Technologies have become indispensable in our daily lives. Voice Search function of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being even more common nowadays. As reported by Apple in 2018, Siri, that is the built-in voice-controlled personal assistant, reached over 300 million times of use every month. Apart from Apple, other brands also provide similar voice search assistants, many of the electronic product users have already got used to making use of this kind of software for searching.
After you tell your personal assistant what information you need, the search results, from search engines like Google, will be shown. This indicates that Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is becoming more vital. Through SEM, companies can reach their potential clients, one way is to use paid advertising to help to get to the top of the result page to increase exposure.
Taking Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google as an example, a company has to choose some keywords as the first step. If the keyword is popular to be used, the bid price will be higher accordingly. The company can set the highest bid price willing to pay or ask Google to set the price. Quality Score is crucial in Google PPC advertising too. A higher Quality Score can assist the company’s advertisement to reach a higher position with a cheaper bid price. According to Google “The more relevant your ads and landing pages are to the user, the more likely it is that you’ll see higher Quality Scores”. The score is from 1 to 10, which 10 is the highest. For example, if the companies bid the keyword at the same price, and company A has a good Quality Score compares to company B, company A’s advertisement can occupy the first position of the search result page; if company A gives a lower bid price but owns a higher Quality Score than company B, it may be possible that company A will get to the top as well. For the fee, as the name implies, it is charged base on click rate and bid price, and of course, if no one clicks the advertisement, the company will not be charged.
Apart from paid advertising on search engines, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) also takes an important role. SEO is a kind of SEM. The company boosts its search ranking on the result page through SEO which does not require the company to pay any fee to search engines. If a company wants to improve its search ranking, not only finding out the correct keywords and labels is essential, it is also a must for the company to optimize the content and design of its website. A clear design and attractive design can help potential customers find out useful information easily and lengthen their time staying on the website to read more relevant information. High-quality content can be another initiative for potential customers to share the website with their friends to raise website traffic.
It is believed that Voice Search will become more popular in the future and companies will allocate their resources on SEM strategies. Only if start preparing early can win a victory in this SEM battle and increase brand awareness as well as exposure.
