Many of us have shiny new thing syndrome. I’m guilty of taking one too many demo calls with businesses in the hopes of finding a tool or framework that’s going to 5x my net-new revenue or retention opportunities on the spot.

But if you look at emerging Channels over the last 5 years, for example – Snap, Telegram, Discord or even Metaverse… only TikTok has really built a moat around its offering and stood the test of time.

That said, out of the corner of one eye I’ve watched Voice Search grow up and become an interesting proposition. It’s under-utilized. And my sense is that’s about to change.

Why Does it Matter? 

34% of people in the US use voice search at least once a month. That share surges to 51% among the 20-25 years old bracket. Those numbers don’t make it a meaningful medium for non-profits, yet – most people use it to look up the weather, find a song, buy movie tickets, or add a grocery store stop to their navigation while driving.

The Real Value is In Between the Lines (like most good things). 

Focusing on SEO for voice search forces us to become closer to our donors. It’ll also likely ensure top organic rankings in traditional search. More generally I suspect it’ll open up the wider Org to at least explore emerging AI solutions too. I’m going to jump into each of these in turn.

Get Closer to Donors. 

Voice search (VSEO) is conversational by nature – forcing a different approach to SEO and over time SEM. Branded keywords don’t work –  potential, or even current, donors aren’t asking their HomePods to “donate to Save the Children” while cooking their Sunday Roast. Long-tail keywords, including everyday words like “what, how, when,” rule the roost. 

Here are a few tactics that help get VSEO up and running: 

1. Create more informational pages explaining your Organization’s impact, specific pillars of what you’re doing, and – ideally – how it connects to the broader domestic or global agenda.
   1. The goal here is to ingest your Org into the conversation when potential donors are searching for information about what’s happening in the world – whether it’s the latest updates on the war in Ukraine or the status of a rescue operation in Hawaii. Suppose your Org works to relieve those affected, and you do the rest of the tactics in the next section. In that case, your information will be given to donors – creating an immediate opportunity for a donation from a qualified suspect. 
2. Include statistics and captions: “How many girls don’t have access to hygiene products in Malawi?” or “How many children lack primary education in Ghana?”.
3. Talk to your current donors about what encouraged them to donate and what questions they had about your Org before doing so. Take those and create a word-for-word FAQ page. 
4. (If your Org is locally focused) Take bullet #1 and make it your own. When people – local or tourists – in your geo of interest are looking for “notable facts about their surroundings” your content will rank high.

You’re not only optimizing for Voice Search in this approach. 

The added benefit is you’re making the Org’s website more accessible to donors, regardless of the medium they used to find you. Not to mention the value the marketing team will elicit in talking to donors directly to understand their intent.

Ensure Better Rankings in Traditional Search. 

If your team commits to doing VSEO, you’re guaranteed to improve your conventional search rankings. These two go hand-in-hand – voice search is essentially picking up one of the top three results on the google.com page for the same search query. 

Technically speaking, there’s more to it: voice search is extremely mobile-oriented and Google is adding VSEO results as a considerably sized portion of its traditional ranking algorithm.

Page speed and usage of the https:// protocol are the most critical factors to successful VSEO outcomes, and slightly longer, clearly categorized pages tend to do best. All of these factors affect your traditional search as well! 

Here are a few tactics how to accomplish both at once:

1. Prioritize page load. This is not a novelty – now you have a straightforward way to “measure” it instead of arbitrary benchmarks. If your content is showing up in voice search – you’re doing well!
2. Talk to your web development partner about your “HTML schema”. Voice Search interprets the content on your page via these markers – the more precise you distinguish your pages into proper content types, as well as sections (such as Question, Answer, Video Explanation, Review, and others) – the better it will make your website rank both for Voice Search and for traditional Mobile Search.

Embracing Emerging AI Solutions. The rise of large-language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT is bound to give Voice Search a second rebirth – much more potent than the first coming ever was. AI is already being used to distill the best content into a short-form answer. At some point shortly, the best-optimized content for this use case will also be the content created by AI. They use the same algorithms! Now is the right time to explore this end of the capabilities, to be ahead of the curve, and to grab an early adopter advantage. 

I was blown away a few weeks ago when I first used Beautiful.ai. I tested it to turn a one thousand-words-long document into a presentation and then used d-id.com to create an avatar to narrate it – all in 5 minutes. 

Here are 3 possible use cases for your Org: 

1. Use narrator AI tools to create personalized thank-you videos for your donors to come in their email right after the donation – instead of old and boring plain text ones. Some of them – d-id included – will also allow you to create an avatar of a specific person (your CEO or brand ambassador?) to be used in such videos.
2. Use ChatGPT and other conversational LLMs to see how AI views your content. Ask it to summarize your best-performing pages or those you aim to have in the top ranks for Voice Search to validate that your content structure and HTML schemas work as intended.
3. Use AI tools to help you quickly generate tens and hundreds of slightly personalized narratives for web pages answering different types of conversational questions you got from your donors – saving tons of time. 

Data Privacy. 

The last and critical element of this puzzle. While Org’s are nowhere near the scrutiny healthcare or financial service industries are under, extra caution is more than warranted when using AI tools.

Use cases for data fed into these models are still wildly unclear. Anyone see Zoom’s recent change to their privacy policy allowing them to use everything you say in meetings for training their LLMs? 

I’ve been using these two rules of thumb to ensure I consider privacy while still getting to learn new tricks and leverage the advantages AI can afford: 

1. Never feed any donor or confidential Org’s data to any AI models, whether as files or in prompts themselves. 
2. Never treat generative AI as truly “generative.” AI tools reform, repurpose, and reshuffle the content already created – they don’t have principles of exclusivity or copyright. There’s a fair chance somebody else can get the same image or text blurb in response to their prompt, so AI can’t be used for creating normally copyright-protected material such as ad imagery, or this article!

I hope you’re inspired to try some VSEO or test using narrator AI tools to create personalized thank-you videos for your donors. Donor behavior and expectations are changing, as is how and where they’re wanting to engage with Organizations. These are exciting times.