How financial marketers must prep banking websites for voice search

'Hey Siri, will my bank's website show up in voice search?' Not if your site loads at a glacial pace. For big banks and community credit unions alike, optimizing website content for voice must be a focus now. That means speeding up your web pages and including content specific for Google's voice-search agents.

Many question marks about voice search remain. Are smart speakers going to become as ubiquitous as refrigerators? Will consumers ever use them to apply for loans or credit cards?

We may not know the answers to these questions yet, but it’s clear that the era of voice has arrived. For big banks and community credit unions alike, optimizing web content for voice must be a focus now.

If you own a smart speaker like an Amazon Echo, Google Home, or Apple HomePod you have a lot of company. More than 50 million of these devices were sold in the U.S. in 2018 alone. eMarketer expects that 74 million people, or 26% of the nation’s internet users, to have a smart speaker by the end of 2019.

The rise of smart speakers could upend the way consumers search for and engage with financial information. Built-in voice agents such as Siri and Google Assistant can parse and process searches in near real-time, making them much faster than typing out queries on the web.

 

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