TECHNOLOGY
queries about your offering and your industry in general. “The questions should be phrased in a way that sounds like natural speech when read aloud. These pages always get picked up in voice searches. They can be created and made live inside a couple of hours,” he says.
Andrew Dunbar, general manager for digital innovation company Appnovation Europe, believes that you should focus fi rst on the user- friendliness of your website rather than the technology. If voice isn’t the most convenient way to solve a problem, focus on a different channel, he advises, adding: “If we fail to recognise the fact that there’s a real person at the other end who’s trying to solve a problem, and they’ve chosen our brand to do so, we risk losing a sale with each poor engagement that we offer.”
‘TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT VOICE,
YOU SHOULD HIRE A DEVELOPER TO CREATE AN AMAZING ALEXA SKILL’
There is, of course, a signifi cant similarity between these two phrases, but enough difference to enable tech-savvy fi rms to capitalise. The second big change is that, while a standard search-engine query will return 10 or more results on the fi rst page, a voice search might return only a single defi nitive answer. In this scenario, achieving second place on the results page – a big win in terms of a text search – is meaningless. Even if the searcher asks for the top three restaurants in a given area, you’d better hope that yours is not number four. So does this mean small businesses risk getting shunted down the search rankings for good? Well, not necessarily. A neat feature of voice
38
director.co.uk
is that it blends perfectly with local search. For instance, if you want to fi nd a good place to grab an espresso in your vicinity, simply adding the word “independent” to your request for a coffee shop might well encourage you to explore beyond the standard chain offerings.
RAISING YOUR VOICE
There is therefore an opportunity for small brands to get ahead of their rivals by blending local and voice search to corner passing trade. But how do you go about doing that? John recommends creating a prominent FAQ page on your website that answers customers’ common
Beyond this, experts advise thinking about what your brand “sounds like” when there are no visual cues. El-Arifi observes that fi rms pay overwhelming attention to the “look and feel” of their branding, but there is nothing in their guidelines to “address what the experience should be like if there were no visual aspect”. As always, if you want something done properly, you need to call in an expert. So says John, who adds: “To get serious about voice, you should hire a developer to create an amazing Alexa skill that dominates the voice space in your market. This will require some budget, but it will ensure that you’re really ahead of the competition and ready for the voice revolution when it comes.” Voice search is clearly a fast- evolving fi eld and global tech brands are still working on software that provides the best possible user experience. But, with hands-free requests set to account for half of all searches next year, surely that’s a big enough development to get any enterprise listening intently.
ALBERTO ANTONIAZZI / SYNERGY ART
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
