures/visuals.
So, how do you overcome this? Start making it easy for users to see/get the appropriate visuals when applicable. (This includes your follow-up communications.) Make a list of your top-selling products that your customers are most likely to reorder and/or not need to see a visual of to order. Look at each product individually. Determine how you think a user would ask for that product on their Voice assistant/device. (Remember, devices include phones.) Then, test it out. Ask Siri/Google/Alexa/whomever (aka your Future Overlord) for the top product on your list. See what the experience is. Technically, you should test this with each assistant but start with the one your customers use most. Then, rinse and repeat.
Next, label your photos clearly and concisely as if you needed to tell a story with JUST the visuals. (This will help with your accessibility efforts as well.) It’s essential that you don’t say the same thing in the same way for every photo. Ensure that your tags are in order and that your internal linking system works efficiently. Set a reminder to check back in a few weeks to see if the experience has changed. Many factors go into this, so you may not see a difference immediately. Please be patient. This stuff takes time, especially if you have underlying technical issues.
It tends to work best to do this alongside your accessibility and performance optimization projects. You will kill lots of birds with one stone if you’re structured about it. Again, it’s essential to do this in priority order (based on product/service sales and/or traffic.)
Feel like it’s too early to worry about all this? It’s not. There’s a battle going on for Kitchen and Living Room space as we’ve never seen before. (Nope, the war with the cable and streaming channels doesn’t even come close.) Marketers may have 3-4 voice assistants/devices in their houses (excluding phones and tablets), but most households will have one, and all the big players are fighting over that space. Most of them are betting that screens will make the difference. That’s why you see more attached screens. Either way, visuals now make a difference in ways they haven’t before for Voice, computer vision (Google Lens, for example), and accessibility.
Figure Out How to Make It Easy to Browse
Voice is perfect for definitive questions like “What are Target’s hours today?” or “Who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird?” It is excellent for straightforward tasks, such as turning on the living room lights or closing the blinds. It is also great for ordering things that (a) you have had/ordered before or (b) are easy, ubiquitous, or require little previous knowledge—things like ordering a pizza or your favorite frou-frou Starbucks drink and reordering copy paper.
Voice is not so great at browsing yet, however. It gets better and better every year, but it still has a way to go. How do you speed up the improvement process for your products and services? Figure out ways to make it easier for people to “browse.” What does that entail? Simple. First, choose 3-5 of your bestselling and/or most highly trafficked products. Then, one by one, review each product. Do you offer similar products that you’d want someone to look at? Do you have complementary products that you should show the user – things that go with or enhance the product? If someone asks about Product X, what else do you think they’d want to know about? What’s the crossover on these three lists? Review what you’ve written, and then figure out your presentation hierarchy. Is this reflected on your site – in the navigation, internal text search function, hamburger menus, facets/sorts/filters/refinements, and so on? How are you able to organize it for your Voice experience?
Like the visual project listed above, doing this for all your products seems like a monumental task. Just remember, if you set up a solid foundation, you can use AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) to do almost all the heavy lifting. First, you need to formulate a replicable process, however. The exercise above is the start of that. I go to your site and ask for (or want to see) X; how do you show it to me? What else do you show me?
The key here is a deep dive into how your products are related and how you can make it easier for your users to browse them. You can do all the relational calculations automagically (by the numbers.)
There are many ways to do this, but this one tends to be the most efficient for marketers. After looking at just a handful of products, you’ll be able to say: “Here’s what we have for data. This is how it’s currently organized. This is the way it should be prioritized. This is what we need it to do.” Then, your technology experts can take it from there. Regardless of where Voice happens – on or off your site – this exercise helps you improve the way your customers will shop your company.
As with properly labeling your visuals (listed above), it might seem premature to do this work. It’s not. Even if you do absolutely nothing with Voice on your site, you need to be prepared to accommodate Voice traffic. If someone arrives at your site from a Voice query, they asked on their phone, do you want them to see only one thing, or would you prefer to have a whole experience prepared for them, just in case? Sassy marketers usually respond to this question by saying, “one thing, and I want them to buy it.” Cool. Cool. The theory is fantastic, but does it work in practice? Look at your analytics, and you’ll quickly find the answer.
In a service business? You can do this, too; just use your services instead of your products.
Develop a Plan for Your Voice Deals (aka Special Offers)
One of the most popular things in Voice commerce these days? Offers, coupons, promo codes…. or whatever you want to call ‘em. Ways to save money. This is precisely what happened in the early days of the internet – people wanted deals… (yes, and adult content, too.)
Be sure to prepare your deals statements. These would be answers to questions like “does {Your company name here} have any deals today?”) One of the reasons why offers work is because they are tied to deadlines. Deadlines create urgency and cause people to focus. So, when making your deals list (2-3 deals), make sure to add the urgency. For example, “today only, you’ll receive a free widget with every order of $xx or more.”
