How Voice Search in Ecommerce Will Enhance User Experience

E-commerce has transformed how customers shop and the volume of online transactions is increasing. As a result, voice search in ecommerce is growing as the next big thing in our modern world, going one step further and simplifying our lives even further. Voice assistants, including Alexa from Amazon, Siri from Apple, Bixby from Samsung, Google Assistant from Google, and Cortana from Microsoft, are a few examples of excellent platforms popular with voice searches.

Online businesses must adapt to the way customers shop, technological advancements, and the latest trends to provide immersive experiences. You can take a cab, call a friend, send a message, play music, and now engage in the ecommerce market using your voice.

What is voice search in ecommerce business?

Voice shopping is one of the fastest-growing ecommerce trends. Voice search for ecommerce refers to technologies and systems that allow customers to search for and buy products using their voice. As businesses provide a more human shopping experience through conversational commerce websites or ecommerce applications, checkout friction and cart abandonment will decrease.

How does voice search work? 

Speech recognition technology is used by virtual assistants to process and send someone's voice into text, which is then analyzed for queries or commands. With the deployment of voice technology, ecommerce businesses will make online store browsing easier. It will enable your customers to browse your catalog, ask questions, leave product reviews, check product ratings, view available stocks, colors, pricing, and place orders. 

Voice search optimization will enhance the user experience since consumers can get information without losing time surfing the web or paying attention to their smartphones or tablets. In addition, voice search in ecommerce enables online retailers and businesses to provide a hands-free buying experience.

The global transaction value of voice assistant-enabled ecommerce purchases is expected to increase from around 4.5 billion US dollars in 2021 to more than 19 billion US dollars in 2023. It represents a more than 400 percent increase in two years due to the growing opportunities for voice assistants to buy products, mainly through smartphones and smart home devices.

Source: Statista

The increased use of smartphones and high-speed internet has contributed to the growth of the ecommerce industry. It has led to brick-and-mortar retailers turning online to boost revenue. Due to intense competition, you must adhere to ecommerce best practices to increase sales. As voice search technology develops and usage grows, it will play a significant role in your ecommerce marketing strategy.

Benefits of voice search in ecommerce businesses

The importance of voice search in ecommerce can be a game-changer for the market. The voice search user base has constantly been growing and expanding. It brings many advantages to the user and any business using voice search capability.

Let's look at the benefits of voice search in ecommerce to provide the best shopping experience possible.

• Delivers a customized shopping experience

Users will have a personalized shopping experience from the start when using voice search for ecommerce. Voice-enabled solutions improve the shopping experience by making suggestions. Voice search helps eliminate the time-consuming, multi-step process of finding a product and adding it to the cart. Instead, it provides customers with a natural and seamless experience.

But how about hiring a virtual assistant to search for and order daily groceries from online supermarkets? Siri or Alexa could order the desired products with a single command if a customer frequently shops using voice search. Customers could order the products they want in a few seconds, encouraging them to shop more often and buy more items.

• Customer feedback is simple to gather

Collecting reviews has been difficult for businesses, but with voice search, customers can easily share feedback. The ease and convenience of reviewing make them more genuine and meaningful, which benefits the product and its many other customers. As virtual assistants ask specific questions and rate responses, voice search users can easily share feedback, making it more impactful. Since consumers use their voice, reviewing a product or service is quicker and more convenient because they avoid typing and the login process.

• Increase brand awareness through an easy shopping

When customers choose a brand, they want to connect with the company and have its services or products become a part of their daily lives. If your target audience is young, they will quickly embrace new technologies. As a result, voice-activated assistants are an excellent resource for your online business. Voice search will also assist your company in identifying shopping patterns and behaviors. Once the patterns are formed, voice assistants can quickly assist consumers in not missing any required items and making the proper recommendations, ensuring a perfect and enjoyable shopping experience.

• Improved service

The main reason for the popularity of voice search is its speed. The average person can type more than 30 words a minute, which equates to more than 150 characters. Regarding speech, the average person speaks about 100 words a minute. As a result, many users find voice search exciting since it allows them to communicate quickly and see what they need.

A voice search feature is also helpful for disabled, elderly, or non-tech-savvy individuals who have difficulty using a standard keyboard and search browser. Instead of typing a query into a search engine, they could ask Siri or Google to order groceries, allowing them to be more self-sufficient.

