Listen up: Travel marketers need to pay attention to voice search

There’s a lot of coverage in the media about Google, Amazon and Apple (okay, AND Microsoft) regarding the race to dominate the voice assistant space. Regardless of whether one of these behemoths wins the battle royal in the near term, my belief is that we’re inevitably going to end up in a platform-agnostic world where the voice functionality is no more than an interface between you and an increasingly smart AI.

There’s going to be a point at which all the major providers reach near parity when it comes to natural language processing (the ability to understand the words you spoke and the intent behind them). But what happens next is really what matters.

When Siri rolled out in beta on the iPhone 4S back in 2011, it wasn’t much more than a semi-functional novelty. We spent the majority of our time interacting with the device by asking questions such as “Hey, Siri. What’s zero divided by zero?” or “Hey, Siri. What’s the meaning of life?” to which we knew we’d get a hilarious answer about Cookie Monster and a reference to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, respectively.

To be honest, when you asked Siri to do anything remotely useful, you'd often be disappointed in either her lack of understanding of your request or her lack of capability to execute your command. This led to a relatively slow adoption of the technology.

There’s a statistic that still gets thrown around in almost every voice-related post. “At Google I/O 2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that 20% of the mobile queries on Google are voice searches.” But that was in 2016.

Two whole years have passed, and 30 million smart speakers have been sold since then. We now have a plethora of smart devices that are substantially better at natural language processing, and, due to continued advancements in AI, they can actually perform tasks that improve our life and make mundane tasks easier.

It’s not just smart speakers and mobile phones, either. Voice control is being embedded in everything from cars to refrigerators. This is leading to a massive shift in consumer behavior.

It really doesn’t matter whether Google’s Home and Android products outsell Apple’s HomePod and iPhone, or whether Amazon Alexa and its myriad flavors take over the world and start to be embedded in our toothbrushes. What matters is that we’re all changing the way in which we interact with technology.

We are moving away from needing to be tethered to a device and having to provide tactile input and moving toward a society where we can simply speak and let our increasingly intelligent devices take care of the rest.

Because of voice integration, how we consume information, how we make purchases and how we experience the world around us is different today than it was a year ago, and it will be different again a year from now. Most important, our expectations are changing along with our behavior. We want everything readily available to us, we want it to work flawlessly and we want it to work intuitively.

So how do we adjust our approach to travel marketing because of this shift in behavior? 

How it all works 

Before we get into that, it’s important to delineate between mobile voice-enabled devices and smart speakers. If you look at the data related to how people currently use their Amazon Echo and their Google Home (and that one person who purchased the over-priced Apple HomePod), it’s mostly for utility such as setting timers, getting the news, listening to music and controlling smart devices within the home.

Sure, there is a small percentage of folks who use it to repurchase items from Amazon, order a pizza or call an Uber, but there’s really not much data that suggests that smart speakers are being used for things like travel research … yet.

I say yet, because I can envision a day in the not-too-distant future when this is more likely. The limitation in how smart speakers are being used is not that these devices don’t have a screen; it’s that they aren’t good at responding to complex requests. It’s going to take a little more advancement in AI before we get there. We’re going to need to have real two-way conversations with our smart speakers in order to provide them with the necessary information to make a complex decision.

Today, if I said, “Alexa, book me a hotel room in London,” she will respond, “Here are a few top-rated hotels in London, England,” and then she’ll rattle off a list of hotel names, with no context or useful information. It’s not very helpful, and it will inevitably lead me to pick up my smartphone and do my research with a screen.

However, we’re on the cusp of something that’s going to be much more useful and much more frictionless. I believe that it will be between two to five years before the conversation will go something like this:

Me: “I need a room in London.”
Alexa: “Sure. When would you like to travel?”
Me: “Arriving June 21 and checking out on June 26.”
Alexa: “Got it. Who will be travelling with you?”
Me: “Just me and my wife.”
Alexa: “Great. Is this a business trip or a romantic getaway?”
Me: “It’s a bleisure trip.”
Alexa: “Urggh! I wish you wouldn’t use that word. Where will you be visiting while you’re there?”
Me: “I have a meeting at Canary Wharf on the 22, tea with the Queen on the 23, then we’ll spend the rest of the time doing touristy stuff.”
Alexa: “Ok. Based on your previous hotel preferences, I found the perfect spot. The Fancypants Hotel. It’s ranked number 4 on TripAdvisor, located just a block from the tube station close to where you’ll need to get to, and it’s only 199 pounds per night. Do you want me to go ahead and book it for you?”
Me: “Yes, please.”
Alexa: “You’re all booked. I emailed you a confirmation.”
Me: “Thank you!”
Alexa: “You’re welcome. Please don’t say ‘bleisure’ next time.”
Me: “Sorry.”

Ok, so maybe it won’t be quite like that, but you get the point. It’s going to be like talking to a real person. If you don’t believe me, check out the Google Duplex demo from the 2018 I/O event. The smart assistant of the not-so-distant future is going to have access to your previous travel purchase history and is going to be able to make meaningful decisions on your behalf based on what it knows about your personal preferences. The more you use it, the smarter it will become.

It will eventually know more about you than you do. It will be able to make all of those tiny decisions along the research and booking funnel on your behalf because it knows how you would answer. It will save you time and it will, ultimately, make better plans for you than you could have on your own.

