Voice search SEO Strategies have garnered a lot of attention with the increased use of voice search.

Would you prefer voice search or search by typing?

According to Google, 41% of adults and 55% of teens use voice search on daily basis.

Voice search is getting popular these days. The idea of voice search began with smartphones. It quickly spread to smart speakers and voice assistants around the world. Recently, we are witnessing a voice search revolution. Nearly, every generation welcomes voice search with open arms. It is also said that voice search is the future of online search. Most people find typing boring and many are switching to voice search.

Alexa is a quite popular smart home device. Voice search has paved way for innovative smart home devices. Alexa, Siri, and Cortana are some of them.

Imagine how interesting it would be if we can incorporate voice search over websites. You can check out the Magento-2 Voice Search extension for smart search.

Now you can incorporate voice search into site optimization. The  SEO community has developed ways for this.

What Is Voice Search SEO Strategy?

Voice search means queries are asked via speaking instead of traditional search. It uses the power of speech recognition for web searches. 

Voice Search SEO 

With the increased popularity of voice search, optimizing your websites for voice search is essential. Voice search SEO means the practice of website optimizing so that it gets shows up in search engine results pages for voice search. Voice SEO means the optimization of keywords and keyword phrases. It is valuable for searches using voice assistants.

To make an effective voice search SEO we need to have proper voice search SEO strategies. 

Relevance of Voice search SEO

It is easy for website owners to provide answers to users’ needs with help of voice search. This means increases in traffic to their landing pages. Searchers want quick answers, and this technology caters to this need. This is an impressive alternative to the web search. There are many voice search optimization examples like Siri on iPhone, google voice search.

How Voice Search Differs From Traditional Search

Typing a query on a desktop and asking a device to fetch results for your query is quite different.

Voice Search Keywords Are Longer and Conversational 

When we converse with a smart device, we ask them questions. Mostly, we ask the whole question rather than using a couple of keywords

When we are on the desktop, one may type “make caramel pudding” or “caramel pudding recipe.”

When we use voice, one may ask, “Hey Alexa, how do I make a caramel pudding at home?”

There is a difference in the length of the keywords in both the above searches.  When we go for a voice search, keywords are longer and more conversational. Purna Virji, Top PPC Expert and Senior Manager at Microsoft have a keen take on this.  She stated that compared to text search keywords, voice search keywords are longer.

Voice Search Has Priority in Local Listings Search

The maximum volume of voice search requests contains “ near me” questions.   this substantiates two things:

• Most people use voice search to find places to visit, hotels, and restaurants to dine in. 
• Apart from places, people also need information about time and things.

Voice Search Results Are Prompt and Crisp 

Mostly, the results for our voice searches are the featured snippets. These are like the results that we get on traditional searches. To answer voice queries, Google depends heavily on knowledge graphs and rich snippets

Searchers want quick and instant results, and Google understands this. Even in the case of voice search, direct answers are the priority.

To provide instant results to the questioner, these direct answers are also read back to them.

How Is It Performed?

As days pass, voice search is growing and evolving as a popular trend.  Let’s see what is the current position of voice search technology.

There are many technologies that are capable of receiving and interpreting spoken commands. Each technology uses search engines as its base of knowledge.

At first instance, smart assistants on smartphones and smart speakers may not have much difference. But as we closely observe their usage, things get more clear.

Our aim is to ensure your website can meet your audiences’ voice-searching needs.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is the technology used for entering input signals into voice search devices.  Some of them use text-to-speech (TTS) for sharing results. 

Activating the virtual assistant is not always needed before initiating a voice search on a device. Once the device has input, it will detect the language of the asked query. Then it captures the keywords in the query. Finally, it delivers the answer according to the query. 

In some devices, results get displayed on their screens. While all other devices will speak back to the searcher. One of the big reasons for its popularity and demand is its conversational style.

What Are The Different Ways To Use It?

For smart-assistant-enabled devices, we’re seeing a separate use case for each of them. They are different from that traditional search intent keywording.

When you focus on the usage of each device, you can create content for each type of searcher you want to reach. Let’s see Voice Search Benefits and usage on different smart devices.

For Instant Voice Searches – Smartphones

When voice searcher wants instant answers to an immediate problem, they opt for their smartphones.

For instance, you are on a road trip and you want to find a restaurant to eat at. An instant voice search can be helpful.

