Is your Google AdWords PPC strategy ready for voice search? Yes, this is the latest worry for marketers and business owners all over the world. Your consumers are less and less likely to type in a search bar to look for products and services. They can simply ask Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant to do that for them.
What Is Voice Search Changing in the Marketing Landscape?
The critical element in any kind of search is semantics: the words used, the order in which they are arranged in phrases, and the number of words in a search query. When typing on a computer and mobile phones, people tend to strip down the query to the basic keywords.
It is natural to save effort, especially if you are outside, waiting for your Uber car or looking for a place to have lunch. You don’t have the time and patience to type a full sentence. But things are very different if you simply speak to a digital assistant. You can ask a full question and add as many details as you wish to make your question clearer.
Your PPC Strategy Must Include Digital Assistants in the List of Prospects
As things stand now, a digital assistant will search for the most adequate answer to a question in terms of: intent, relevance and location. Most of these questions refer to products and services which people need now. Thus, they want to find them as close to home as possible.
So, what should you do to make sure that your PPC strategy takes into account the growing source of voice search queries? Here are a few helpful ideas:
1. See If Your Current PPC Ads Already Get Voice Search Traffic
It is quite likely that a proportion of your traffic from paid ads comes from voice searches. This is how you discover this category:
- Export an AdWords search query for 30 days (for relevance)
- Filter for the names of the most popular digital assistants: Siri, Alexa, OK Google
- Create a word count column for these filtered results.
What do you get after performing these actions? First of all, you can calculate the percentage of voice search traffic out of the total traffic your ads generated. Secondly, you can estimate the average length of the search query by voice and its structure (sentence, question, or phrase).
2. Review Your Negative Keyword
If you went by the book in your past PPC strategy, you probably removed some negative keywords, such as “how to”, “what is”, etc. They generally indicate simple curiosity in typed searches.
However, with voice search, these question keywords indicate intent. People want to find a business, get directions to a store or compare various offers. Thus, you should remove some of these negative keywords from your list.
3. Expand Your Basic Keywords into Questions
Voice search relies on full questions. Thus, you should rely on question style long tail keywords. But how can you find relevant questions including your keywords?
One reliable source is Answer the Public. This free online service uses both Google and Bing to give you a list of actual questions asked by people which contain your keywords. From 2-3 basic keywords, you can get 50-60 question ideas.
4. Sort Your Keywords by Intent
Just like with traditional typed searches, users are at different moments in the buying journey when they use voice search. They ask certain questions during the initial search, others during the consideration phase, and others when they have decided to select a specific product or business.
Thus, using the same judgment as you apply for your top of funnel – middle of funnel – bottom of funnel marketing strategy, create groups of voice search keywords for each phase of the customer journey. This will make your PPC strategy more effective for voice search.
5. Prepare Relevant Landing Pages
The finish line for each AdWords campaign is on your landing page. This is where the prospect must find what they were looking for when they clicked on the ad. With voice search, you are dealing with prospects that have even less patience than before.
Thus, your landing page must be super relevant, contextualised and designed to promote conversions on the spot. Your prospect must see what they are looking for at the first glance and make up their mind to find out more by signing up.