How Will Google Voice Search Change Your Apartment Marketing Strategy?
Voice Search is poised to quickly disrupt current apartment marketing strategies. We already know that users prefer mobile devices – the most common voice search platform – over desktops, when conducting a search. We also already know that 55 percent of teens and 41 percent of adults use voice search technologies on a daily basis. But how will these unignorable trends shape the future of apartment marketing?
Let’s take a look…
How is Voice Search marketing different from regular SEO?
Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how the search giant’s standard algorithm works. However, we do know that Voice Search uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) to help it understand a user’s search request. These extra layers aim to discover the meaning of the search query from a contextual standpoint.
The added emphasis on context means that marketers have to be a bit more creative when crafting strategies. While keywords are still important, we should place extra thought into how we use and phrase those keywords.
What strategies can apartment marketers use to target Voice Search?
Targeting Voice Search users may require updates to both the technical and creative sides of your website. Here’s a look at two things you can do to optimize your site for Voice Search:
Use Schema markup wherever it makes sense. Schema is an internet markup language that can be added to HTML in order to put your website’s content into perspective for search engines. Without Schema markup, content that identifies addresses, events, and many other things is simply interpreted it as text. With Schema in place, your website provides context to search engines, letting them know that a specific line of text represents an address, or an event, or a great number of other things.
Write in a conversational tone. Targeting Google Voice users requires you to think (and write) like a Google Voice user. You want to create content that answers the questions prospective renters are asking in a way that’s quick and easy for them to understand. If you’re not sure what questions your prospective renters are asking, use a tool like Google’s Keyword Planner to help you identify a few.
Will old SEO strategies still work for Voice Search?
Ultimately, all of the things that we identified above are already in use by multifamily communities that prefer to stay ahead of the marketing curve. Technical SEO practices that provide contextual clues to search robots and creative SEO practices that provide valuable information to users have long been the backbone of the best apartment marketing strategies. The introduction of Voice Search doesn’t change any of this. It simply puts those who fail to embrace these practices at an even more significant disadvantage.