It’s clear that voice and visual search will be here to stay for the next coming decade, with Amazon pushing Alexa, their speech synthesizer virtual assistant technology and Google having launched Google Lens in 2017, which allows users to conduct visual search using existing mages.

The trend of using visual and voice instead of text is beginning to show its prominence. The technology is here. But should we adapt to it?

As tech evolves, users are interacting with content in many unique and new ways, if you’re not preparing and optimizing your brand for these trends then you may be missing out on a group of potential customers with different searching habits.

That’s why you may want to prepare your brand for the upcoming changes in technology and its impact on the search engine.

The Differences Between the Three Ways of Search

There are a few distinct differences between how search is conducted with voice, text and visual:

Voice search – The ability to search using the spoken voice rather than typing. This technology can be seen in Alexa, Google Voice Search and Siri for the iPhone.

Visual search – Using visual input, for example pictures taken on the iPhone to determine the best fit photos that are uploaded online.

Text Search – Text search is using text input, usually from a keyboard, to search for relevant keywords that have been inserted. What is being used currently is most commonly text search.

It’s not exactly the contents of the search that will change, but instead of how the data is being inputted and the results that are displayed from the search.

How Will Voice & Visual Affect My Brand?

It is likely that your brand will be affected in terms of what is required for SEO optimization. You will have to optimize your article in a way that appeals to your audience’s new searching habits.

For example, with the advent visual search, having your alt tags, image titles set towards your targeted keywords are still good SEO practices to have.

With visual search, the technology is reliant on neural networks and machine learning to match your inputted picture with relevant photos. Its capabilities also range towards matching images with those that are around your location.

Therefor for optimization with visual, it’s important to have your images on your website that are presented clearly and without confusion. This could potentially be important for areas such as e-commerce where visual search is a way to look for products online.

With voice search on the other hand, you want to make sure that your keywords have optimization towards someone searching through voice, which requires more long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are important is because someone searching will likely be asking a question.

Due to voice search usually being synonymous with asking a question, you want to be listing your page on “Google My Business” so that that the technology can match the user’s input to your page.

Copywriting for Your Website

The copy is something that will remain unchanged. The things that are a must to create a good piece of content such as emotions, strong unique angles, hooks and storytelling remain important features will remain a constant.

As voice search is something that is conversational, the important copywriting advice of “writing the way you talk” will still apply.

Having a conversational tone is something that will also fit in with how a piece of content is discoverable due to voice search being a conversational tool.

In addition, a conversational tone is something that will appeal to the masses because of its relatability and readability.

In general, copywriting for the website has to be tighter than before. Gone are the days of lazy writing where you can just write a few half-decent articles to rank well. Voice and visual search introduces a whole level of complexity in ranking your content, as well as Google’s detection system of weeding out low-quality content.

Things will simply need to be tighter or you will lose out to the sea of competition.

Future Implications – Visual and Voice Search

The future implications within the next 10 years will likely be a less usage of text and a lot more alternative forms of utilizing search.

This may be because uploading a photo for visual search or just using your voice to search is something much more convenient, in addition to using less brainpower compared to typing.

Will this trend replace text search altogether, however is still debatable.

The advent of automation in terms of search will be something that is definitely disruptive to the digital marketing industry as soon, text may be something you see of the past while visual and voice search, in particular voice, may take over.

This could be due to automation being moved towards voice and hand gestures as you can see in Amazon’s latest no-cashier shop.

Be prepared and be ready to adapt.