The limitation in how smart speakers are being used is not that these devices don’t have a screen; it’s that they aren’t good at responding to complex requests.

Stuart Butler - Fuel

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Today, smart speakers aren’t necessarily impacting the travel industry directly in terms of how consumers research or book their travel. So, rather than focusing on what our life is going to be like in the future, I want to focus on something more tangible, the area in which voice search can have a meaningful impact on travelers and travel marketers today.

We know that people are using voice search on their mobile devices to find local businesses, search the internet and compare prices. So, that’s where we should look to gain the most traction. Just as we have always optimized our online presence to maximize our exposure and to convert as many people through our funnel as possible, so it should be the same with this new shift in behavior.

The good news is that many of the best practices that savvy marketers have already been employing in order to maximize their organic search exposure and to increase their website’s conversion rate are the same things that are going to help your business when it comes to being visible and performing well for voice search.

This means that you don’t need to hire one of those opportunistic hacks who are selling “voice search optimization” services all over the place. Your current provider is likely already focused on a lot of the right things.

Here’s a list of some of the most important things that you can be doing today that will help you gain more traction in voice search results:

4 simple steps to optimize your business for voice search

• Optimize your Google My Business listing and other local profiles.

Many voice searches are local in nature, which means that the results page will often be based on the results that rank well in local listings. It’s essential that your Google My Business and all other local directory pages are claimed and optimized.

But don’t stop there. You should also make sure that your name, address and phone number are consistent throughout the internet. We know that most voice searches are looking for information such as directions, opening hours, etc. Be sure that your relevant information is up to date and highly visible.

• Make your website blazing fast, mobile-friendly and useful.

At the moment, the majority of relevant voice searches that impact your business will be performed on a mobile phone as opposed to a smart speaker. The logical next step for the traveler who doesn’t simply call you is to visit your website. Make sure it is helpful. Think about what the person making the search is trying to accomplish and try to make it easy for them to find the information they need or to perform the specific task they are looking to perform.

Savvy marketers are already on top of the things they need to be doing, and will likely continue to be on top of these things as they make iterative improvements to their marketing strategy.

Stuart Butler - Fuel

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Think about each page within your website as the gateway to your business. Look at it on a mobile phone screen and ask yourself whether or not that page is providing everything it needs to in a clear and concise manner. For example, using bulleted lists vs. paragraphs of text may make more sense for consumers on the go.

Another factor that seems to influence voice search results is page speed. Be sure that your images are optimized, that you aren’t running any unnecessary scripts and consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to offload some of your larger assets.

• Use conversational keywords and build great FAQ pages.

Start writing down the questions that people actually ask while making travel plans, and be sure to use the same language structure and nomenclature in your content strategy. Use these questions as a starting point to build out comprehensive information that covers all of the potential questions.

When a question cannot be answered within a single paragraph, take the time to build out robust and useful content that earns the right to rank at the top of the search engine results page by being better than everything else that’s currently available.

By nature, the types of keyword that we type into a search engine are different than how we speak and think. As voice search becomes more prevalent, the types of queries that people use to find information will become more like everyday speech. Looking at your keyword insights within Google Search Console already shows the beginnings of this shift, as fewer people are landing on your site from simple keywords such as “hotels in London,” and more are finding you through discerning keywords such as “show me nice hotels in London near Canary Wharf with breakfast included.”

• Embed schema.org markup.

In order for your site and your information to be presented to the consumer by these smart devices, the devices first have to understand the semantics of your content in order to determine whether or not you deserve to be displayed and whether or not you are going to be the most relevant response for each individual query.

Defining the structure of your content by encoding it in a language that the machines are taught to understand is critical. This does get a bit technical, but it’s too important to ignore. In order for our smart devices to be able to carry on a conversation with us about the information it can find, that information has to be accessible in a manner that it can be understood and related to other information.

The standard that has become universally adopted is schema.org. Founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex, schema.org is a standardized vocabulary that can be embedded within the markup of your website’s HTML code in order to label your content. For example, if you are a hotel, defining that you are a hotel and defining each specific room type and its bed configuration and amenities, etc., will help folks who ask questions such as, “I need a hotel room close to the airport with two queen beds that has a refrigerator in the room.”

Don't overthink it

As is often the case when technology causes a shift in consumer behavior, many people within the travel industry will spend too much time over-analyzing the technology itself and overthinking how to take advantage of the situation before the competitors figure it out.

Truth be told, savvy marketers within the industry are already on top of the things they need to be doing, and will likely continue to be on top of these things as they make iterative improvements to their marketing strategy.

As an industry, it’s important that we are constantly evolving to meet the expectations of our consumers. The increase in volume of voice search is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the beginning of the next evolution of human-computer interaction, and we need to understand that with that shift comes new expectations from our customer.

Rather than focusing on the buzzwords that accompany new technology, we need to continue to remember that we’re all in the people business. How we research and book travel may be changing, but why they travel has always and will always be the same.

Before too long, we’ll be talking about the downturn of voice search brought on by the onset of brain implants that decipher our thoughts. Regardless of the technology, we always need to focus on what really matters in the travel industry.

We need to focus on building one-to-one relationships with real human beings. We need to focus on the emotional side of what inspires us to travel. We need to make it frictionless to make decisions. And we need to deliver on the experience. How we do some of these things may be changing, but the reason why likely never will.