Why Brands Need to Focus on Voice Search With Amine Bentahar

Welcome to another episode of the Marketing Growth Podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker, and I have with me Amine Bentahar, Chief Digital Officer and COO of AVX Digital.

In the last episode, he talked to us about his personal and professional background. Today, we’re going to talk about voice search optimization.

That’s awesome. So tell us—because I know you guys have worked with some big brands—tell us about a good success story. I know we’ll probably have time for maybe one or two, but give us some good results you’ve had with your clients.

Yeah, sounds like you guys kind of got your foot in the door, had phenomenal results, and now when companies like Google are doing case studies on your work, that’s not too bad. Last time I checked, that means you’ve made some serious traction.

Yeah, I actually Googled Google once to find out about Google. They’re doing okay, last time I checked.

So what do you think the future of digital marketing is? Because obviously we’re going to talk about voice here in a bit, but I want to hear your thoughts and predictions about where digital marketing as an industry is heading.

Yeah, agreed. Man, those are all it’s so crazy. A lot of that stuff’s so disruptive. If you’re not looking at the data and using people smarter than us to analyze it, you’re going to miss out. AI and machine learning—it’s phenomenal.

Clearly, there’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in digital marketing. For forward-looking businesses, it’s more important than ever to go digital.
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Now, I want to switch gears a bit. We touched on this earlier—voice search.
You co-wrote a book, right? I think it was with Courtney Cox, right? Yes, with the actress, no, I’m just kidding.

Much better. Yeah, she obviously sounds super intelligent—not that I’m saying the other Courtney Cox doesn’t—but yeah. So you guys actually created an e-book on voice search called Voice Search: The New Search Engine. Tell us a little bit about that.

Let me explain what a hug is—for the younger crowd. A hug is what people used to do before COVID. You’d bring two people together, wrap your arms around each other. It’s actually really nice. I enjoy hugs, but I was raised by hippies in California, so I’m very fond of the hugs.

But cool—you said, “Hey, we’ve got to write this book,” and seven months later, it was done. And obviously, you did it because you saw that one out of five searches was being done by voice. But there was no real deep info out there—just a few blog posts. So what was it that made you say, “This is the future”?

Well, it is. And I agree with you. A few years ago, I remember looking at all these voice devices being sold, and Amazon was basically losing money on them—like, “Hey, we’ll give it to you for 20 or 25 bucks.” And I remember thinking, there’s something there. Bezos isn’t just losing money for fun. I mean, last time I checked, he’s worth $200 billion, so I think he’ll be able to pay his mortgage this month.

But seriously, it’s one of those deals like— obviously, this is the future, right?

Because if they’re offering these devices, they obviously want to get as many of them into people’s homes as possible. Then it becomes all about convenience—making it easy for you to search for something, find something, or shop online just by using your voice.

So what do you think? I mean, you guys specialize in voice search, right? You said you were one of the first agencies to start doing that. How does it all work? Because I’m sure some people listening, if they’re marketers, they kind of get it. But for others, they’re probably thinking, “Wait, Alexa does searches?”

Isn’t that just like typing something into Google? How do you optimize for that? How does that process look? Is it different from regular SEO?

And let me say something too. So we talk about position zero—because I know some people might not know SEO—like, how do you get to position zero? I thought there was just position one.

So position zero is the snippet. It’s when you search something on Google and there’s usually a block with a list or a paragraph that shows up before the first result—that’s the snippet. Some people think of it as position one, but technically, it’s position zero.

And that snippet is what everyone wants. From an SEO perspective, that’s the pinnacle—because it’s the highest you can be on Google without having to pay.

So, okay, I’ve got a better idea now. It’s not like voice search is completely different from regular SEO. The main difference is making sure your structured data is solid and that you’re properly optimizing for local—things that, honestly, most companies still struggle with. There are a lot of great resources out there. I’m sure your site has an awesome blog where people can dive in and get more info. But really, voice search is just an extension of traditional SEO. You’re doing the same foundational work—it’s just being accessed differently, through voice.

This is funny, man. This is probably the second or third time this has happened on my podcast. You said “how to write a check”—and the reason I’m laughing is, I literally searched that like ten days ago.

I had checks. I went to the bank because I needed to get a cashier’s check to pay the IRS—long story. Anyway, the bank was like, “We can just send you checks,” and I thought, “Oh, I think I already have checks.”

So I go into my safe, find the checks, and I’m like, “Oh no, I gotta remember how to write one of these.” I Googled it—literally Googled how to write a check. And I can’t believe I’m telling everyone that, because I feel like I might as well be using a pay phone. But I Googled it, wrote the check, looked it over, and thought, “Yeah, I think I did okay.”

