How to Optimise Your Website for Voice Search?
Talking to robot assistants on a regular basis sounded like science fiction just a few decades ago. Today, we have no trouble asking Siri or Google for recommendations if we need to locate the closest taco stand, dog park, or day spa.
Conducting web searches with a virtual assistant is now a highly common activity on devices like smartphones, smart speakers, and smart TVs. It’s frequently quicker, more practical, and simpler than typing a query.
The problem is that a voice search typically isn’t the same as a text search. Our questions are phrased differently and more naturally when we speak to our devices. This fact has forced SEO experts and marketers to adapt in order to reach this growing audience of searchers.
As if that weren’t difficult enough, voice search ranking is difficult as well. Devices with voice search functionality frequently only show the top one to three results for a given query. To hold that rank, you must have top-notch content and voice SEO.
Voice search optimisation is a set of SEO strategies that increases the likelihood that your content will show up in voice search results. In order for voice search technology and virtual assistants to expose your page to users in voice search results, your content must meet typical verbal search inquiries.
In a typical voice search, a user will say “Google” or “Hey Siri” and then ask or say something like, “What are some good cafes nearby?” or “When is the local food festival?”
The gadget then answers by speaking a response, or if it has a screen, it may show the top outcomes from a search engine results page. Gaining presence in this specific search area is the aim of voice search optimisation.
While Universal Analytics combines data collection, analysis, and reporting into a single dashboard, Google Analytics 4 focuses solely on ad hoc data analysis and is meant to be paired with other advanced tools.
These include Google Tag Manager for data collection, Google BigQuery for cloud data warehousing, and Google Data Studio for data visualisation and reporting.
So essentially, the segments are being broken up into three specialised features. Click here to Sign up for your account if you haven’t done so already.
Why optimise for voice search?
Voice search isn’t a trend; rather, it’s gradually taking over. The majority of voice assistants are used by internet users in the United States on their smartphones and smart speakers, accounting for about 40 per cent of all usage. By 2023, there will be more than 200 million smart speakers worldwide, just in the United States alone.
No matter what sector you’re in, voice search offers a crucial additional opportunity to capture organic search traffic. By utilising voice search, you may reach a new group of consumers who use their smartphones and smart speakers to look for businesses and make purchases.
Voice search optimization can also benefit your site’s overall SEO and rating. Search engines enjoy it when websites are voice search optimised since it gives your site more authority and lands it higher positions on results pages, possibly even in the voice search results.
How to optimise your website for voice search?
Here are four main ways how you can optimise your web content for voice search:
1. Focus on phrases & longtail keywords
Long-tail phrases or even whole sentences are now more commonly used in searches than terse, uncomfortable keywords. Due to the fact that voice searches employ natural language (Open Link in new window), the way we type differs significantly from the way we speak. As a result, the words and phrases we use while speaking to digital assistants will differ from those we use when typing in text for Google searches.
A conversational or natural language question like “What is the weather like in Singapore today?” is an example of how this is different from what we would write into a search bar as “Singapore weather”. Therefore, SEO would have to concentrate on this crucial facet of voice search.
2. Anticipate specific questions in a conversational term
Although voice search sometimes uses complete sentences, it is also very specialised. When speaking to a digital assistant, people tend not to ramble on, maybe because a more concise question yields a more precise response.
With the user’s location enabled, a search such as “Find a Japanese restaurant nearby” can provide users with accurate results. Therefore, business owners would want to tailor their websites and content for simple yet precise searches. A thorough FAQ page or a blog with authoritative material written around longtail keywords and general but specific questions can achieve this.
In order to do this, you would need to do some research on the types of questions that your target audience commonly asks digital assistants and then create content that addresses those issues. Each of those queries should have detailed responses in the form of excellent blog posts.
Expect Google to notice your content and rank the website/mobile site appropriately as long as it provides the best and most helpful answers to customer queries.
3. Optimise your website for local SEO
According to Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, voice searches are 3x more likely to be of a local origin. In light of this, businesses should maintain their profiles and contact details since Google will use them to respond to inquiries like, “Where can I get the best coffee in Seattle?”
For a coffee shop owner, this would entail accurately listing the business’s hours of operation, and its exact location, and optimising the website’s content to be found via search terms like “best coffee” or something more specialised like “best cold chai latte.”
Create content that offers detailed responses to the kinds of inquiries your target audience is most likely to ask a digital voice assistant.
4. Ensure that your website is ready for voice search
Google claims that the secret to making the most of any kind of search, especially voice search, is to capitalise on micro-moments (Open Link in new window), or instances when users require immediate, pertinent, and usable information. Being our constant companions and having access to the internet at our fingertips, it only makes sense that our smartphones would be our go-to source of information. Google has been urging companies to improve their websites for mobile and to be aware of the growing use of mobile in internet search.
We now need to pay attention to mobile and voice searches. Businesses that seize these little windows of opportunity have a decent probability of outpacing their rivals:
- Determine the stage(s) at which a user is most likely to require the services your company offers.
- Be prepared for the type of information they will require to make a choice.
- At that point, give consumers the information they need to make a decision or provide them with clear further instructions.
Businesses must make sure their websites are mobile-friendly, local SEO (Open Link in new window)-optimized, and voice search-ready for this to happen. A mobile site must load quickly, be user-friendly, have pertinent content (local SEO), and provide the appropriate responses to voice search queries in order to be useful to someone in a micro-moment. Together, these factors increase the likelihood that a user will select your service.
Conclusion
Marketers must adapt to current trends due to the nature of search and the evolution of search algorithms caused by evolving technology and customer behaviour. That is how you maintain your relevancy and competitiveness.
Have you thought about including voice search in your content marketing plan (Open Link in new window)? Contact us today, we’d love to help you with your voice search optimisation
