With people spending more and more of their time on mobile devices, voice search has become an integral part of the way we interact with our devices. With this change, it’s important to remember that search queries have changed too. That means voice search optimization requires some key changes to both your content and your website structure.
While voice search usage is still growing, we’re most likely years away from the moment when voice search will overturn text-based queries. However, optimizing for voice search mostly follows classic SEO practices. Hence, we’d say it’s worth the effort since your site can be missing out on lots of traffic and sales simply because it isn’t optimized for voice searches.
Google reported that 27% of the worldwide online population is using voice search on mobile. This fact doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise since more and more people started surfing the Internet by voice rather than text over the years. Why? Well, it takes less time to speak out your requests than to type them and it comes more naturally to some. Apart from that, voice recognition has an accuracy of 95%.
Looking at the statistics, it becomes clear that voice search optimization will slowly but surely become a part of any marketer’s SEO strategy. As shown below, a significant percentage of the population is frequently using voice search. 28% of the online population in the US and UK and 22% in Germany use it multiple times a day.
Voice search SEO is not that different from good old search engine optimization. It follows similar principles, and they fight for the same cause: ranking higher on the results page.
You should keep in mind, however, that texting habits are quite different from speaking. Let’s say someone wanted to find a marketing agency in Boston. When texting, their search query could look like “Google Ads specialists in Boston”, while when speaking “where can I find Google Ads specialists in Boston?”. Using voice assistants such as Google, Siri or Alexa gives search queries a conversational tone.
Although voice search optimization seems like a brand-new challenge in your SEO strategy, it doesn’t necessarily stray far from the basics. After all, they share one crucial goal: matching user intent. We want to answer problems and offer relevant solutions, so here are five ways to optimize your site for voice search so you can take advantage of this new way to interact with customers.
As mentioned above, we don’t speak the same way we text. Therefore, text search habits and SEO are slightly different than voice based ones. Voice search queries are more natural, therefore may probably use more than 3 words which take the form of an interrogation. While short tail keywords are usually the most relevant in search queries, long-tail ones integrate better in voice searches and should be included in your strategy.
Most users tend to use words such as “how”, “when”, “where” etc. when they activate voice search. It becomes quite important that your website’s pages respond to frequent concerns the users might have. These questions should be answered in a conversational tone, so they fit the voice search. Moreover, people who use voice search typically want fast answers and immediate results, so a FAQ Page is the best option.
In addition to the FAQ page, voice search performance can also be improved by designing on-page content to answer questions. More precisely, by using a voice snippet, Google could extract the most relevant paragraph and recite it. This could be achieved by using a question as a page headline, while the answer should be briefly explained in the paragraph below.
The markup language behind your website’s front should not be forgotten. Schema markup allows us to offer more details about certain terms used so that search engines could gain a better understanding of our websites. This detailed perspective helps search engines in ranking your web pages, while it is also closer to how voice search queries sound like (since users give a lot more information when speaking than typing). Hence, your content will also gain more relevance.
Conciseness, context, and relevance are key when optimizing for voice search. A successful approach that many websites have previously embraced is to:
The crucial aspect of this approach is that the final result will be a rich, comprehensive webpage.
Since most voice searches happen on the phone, your website should be designed to be mobile-friendly. Yet again, this aspect should be considered in all kinds of SEO practices, but even more so when optimizing for voice search. First impressions do matter since your website acts as your virtual business card. Hence, your website should be easy to navigate, accessible and, of course, mobile responsive.
With the growing usage of voice assistants, adding voice search to your SEO strategy seems like the right thing to do. After all, it could improve your website’s traffic and your overall website experience without implying tremendous amounts of work.
Reach out to one of our senior SEO consultants if you need help in adjusting your SEO strategy.