When you’re putting together your Voice deals, you need to have a link to the legalese that you can send on request. (Depending on your state, there may also be other rules you should address. Talk to counsel about your deals policy and your overall Voice policy.)
Even if your company doesn’t offer discounts/deals, you should prepare responses for people who ask for them. Things like “all orders are backed by a lifetime guarantee” or “we ship your order the same day it’s received.” Focus on whatever your top unique selling position points are.
It’s important to note that most companies aren’t going to get many requests for deals right out of the gate. Getting an initial plan ready, however? It only takes a few hours (that includes chasing down Legal), and it’s worth it. Right now, this is a sizeable percentage of the juiciest traffic.
Determine How to Best Present Your New Products
There’s no doubt that many marketers struggle with Voice at first. Some folks try to jam their desktop experiences into a Voice model and find it a big struggle. Others just way overthink it.
Voice is indeed different, but it’s nothing that you can’t handle. It REALLY helps to be an active Voice user or, at the very least, to have access to some Voice assistants/devices to play around with and to conduct your testing.
If you’re one of those struggling people or just looking for an easy win, consider building a strategy to best showcase your new products.
Companies have successfully trained their customers to ask their Voice assistants and other devices about new products. It’s a clean, easy ask for the user. Nothing fancy to remember or do. And as the provider, it’ll be relatively simple to build a plan for how you want to showcase them.
How should you present your new products? It depends on how many you have, how often you get new ones, and how your users respond to your introductions. Make a list of your products, their on-sale dates, and when you’re permitted to “sneak peek them.” Then, figure out how you want to present them. Do you want a trigger command? What assets are you going to use? Have you written special product descriptions for Voice? Where should you send someone interested in the new product(s)? What link(s) will you give? Are you going to have a special offer with a deadline? What’s your follow-up process?
Please don’t do this all at once. Take your first product and figure out your plan of attack. Then, implement it. Read the results. And then try it again or work on the second product (using the learning you gathered from the first product.) The first dozen or so products you build may completely bomb. That’s ok. You’re trying to build a solid foundation to use all the learning(s) you can and improve things. After you’ve developed a sturdy structure, you can turn things over to AI/ML. Till then, just keep improving.
Review Your Internal Text Search Program with an Eye to Voice
As your Voice traffic picks up, some of your other metrics will likely go wonky little by little. This usually happens so that marketers don’t notice it for a while and then, suddenly, POW! You feel it right in the kisser.
One of the things that get hit hardest? Internal text search. (Yes, even if you don’t accommodate for Voice on your site.)
You already know that Voice searchers use longer searches. Many marketers don’t realize until they see in their analytics how different voice searches can be and how your site handles those queries once they’re replicated in your internal text search function.
For example, a user finds you through a Voice search they did with Cortana on their desktop. When they get to your site, they like what they see, but it’s not exactly what they want. So, they start trying to find it. Live (not heat-map) usability testing will show you that Voice searchers will then typically skim your action bar navigation if they’re on the desktop but not pay much attention to the hamburger menu if they’re on a phone. Instead, they’ll go hard at your internal text search function. Using a slightly truncated but still longer-than-normal search to find what it is that they need. Can your search function handle that?
Right now, even the AI-enabled ones tend to struggle with the Voice searchers’ searches because of their different patterns. The adjectives and superfluous words we say but don’t type are often the biggest hang-ups. You’ll also want to check how often your visitors use proximity/availability language in their requests. For example, “office chairs delivered today” or “Copper River Salmon available now.”
This problem won’t be solved in a day, but it’s undoubtedly worth plugging away at. First, start to pay closer attention to your internal text searches. Many companies just focus on the “top 50” or the “top 100.” Keep doing this but also designate someone to look at the ENTIRE list each month. Have them assign each search to its main hub (aka the trunk.) Then, one-by-one start reviewing your spokes (aka roots.) Are the products in each spoke (root) prioritized properly? Are all the products within each spoke (root) adequately differentiated, or are there things you need to add to clarify what product one should buy per need?
You’ll also want to determine if the people using the longer searches are looking for something different. This happens ALL. THE. TIME. Some products are much more attractive to Voice searchers and search engines. So, you end up with all sorts of traffic that flies under the radar, and sadly, you neither notice nor accommodate it because it comes through as a long-tail search that you’re not paying much attention to and/or is not defined.
Remember, people who use search have some of the highest propensity to purchase of all your users/visitors/listeners. In fact, they’re right up there with carters. It’s essential to get this right.
Have questions or comments about Voice? Tips you’d like to share? Tweet @amyafrica or info@eightbyeight.com.
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