Technology is advancing at a faster pace than ever. What was once just stuff we see in sci-fi movies is not a reality. Smartphones now have the ability to perform voice searches. Voice search uses the power of speech recognition to search for anything on the internet. If you own a website, read on why it is a good idea to optimise your website for voice search, and how you can do so in your Google Ads campaign.

Why Optimise?

According to Adobe, in 2019, 48% of internet users use voice search instead of manually typing in their searches. By this year, it is expected to increase further to 50%. More and more people use Alexa or Siri to perform searches or tasks on their smartphones. Indeed, this presents a great opportunity for digital marketers to use in their advertising strategy.

How to Optimise in Google Ads campaign

For digital marketers, optimising a website for voice search has a great impact on SEO strategies. However, aside from SEO, voice search can also be optimised for Google Ads campaigns. Here are three things to remember with voice searches:

• Most voice searches are conversational and asked as a question instead of just a random phrase.
• Thus, voices are a bit longer than traditional searches, averaging to 4.2 words per search, compared to 3.2 words per search for text-based searches.
• People do voice searches while driving, thus “near me” or “open now” searches are very popular.

With these in mind, you can now identify which keywords to use for your Google Ads campaign. You can also check if your current campaigns are currently receiving any voice search traffic. Run a report from the last one or two months. So you can see how you are currently doing and what needs to be done. From there, you can identify negative keywords to add to your list so that you can successfully trim to target your desired audience.

Once you have narrowed down which keywords your audience uses and which ones to steer clear from, you can now begin to build on these longer-tail search queries so you can include conversational keywords to your Google Ad campaign. There are a lot of great keyword research tools out there such as SEMrush, Moz, or Ahrefs, just to name a few.

A tip from the experts is to include question words such as who, what, when, and where because most searches are in a question form. They also recommend short but broad modified keywords so you can get more variations. Lastly, you may also want to include your location in the keywords. For instance, a user might ask, “Ok Google, find a coffee shop near me.” If you clearly indicate your location in your keywords, then it is likely that it will turn up in the top results. Just make sure to have the locations extensions enabled on the Google Ad campaign.

With voice search rapidly on the rise, it’s the perfect time to get ahead and set up your Google Ad campaigns to fully optimise this growing market.

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