You can’t deny the Internet and its users have changed significantly since the Dotcom Boom era – today, technologies that have become integral for image and voice search demand that you understand systems like voice SEO and other multimodal search functions to ensure brands don’t miss out on valuable engagement with audiences.

For those who depend on the web to attract customers and conduct business, multimodal searching will likely profoundly impact where, how, and if people can find you.

Throughout the following, we’re going to dive a little deeper into multimodal searching, explaining how it works and why mastering the mechanics of voice SEO, visual SEO, and other multimodal concepts will be essential for brands to thrive with tech that is becoming a staple in the fabric of the Internet.

Why is Multimodal Search Important?

If we rewind the clock to around the Dotcom bubble burst, we’d find SEO undergoing one of many changes throughout its turbulent history.

Before Yahoo brought Google aboard in 2000 to power its searches with its advanced PageRank algorithm and crawlers (a move that plummeted Yahoo from the top of the search engine leaderboards), websites could rank highly in search engine results with only a few ingredients: a recognizable domain and lots of keywords.

Google’s rise to relevance also meant new changes to the search engine introduced tools to bolster site visibility and relevance with backlinks, localization, and other techniques as the system was augmented.

Eventually, changes would deprecate the positive effects that former techniques provided websites in a series of moves designed to make the web a more user-friendly place. Source: Medical Web Experts

The two biggest takeaways here are:

  • Easy, gimmicky techniques (e.g., keyword stuffing, early quantity-over-quality backlink distribution, etc.) work for a time when a concept is new but are eventually nerfed to thwart abuse.
  • New technologies and techniques that prove convenient, viable, and affordable are often folded into the user experience.

Voice search is one of many new methods that users have demonstrated as undeniably valuable for both obvious and more nuanced reasons. As such, systems like voice SEO, visual SEO, and other techniques for understanding semantic and optical searches that fall under the umbrella of multimodal searches are invaluable for businesses that translate new techniques into user intent.

What’s Powering Multimodal Searches Behind the Scenes

Another new component in many search engines is LLMs (Large Language Models), such as the GPT family of products, Gemini, and many others. These LLMs work in conjunction with other tools as a multimodal search mechanism to provide an incredibly robust framework that provides users with all kinds of ways to find information on the web.

On the flip side, this increases complexity for marketers, as it brings substantially more data into the mix, much of which is qualitative.

More specifically, marketers need to understand how to interpret:

  • Old-fashioned text search queries, complete with popular but typo-ridden user searches
  • More conversational text-based searches and questions geared toward AI
  • Voice and audio data, usually in the form of STT (Speech-to-Text) transcription
  • Image data from visual uploads

Regular, text-based searches already produce enough data to sort through, and all the subtleties that coincide with voice (i.e., dialects, accents, colloquialisms, plus other phonetic elements), image, and gesture mean marketers are now required to interpret user behavior more as a function rather than a set of static answers. This understanding is particularly important when pursuing voice SEO and targeting voice search.

Here, vector embeddings serve as the basis for accomplishing this without a lot of hands-on, advanced mathematics. Data is stored and interpreted as vectors that are leveraged by ML (Machine Learning) systems to drive semantic understanding, like those used by NLP or visual systems, which are responsible for interpreting and assembling all the training data accessible to a deep learning environment.

More specifically, vectors are used in conjunction with multidimensional arrays, as these configurations are optimal for storing and interpreting ranges of data necessary for executing layered logical processes, like figuring out objects pictured in an image. This makes it more conducive to building and assessing datasets embedded with functions that power the underlying network’s semantic and visual reasoning capabilities.

Similar processes are further used for data produced or plugged into visual and gesture-based systems.

Vectors make it possible for voice and image-based systems like Google Lens to make small logical leaps between relational data models to identify different elements of data and populate links and material based on assumed intent. This is how it knows a Corgi looks like a Corgi and not a bear riding a bicycle. | Source: Self

The math behind the scenes is what allows different flavors of AI to interpret relationships between data so that, for example, when you upload an image of your mom’s Corgis playing your sister’s Australian Shepherd to Google, a pixel-level analysis can recognize patterns that tell it these animals are present in the image, as well as pull relevant (in the case, very general) search results around the assumed intent.

Techniques to Make Voice SEO and Visual SEO Work for Your Business

Aside from users uploading random images to Google out of curiosity, queries using imagery or voice can also be linked to different tiers of intent, just like traditional search queries. This is where voice SEO can become particularly advantageous if used properly.

Let’s jump into what this might look like for a brand:

  • A user searches for an image of your product. A user uploading a picture or screenshot of your product that they snapped could mean a number of things. Fortunately, this is one area where multimodal searches are making it easier for marketers as users can add extra context with text to searches. This provides an opportunity for businesses to direct users to different places, depending on whether they search for your product, with supporting text like “where to buy” or “how to factory reset.” Not only is this important for sales, but being able to find support information from a manufacturer easily is key to keeping customers happy.
  • Gestures can demonstrate an action, idea, or intent. Building on image search, users can leverage gesturing alongside image searches to better state intent, both directly and indirectly. Gesturing, which is effectively sketching on a touch screen or touchpad, can serve as an abstraction tool to communicate different things, allowing users to “tell the ‘what’ where,” among other things.
  • Semantics matter. Consider how one person can say, “I love this,” and it can mean something totally different depending on the scenario and what’s being discussed. You might say, “I love this,” and mean it at face value when your significant other surprises you with a gift, whereas “I love this” can mean something entirely different when you utter this phrase in response to seeing your basement flood. Language is often incredibly nuanced, and understanding all the idiosyncratic elements of different groups and regions can allow you to find and target audiences optimally.

All of this is relatively new, and many marketers are still learning, testing, and refining techniques to assimilate data into marketing campaigns to see how users respond. In time, knowing how to appropriately leverage all the data you can access from multimodal searches will be crucial to staying on the cutting edge of digital marketing.

Turn Multimodal Searches into More Traffic for Your Brand

Like anything else, easy exploits will emerge, allowing brands and individuals in the know to gain ground quickly, at least for a time.

For those concerned about the long term, building scalable strategies for voice SEO, visual SEO, and beyond will help ensure that your brand is making the most of emerging multimodal search tools. As a devoted SEO agency, Taktical can help you navigate the future of search to ensure your brand is at peak performance now and into the future.