The Rise of Digital Assistants

Search engine optimisation revolutionised how businesses were discovered online, and voice-controlled AI is pushing that practice to a higher level. Google Assistant, Bixby, Xiaoyi, Alexa, and Clova are all examples of these digital assistants that now deliver approximately 20% of all search queries right to smartphones, a number that is only expected to grow in the near future.

Unlike traditional search engines such as Naver, Baidu or Yahoo! Japan that emphasise a breadth of knowledge, digital assistants try to answer queries as directly as possible. This means that rather than delivering hundreds of thousands of relevant links that the user is expected to sift through in order to find answers, only two or three of the most relevant results will be displayed each time a voice-activated search is processed.

Due to this increasing competition, businesses looking to improve the discoverability of their content now need to implement a new practice—voice engine optimisation. Here’s how these new features are changing the game, along with some tips on how to take advantage of them.

Smaller Markets

Since voice-activated searches tend to use complete sentences and precise phrasing, one of the defining features of voice engine optimisation is the use of long-tail keywords—phrases that contain anywhere between three and five words. While these searches tend to deliver more niche results, they are also less competitive, allowing businesses who properly tailor their content to this practice to stand out from the crowd.

By anticipating questions that customers are likely to ask, businesses can create FAQs and about pages that can provide the pertinent information necessary to deliver high-quality responses. The more specific they get regarding their prices, goods, services, and contact details—all of which are things customers are likely to be interested in—the more they’ll shoot up the search rankings for relevant queries.

Intelligent Crawling

Due to their emphasis on user convenience, digital assistants examine every aspect of your website—not just your content. Primarily, they take close looks at your HTML code, URLs, and headers in order to assess whether content can be easily distilled into featured snippets—condensed summaries of information that allow users to get answers to their questions without having to click through to the site itself. By adjusting your website to provide what these search engines are looking for, businesses can greatly increase their odds of being discovered.

Plan for the Future

The AI powering smartphone assistants is getting more complex each and every day, and keeping tabs on forthcoming changes can prevent your website from falling behind as the technology continues to develop. Speed-based ranking is one such example, where the loading times of your web pages are assessed by the different search engines before they’re recommended as results. This means that quick web hosting solutions and a responsive design that has mobile browsing in mind will be of the utmost importance to stay ahead of the curve.

The boom of new assistants entering the market in the past few years combined with the proliferation of popular new smart speakers such as Line’s Clova Friends Mini makes it clear that the technology isn’t going away anytime soon. By optimising your practices to account for this future growth, you can ensure that your business will benefit from the increased traffic provided by users looking to take advantage of quick, local solutions.