How to optimize for voice search in e-commerce

Do you have an Amazon Echo, Alexa or Google Home in your household? If so, you are part of the 68 percent of Amazon Echo users have implemented this technology into their homes. Before the stay-at-home order and quarantine, consumers were shopping online, but the spike in e-commerce caused a five year expansion in a matter of one year. 

The growth of this industry has been astronomical and as companies are navigating the current explosion of their online stores, they are also having to adapt to another technology that has continued to grow and provided another outlet for revenue. 

Voice search is now a major part of the ecommerce industry! From sales to online ordering- voice ecommerce will grow to an $80 billion sector by 2023.

How do you optimize for voice ecommerce? 

Voice search and ecommerce 

Conversational content and FAQs

Voice ecommerce is utilizing conversation content and a thorough FAQ page with answers that customers can access before they need to reach out. For companies who are planning to change some of their content to be more conversational and provide answers to those questions, what are the FAQs?

What are consumers consistently asking in meetings, online and through chatbots? This is social listening; listen first, digest it and make a plan. 

The way that consumers ask voice search technology questions is different than their mobile and desktop counterparts. While optimizing and focusing on voice search and ecommerce strategies, make sure to not lose other content for those searching on their mobile and desktop devices.

Efficiency and multi-tasking

What does voice search ecommerce really provide to consumers? A time-efficient experience. Voice search is quick and effective when it comes to asking questions, it only takes a matter of seconds, while typing out said query takes about 35 seconds on average. 

Hands-free information and instant access to information are just some of the benefits associated with voice search. Some others include less interruptions during the voice search query and a faster response time on the voice search device! 

Along with this, voice search provides the ability to move around and ask several questions at one time without having to sit down, open a laptop, turn it on and then sit down to type out the query and figure out the answers. 

In our society, we want the instant results with instant answers which is what voice search provides to consumers. 

Speech recognition

One of the major downsides to voice search and ecommerce is that depending on the way the consumer asks a question, it can provide the wrong information, and no one is sure if that would affect websites like ranking for the wrong keywords. 

This is the moment to consider the number of ways that consumers could ask the same search phrase differently- and while you can’t modify and add content for all the different phrases- it is certainly something that can be considered.