Craft Focus - Oct/Nov (Issue 63)

business advice craft focus 65 spoken search and in fact, are we asking the right questions anyway? Perhaps what we really need to ask when structuring a marketing campaign in this new era of spoken search is ‘how would anyone possibly describe a search for this product?’ This is a much broader question that can’t readily be answered. Even the normal array of key phrase research tools available to us become useless when a good portion of the possible phrases used to search for a particular product or service become in effect completely new and have no search history. Perhaps what we really need is a way of predicting how people interact with machines through spoken language. While clever people all around the planet are actively working on producing machines that can do just this, perhaps what we really need to do is think creatively ourselves and approach the problem from the point of view of a website user, rather than a website marketer. COVERING ALL THE BASES The worldwide web was originally proposed as a massive data exchange. The whole concept was to allow information to be easily shared. It turns out that if we go back to basics, we can get around the problems posed by natural language searches. By going back to basics, I mean providing comprehensive, factually correct and enticing information on each and every product and category page in our online stores, backing this up with genuinely useful content on supporting pages like guides, blog posts and informational pages. Doing this in the vast majority of cases allows us to describe any way in which anyone will search for products or product ranges. The more text you add throughout your e-commerce website and the bigger variety of language you use, the greater chance that you will capture some of the phrases used to search for the products and brands that you offer in your online store. This doesn’t give you free rein to spam and stuff keywords in every page in your website, but if you keep it front of brain that not everyone thinks alike you should be on the right track. It doesn’t guard against people who search for a battery by asking Google Home ‘that thing with the copper-coloured top’, but it may just save our marketing efforts from the worst effects of the Intelligent Speaker invasion. THE DEATH OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION The logical conclusion of the arrival of smart devices like intelligent speakers is that they will eventually render search engine optimisation and online marketing obsolete. After all, what’s the use of optimising a website for a bunch of key phrases when searches by real users can’t be predicted? This argument is slightly erroneous. Although yes, it’s much harder to predict what an actual user is going to input via a smart device, the raw material used by these devices will continue to be the actual content within a website. All search engines and the smart devices that utilise them rely on website content and the content that these search engines are really interested in is written text. Supply plentiful quantities of written text in your retail website that is factually correct, enticing, unique and on subject and you are not only fulfilling what search engines are looking for but providing exactly the kind of content your real, human visitors are looking for. Unlike a traditional bricks-and-mortar store, e-commerce websites rely on top quality imagery and text to persuade people to buy. Retail website users don’t have immediate access to a salesperson so rely on supporting text, product description and imagery to portray what the product is and why it should be purchased. Even if optimising for key phrases on each page were to become outmoded because of smart devices and intelligent speakers, website content will still have to be optimised to get the right reaction from a website user. It turns out that if you supply top quality content that you’re also going back to basics and right back to the original premise of the worldwide web. Create. Share. Amaze. It’s what the web should be, and I for one am looking forward to a bright new chapter in online marketing! Intelligent Retail +44 (0)845 680 0126 intelligentretail.co.uk