The weird part is, this is the second or third time someone on my show has mentioned a search I’ve actually done—one I probably wouldn’t admit to anyone. But here we are. I told my wife, “I need to Google how to write a check,” and she’s like, “You don’t know how to write a check?” And I’m like, “It’s been a long time! Don’t judge!”

I had to Google what a check was first. But yeah, my great-grandma used to give me those for Christmas or birthdays. I remember those.

But seriously, that makes total sense. Voice isn’t that different from regular SEO, except we’re going to have way more searches because of the convenience—whether it’s your phone, Siri, Alexa, whatever.

I think when people hear “voice,” they get nervous—like it’s a whole new thing. But it’s not. It’s like going from desktop to mobile. It’s the same site, same info. You just optimize differently. Now, it’s voice.

You just have to make sure your website can give Google the information it needs quickly. Like, “Hey, this is what the person’s looking for, and here’s exactly what we’ve got that matches that intent.” And if you provide solid info, you should be good. Exactly. Exactly. Makes total sense.

Okay, so what I want to talk about next is Voice Search SEO. I want to get into some of the actual tips and strategies. You’ve already shared a bit about what people can do to optimize their site, and sure, some people will know what that means. Other people might have to go Google it—which, hey, no problem. Go look it up, figure it out.

But what do you think some of the big trends are going to be in the search marketing industry? Like, from your perspective—being in the industry as long as you have, working with these major companies—what do you see coming down the line? Voice is obviously a big one, but what else do you think is on the horizon?

So that’s for all the people who didn’t know—Google is following you, knows everything about you, probably knows more about you than you know about yourself. Just don’t worry if Google knows what you’re doing at all times. Nothing to worry about.

But yeah, agreed. There’s obviously tons of information and data out there, and that’s always the big fight—Amazon, Google, Facebook—it’s all about data, right? It’s information. The more you have, the more you can use it for marketing, or turn it into whatever.

I also heard something—kind of outside the scope—but maybe we’ll talk about it later: I heard Apple might be working on a search engine?

Yeah, it’s hard to go from “Google it” to “Bing it.” I know they tried. It’s like when people say “I’m going to Uber,” even if they’re actually using Lyft. Once the name becomes the action, it’s hard to disrupt.

Yeah. And just for the people listening—I didn’t pay him to say that. Obviously, we produce a lot of content. I always tell people, content is an investment. My blog, for example, we started it probably eight or nine years ago—let’s say eight—and it’s paid off big time.

Not saying it always takes that long, but we’ve got pages ranking in snippets and on the first page for thousands of keywords. We’ve got big marketers always trying to push us out, and we’re going toe to toe with them. The traffic we get now is incredible.

And again, it’s a long-term investment. I don’t even have an outbound sales team calling people all day. All our leads are inbound. There are pros and cons to that—I should probably have both—but it’s worked wonders for us.

I tell people, whatever kind of content you’re creating, you’ve got to be producing something. Especially now, during COVID—if you’ve got a brick-and-mortar store and you’re open one day, closed the next, people don’t know what’s going on—get online. Start creating content. Get a website up. If you didn’t start six months ago, you need to start today. It’s not a “maybe.” You need to be online right now.

So what do you think—when it comes to organic reach strategies—what can businesses or organizations do to maximize it?

I know you’ve got a background in SEO, ever since someone told you to “optimize the website,” and here you are now. What are some of the core SEO tactics you guys use at AVX?

There’s two things. Yeah, give us some examples of structured data. Because I think, you know, when you say that—I know what structured data is—but I want to hear it from you.

Structured data means what? When you say “structured data,” explain that to the audience. I think some people will know what it means, and some won’t. They’re going to say, “Okay, how do I improve this? What do I do? Is it something on my website? Is it off my website?”

Yeah, it’s kind of like—so I’ll explain it like this. If people know what site maps are, a site map was like the first level of, “Hey, Google’s coming to your site. The site map tells it where to go.”

This is the next level. This is where you’re saying, “Here’s the site map. Here’s the article. Here’s the specific thing in the article. If you’re looking for this, here’s the answer.”

Google wants a roadmap. If somebody’s searching and there’s going to be 40 million pages, and they want results in 0.2 seconds, they need you to give them direction.

You’re just showing them—go this way, go that way. If you’re looking for this, it’s right here. You’re giving them indicators.

Educating them on what you’ve got going on—that you’ve got good stuff—and hey, if they’re looking for a certain search term, you’re saying, “Hey, it’s right here. Let me show you. I’ve got some answers over here in the content.” So I love that.

Thanks. Amine, today’s conversation was really fun. It taught me a thing or two about voice search. I know we’ve got a lot more ground to cover, but unfortunately, we’re short on time today. We’ll continue our conversation in the next episode of Shane Barker’s Marketing Growth podcast. Stay tuned.