• Facilitates smart shopping

Artificial intelligence and machine learning empower virtual assistants, making them smart enough to understand customers' shopping behavior and preferences. For example, in the grocery shopping scenario, let's say that you frequently buy a particular brand of coffee from Amazon Fresh. Knowing this, the voice assistant can ask you to place an order and notify you when there is a sale on that specific brand. Customers would benefit from this as well as businesses because they could immediately reach out to customers with the new special offers.

The total global transaction value of voice assistant purchases on smart home devices is anticipated to increase from around 20 billion US dollars in 2020 to more than 160 billion US dollars in 2025. It represents a more than 625 percent increase in five years due to the growing opportunities for voice assistants to purchase items through smart home devices.

What accelerated the rise in the popularity of voice search?

Marketers believe that voice search will be the next significant element in digital marketing. E-commerce platforms have already begun optimizing their portals in preparation for the transformation. As a result, it's quicker and hands-free, and you don't have to focus on your device to access information—you can multitask with it. However, the evolution of technology has maintained some essential characteristics, such as a high-quality service experience, a user interface, and faster accessibility.

Let's look at some of the key reasons for the enormous increase in voice search in ecommerce.

• The design and development of voice search technology have resulted in a simple user interface for people of all ages and a large user base.
• With tech giants such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft all-embracing voice assistant technology in the mainstream, voice search has emerged as a reliable digital marketing trend.
• Compared to typing, searching by voice is unmatched in speed and convenience.

How do you optimize your website for voice search in ecommerce?

Voice commerce has excellent potential and will change the way people shop online. We live in an era where talking with your phone or smart speaker is commonplace. People are impatient, and they expect quick results to meet their needs. How do you get your voice search for ecommerce up and running?

Improve site speed: A quick mobile page load time is critical for Google rankings and happy customers. If your website does not load in three seconds, the voice search app cannot retrieve all of the information requested by customers. As a result, the entire ecommerce web development process is more concerned with speed than anything else.

Tips for increasing site speed:

• Remove any broken links
• Select a fast web host
• Reduced image size
• Lowering the number of redirects
• Make use of caching

Understand your customers' search patterns: Marketers must thoroughly examine their customers' behaviors and search context to understand and analyze their consumers' search patterns. Then, gather and evaluate the data points to better understand customer search trends. You can acquire real-time data to learn how people use voice search.

Restructure your content: Unlike traditional searches, where you have to type only a few keywords to get relevant results, voice search takes a more conversational approach. Therefore, businesses must analyze and restructure their content to align with voice search norms. The content layout should address many relevant questions with precise answers. The FAQ-style format allows Google to retrieve content from your website and display it as the expected result to the user. You can make your site more voice-search friendly this way, and it will rank higher in voice-search results.

Use natural language: Voice search technology is similar to the conversational language we often use while talking. When people speak out their questions instead of typing them, there is a noticeable difference in the language used. If all they need to do is speak vocally to technology, people will communicate their demands in their language. You must optimize your content so that Google can quickly find compatible answers with their casual language.

Long-Tail keywords: Voice searches are longer than traditional keyboard searches. Because of their conversational nature, voice searches are popular. Furthermore, we all know that Google supports long-form, detailed content. As a result, content creators must consider this point when generating long-form content that is heavy on long-tail keywords that appear in vocal queries.

Provide question words: It has been observed that question words such as who, which, how, when, and where are more frequently used in voice searches. In written searches, these question words are typically ignored. Marketers must ensure that their content responds to voice search queries accurately and politely. It should distinguish between simple questions and those that require more specific answers.

Include featured snippets in the content: A featured snippet is a brief text that appears at the top of Google's search results page. It provides an immediate response to your search query. The information for a featured snippet is pulled automatically from your website pages in Google's index. You should include featured snippets in your site content when implementing site-to-voice search. It is essential for Google Assistant and Alexa because these devices only display one result, and if your site lacks this short text, you will be invisible to customers.

Conclusion

Since voice assistants are the new thing on the block, as technological advancements and usage grow, they will become increasingly crucial to your ecommerce marketing strategy. Whatever your company's status or size, you should know what is new in the e-commerce field and, if it is a good fit for you, find the right partner to implement it. Innoraft has excellent expertise in ecommerce web development and optimizing website performance. We also strongly understand how to implement SEO and digital marketing best practices. If you are looking for a partner to assist you in scaling your business to a higher level, kindly contact us.