Online shopping has undergone a tremendous transformation with the advent of voice search. Finding products and completing a purchase has turned from typing information to issuing voice commands. Digital assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Apple Siri have become personal shoppers for millions of people worldwide. They understand spoken language and perform all the given tasks.
How Does Voice Search Influence Ecommerce Websites?
The faster and more accessible internet has become, the shorter people’s attention span and patience have become. You know this, because you are constantly trying to make your website as faster and accessible as possible.
With voice search, people’s patience has become even shorter. And this is because they are no longer performing the search – but an AI entity that communicates with the internet even faster than a human being. Thus, a slow loading page will stand no chance, no matter how valuable its content is.
Need for Speed and Relevant Information
However, relevance is also important for voice search. Virtual assistants use natural language and semantics to match a query with an answer. This means that your ecommerce website needs to supply information in a clear and conversational manner.
But how do you really prompt a digital assistant to recommend your products as the best match for a user’s search term? Here are some ways in which you should optimise your ecommerce website for best results:
1. Make Your Website Navigation Simple and Logical
How many clicks are there from your home page to a specific product? And, should a user want to backtrack their navigation steps, can they do it easily? These issues are more important than ever in the voice search era.
Generally, users instruct their digital assistants to look for a product, then for details on the delivery and return terms, and then back to the main category for the product. If your site map is not clearly structured, the AI assistant may return a wrong answer, and the user will instruct it to search for another website.
You should review your website navigation, add breadcrumbs and post a sitemap with clickable links so that digital assistant can find the information the user asked for.
2. Focus on Best Selling Products through Voice Search
According to recent statistics, people use voice search to shop for:
- 20% grocery
- 19% entertainment
- 17% electronics
- 8% clothing.
Thus, you should focus on promoting these types of products on your home page and in the special deals page. In this way, you can grow your sales from voice search queries and help grow your brand image through this new form of internet search.
3. Get Your FAQs Together
The FAQ page will become one of the most important sections in your website in the voice search era. This is the most voice search friendly page on your ecommerce site, because it consists of questions and answers.
With proper optimisation, your Q&A content may rank in Google Featured Snippets and Direct Answers. These sections appear even ahead of the first Google search results, in a distinct rectangle. Thus, they are more visible and more likely to get selected by digital assistants. Actually, according to Backlinko, over 40% of voice search answers come from Featured Snippets.
4. Build Trust through Helpful Content
At the present, most people use voice search to reorder products they are already familiar with. They do not trust a direct voice purchase from a brand they have never bought from. Thus, the number one challenge for your ecommerce website is to build trust with people who use digital assistants.
The way to do it is to create a careful content plan that takes into account all the stages in the buying process, from the initial search for information to the checkout page.
5. Think Big, Act Local
Voice search queries are mostly focused on local businesses, products and services. People use digital assistants when they are in a hurry, and when they need a product as soon as possible. This means one thing: they need to find the product as close to home as possible.
Therefore, while maintaining a SEO strategy aimed at a large number of prospects, don’t forget to optimise for local searches. Many people use an ecommerce website with a local brick and mortar presence so that they can receive the products as soon as possible.