With the growth in demand for voice devices, we can surely come up to the conclusion that voice search optimization is a thing that webmasters must consider for SEO optimization. Going hands-free has become a trend.
So, speaking to your device and getting informed of the details you want is not only convenient but also more fun.
According to Gartner, at least 32% of consumers share an interest in keeping up with hands-free technologies that help in limiting virus contamination. Well, you can call it an after-effect of COVID-19.
Voice Search is currently the fastest-growing type of search. At least 55% of users prefer voice searches to ask quick questions on their smartphone, as per the data of Perficient.
On the other hand, 39.4% of US internet users tend to rely upon voice searches at least once a month, as eMarketer says. So, to keep up with the trend, you need to optimize for voice search so that you can have great traffic to your site.
So, here in this article, you’ll learn to optimize your website for quick voice searches. Have a look!
What are the SEO strategies that you can use to optimize for voice search?
To stay updated with the new search trends and make your website more flexible to appear in voice searches, SEO optimization is a must.
You need to follow up with the right strategies which have the potential to give your site the right kind of visibility through your voice searches. So, here is how you can SEO optimize for voice search in 6 useful ways:
1. Take a note of the customers and their device behavior
Voice search algorithms use various data, locations, and many data points to understand the search context better. Thus, the marketers have to go a bit deeper to better understand the consumers and their behaviors.
Opting for real-time data and research on consumer insights can help you to understand how differently people voice search and on what type of devices they search.
It will further help you to align your website as per those requirements so that you can gain quick visibility on the search engine results page.
2. Work on creating a persona-based content
While you optimize for voice search, the most important things are brevity, relevance, and context. What makes the voice search SEO slightly different from the usual one is that now you will need to pay better attention to create detailed answers for common questions.
At the same time, you will also need to answer simple questions quite clearly and much concisely.
Hence, it is suggested to create rich and compelling content, which will answer most of the common questions of your users and solve their problems.
So, here are some of the strategies that you can use to create compelling content:
- Consider creating content or a webpage with a headline that usually users ask and is a very common question.
- After you create that headline, you will need to give a concise answer or definition to that particular question.
- After that, you can use that entire page to offer further elaborate detailing on that particular topic.
How does it help further in your site optimization? Well, it will help your rich and robust webpage to align well with the ranking algorithm of Google.On the other hand, short and crisp information present at the top of the page you have optimized for voice search will become a featured snippet.
3. Go for conversational keywords
SEO optimization is simply incomplete without keywords. Whether it is optimizing your SEO for better search visibility or meeting the search intent of your audience, the keywords play a crucial role at every step.
Hence, you must optimize your website with the proper keywords that go well with the voice searches.
Though the short tail keywords will not ever disappear entirely, they might become a bit less relevant when we consider the usage of natural phrases for voice searches.
Hence, to stay relevant with the voice searches, marketers need to focus on conversational and long-tail keywords, which provide better opportunities.
It is recommended to research thoroughly which kind of questions you will need to include so that users can find suitable answers properly.
4. Offer context to your content with schema markup
Now is the right time to get acquainted with schema markups if you haven’t done it yet. You can use schema markup in your content to tell the search engine about your site.
The schema markup comes in the form of an HTML add-on. It helps search engines to understand the context of your content.
It helps you rank better with your typical searches and makes your site more relevant for specific queries, which are made through voice searches by users.
Google better understands all languages through its schema markup utilization. Hence, schema markups can be a great way to add more information to your website. It will further help your site to become ready to the answers of all commonly asked questions.
As per the Milestone Marketing research, based on 9400 schema deployments, they have found a significant gain of +20-30%.
There was noticed an average of 40 schema types, along with 130 more attributes and properties. This is basically the type of information that mobile users and voice searchers look up to.
5. Opt for mobile optimization and localization
These days, users prefer those sites more, which are mobile-optimized and work great with hand-held devices.
Hence, it is very important to consider mobile optimization and localization of your site. Both of these parameters go hand in hand when it comes to optimize for voice search.
Mobile devices allow the users to opt for on-the-go local queries. Voice search through mobile also enables users to ask for hyper-local queries.
Hence, you need to ensure that information like directions to brick-and-mortar locations and XML sitemaps are readable enough to your visitors and search engines on your website.
At the same time, you will need to create different kinds of experiences for your mobile and desktop users. Consider optimizing your site for ‘near me’ types of searches.
Besides, to make your mobile optimization more robust, you must focus better on page speed and page loading time improvement.
6. Build pages that can answer better all FAQs
Most of the time, the voice searchers will begin their questions with "where", "who", "what", "why", "when", "how," etc. They are always looking for an answer with which they can fulfill their immediate need.
So, you can answer these queries better with an FAQ page. Consider beginning all your questions with the mention of these aforesaid adverbs. You can further answer those FAQs quite conversationally to appeal better through voice searches.
To enhance the performance of your site, you will need to ensure that your website is quite sound and includes the schemas.
At the same time, you must ensure that the navigation and informational structure of your site are quite easy to find and the page loading speed is pretty fast.
Conclusion
Optimize for voice search has become an ultimate need to stay in trend with your website visibility and generate better traffic.
Hence, you need to integrate SEO strategies in your voice search optimization task so that you can render better flexibility to your webpage to appear more often in voice searches.
The more you work on such a task, the more it will offer your site the capability to stand out as a significant one in the search engine results page.
