How Firms Can Use Voice to Dominate Search and Social

If your clients use a smart phone to communicate, read news, or get information for their business, you might want to consider the power of voice search in your marketing efforts.

Voice in Search

Tools likes Alexa and Siri have been on the scene for a while. How can accounting firm marketers leverage these tools to increase client engagement, to share content via social media, and to increase search rankings?

Alexa has a tool called Alexa Skills. Users download the skills to their Alexa device and can get updates each day on a specific skill. Let’s say your firm offers business tips for managing a dental practice. You could create a series of quick tips for cash flow, retirement planning, payroll tips, tax deadlines, and more.

Once created and uploaded, anyone who asks Alexa for managing a dental practice could hear your information. To learn more about creating a skill, visit the Amazon Alexa app development area at https://developer.amazon.com/docs/ask-overviews/build-skills-with-the-alexa-skills-kit.html.

How does this help with search rankings?

Providing tips via voice is a new technology many large brands are taking advantage of. Think of all the tips you could share as a firm to help broaden your search reach, SEO ranking, and ability to get “in front” of your target audience by providing tips and information they can use.

To take advantage of this technology, ensure micro data is embedded on your website to increase your chance of being mentioned in a voice command. For example, if someone moves to a new town and is looking for a financial manager for their new lottery fortune, and asks Siri, “Hey Siri, who’s the best financial manager in my town?” Having micro data on your website’s sitemap, description tags, and keywords helps to increase your search relevance.

How does voice impact my firm’s social media marketing?

Did you know Alexa can read a person’s Twitter feed out loud? Knowing that, it’s time to remove the cryptic online phrases and shortened terms you might be using in social media to make it more user friendly and conversational.

Additionally, changing your content methodology to answer the basic journalistic questions, who, what, where, when, why, and how can help improve voice activated requests to find your social content. If you’re unsure where to get a list of questions like that, leverage AnswerThePublic.com (https://answerthepublic.com), a site that you enter a keyword phrase and get back a list of questions about that phrase. For example, enter the phrase “small business payroll” into the search box and you’ll receive nine questions. Use those questions as the content fodder for your next series of payroll blogs and social media posts.

When someone asks a voice-search tool for the answer to say, “How much does small business payroll cost?” you would have an answer available.

Now that you have an idea of how you can leverage voice in your website and social media content development calendar, what will Alexa and Siri be saying about your firm?