In recent years, the way we search for information has changed significantly due to the emergence of artificial intelligence, technological progress, and the development of mobile devices. Smart phones and smart speakers gave a further boost to the use of voice activated searches. Moreover, throughout pandemic and post-pandemic era, contactless experience gave a major boost to voice and visual searches, making a shift from text-based search to voice and visual search.
Voice-activated digital assistants like Alexa, Siri, Google, and Cortana are becoming more popular while Google Lens, Pinterest Lens, Instagram Shopping, Snapchat, eBay and Bing Visual Search are becoming more common visual search platforms.
A voice search is a spoken query that uses artificial intelligence (AI) like Siri or Alexa to find something online. An image, map, or video may be the subject of a visual search. Voice search tends to be more local than text-based search, whereas visual search is more global in nature. It is important to remember that even though voice and visual searches are becoming increasingly prevalent of all search queries, there is still a large percentage of the people using text-based searches on Google and other search engines. According to the latest research, 27% of people globally use voice search on mobile devices while in India voice search increased to 270% year-over-year.
Businesses are now making their services available through voice-activated assistance. Many tech giants such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are already on the move, optimizing voice search which will give them an edge over their competitors.
With this change, SEO and keyword search strategy will also need to change. Specializing in voice search SEO and monetizing is critical to compete.
How to optimize your content for voice and visual searches?
Digital marketing has now become a ubiquitous channel, guiding consumers’ businesses to make decisions according to industrial trends while conducting competitive analysis, linguistically, visually and test-based search engine keywords and SEO strategies and content is an important part of all the digital marketing strategies.
But not all content performs well in search engines. Optimizing your content for voice and visual searches will help you reach more people and improve your visibility on search engines. To optimize search results for voice and visual searches, you need to have a clear strategy in mind.
Make sure your website is mobile friendly. Focus more on visual elements like uploading high resolution images of your product and services which are related to your keywords. Use audio files instead of pure text content, or use specific keywords or phrases that aligns with your brand’s voice and tone. This will create an online inventory and catalogue of your products and increase your brand visibility in searches. The most cost-effective way is to create ad copy, optimized for both visual and voice searches. Lastly, get the SEO done even for images and videos. It might take a little time and effort in the beginning, but search engine optimization is one of the most feasible ways to market your brand. You simply need to keep in mind that content should be original, highly relevant and easily accessible. Also remember that visual content must not be too cluttered or distracting in its design.