"Siri, I would like a pizza. Can you find me a pizza take-out in Melbourne city?"

According to Forbes, 30% of all website sessions will be conducted without a screen by 2020. While my love-affair with a screen seems to be something I am unprepared to give up, it is inevitable. Let's face it, giving up a screen will do wonders for our eyesight and sleep patterns. Speech recognition in our devices has become more complex and precise although an Australian accent is still an issue on most voice assistant platforms. In recent years, we’ve experienced a technological breakthrough with the introduction of voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri.

Consumer Behavioural Change

Our behaviour has changed when using voice search and our acceptance of the decisions that Siri, Alexa and Cortana make on our behalf has given confidence to the developers who are seeing a reliance on voice search particularly in the area of consumer buying.

When you are searching for a restaurant on your desktop or phone, you might type in "Best Lunches in Sydney." But when you use voice search you change your behavior and ask a question, like "What restaurant has the best lunch in Sydney?" or "What restaurants are open from 5pm today?"

Choice of Words

The choice of words used in the question provides more context about the users intentions, which in turn can provide advertisers with more insight into where the consumer is within the purchase cycle. Are they simply researching, or ready to purchase? If so, when are they seeking to purchase? What is their budget? How do they want a product to be delivered? 

This change in consumer behaviour has lead to marketers needing to adapt their search engine optimisation of websites. No longer do we seek to shorten our dialogue with Google. With speech, we are able to ask exactly what we want in the characters that are required. 

Voice SEO Tips

Tips to re-organise your content for SEO:

• Create content to answer specific questions
• Organise your content in a question and answer format
• Make sure to create high-quality content

Looking to the future, featured snippets will be more valued and there will only be more competition to win a spot at the top of search engines. Creating more content and video will allow for your brand and website to stay on top but you will need to keep changing the dialogue, regularly getting feedback from your customers on how they are asking for products and services and in which format would they like to see it delivered.

Walking into a pizza shop in the future may have you ask for your pizza as you walk in the door with the server delivering it to you in no time at all knowing your name and with a smile on their face creating a better customer experience and less work overall.