For In-Depth Knowledge Voice Searches- Smart Speakers

Most often people use them in the comfort of their homes for any kind of huge, in-depth search.

The topic of their vocal searches would be random trivia, random songs, or any help to plan something.

For Consumer Needs Voice Searches – Car Speakers

Voice search through car speakers comes in use when the searchers are driving.

Mostly for asking for locations, directions, and stores with the best prices.

12 Ways To Optimize Your Site For Voice Search

Conversational Keywords

As you know, short and vague keywords are not good for SEO. When the keywords are more specific, they are more likely to bring you a customer. 

When it comes to voice search takes it a step further. Just having long-tail keywords aren’t enough. It requires you to use full phrases and questions that are commonly used in human conversation.

Such as, “What is the difference between the gravitational force on earth and that on the moon?”

Keyword-finding tools can choose such phrases and questions for you.

When you’re using a question research tool, choose all phrases that are conversational. These phrases begin with the words who, what, why, where, when, and how.

Google’s autocomplete and “People Also Ask” features are good alternatives for voice search keyword research  

To complete your research, do take a look at forums and websites frequented by your target audience.

Reddit can help you in this research. First, find a subreddit associated with your niche. Check the thread title. It contains the questions asked by your potential customers. 

Create An FAQ Section

It is great for your SEO to have an FAQ page on your website. You should have the answers ready for the questions that users come up with. As per SEO experts’ advice, it’s good to create content that fulfills the users’ needs. There is no other better example other than FAQ 

“Questions”  and  “answers” are the essence of voice search. You can choose questions that your audience asks frequently. List them and just follow them up with answers.

Make the FAQ detailed but not too long. Most users prefer quick answers. Usually, voice search answers tend to be shorter.

Be Multilingual

There’re chances that you can have a diverse group of visitors who speak different languages. Then you should prepare content they can find and use.

 It is important to maintain the quality of your content’s translation. With voice search involved,  it needs to be very accurate.

 Make sure that you sound like an authoritative and trusted source when Siri reads your content.

 Get a native speaker to translate and proofread your content and copy to make it error-free. Make sure to consult Google’s guidelines for managing multilingual websites.

Get Your Google Business Profile

Every day, nearly half of voice search users look for local business information. 

This is because voice search is local-friendly. Thus it’s important to ensure that your voice results are at the top. You can use v Google Business Profile to be the top player in local SEO.

This is an important step for all brick-and-mortar businesses, voice search or not. It is completely free and easy to use.

Create your listing, fill it out with all the information you can provide, and wait for approval. Create your listing on it. Then fill it out with all the information you can give. After that, you can wait to get the approval.

Once you get the approval, you will gain a powerful SEO asset. By tracking it in Web CEO, you can make it work for you even harder.  

Their Google Business Profile reports track of customer activity. It will show you how visitors interact with your site. It provides data starting from the SERP.

Make it Mobile-Friendly

There are many mobile users who use voice search to make queries.  So, if don’t get your site optimized for mobile, your users may move to some other websites.

So, let’s see the essentials of mobile SEO.

• Designs should be responsive.
• Avoid intrusive interstitials.
• Loading time should be short.
• It should be easy to read.

You can test the mobile-friendliness of your site with Web CEO’s Speed Optimization tool. This tool will provide you with a score.  It will also give tips to optimize your site for mobile and make it load faster. 

Improved Domain Authority 

Now comes the part you will probably enjoy the least. For the spoken query, voice search picks the top search result as per the rule of thumb.

So if you want to reach your audience, you should put your website on the first page of Google. If your site is closer to the #1 position, then it is very beneficial. For this, you should double your  SEO efforts on all fronts. This includes backlinks, user experience, local search, and technical issues. 

Track your progress by watching the growth of your rankings in WebCEO’s Rankings report. With this tool, You can also track the ranking of your voice search keywords.

Gain Featured Snippets For Your Site

Voice search chooses the top search result, which includes Position 0. Ranking number one in organic search is no longer enough. You should aim even higher. Featured snippets are the source for 40.7% of voice search results.

You’ve already done most of the work if you have a page dedicated to an FAQ. Both featured snippets and voice search prefer short and crisp answers to users’ questions. 

According to  Backlinko, the average Google voice search result gets written at a 9th-grade level. Simple language suits well here, so don’t go towards academic language. 

Utilize Schema Markup

As per the same study by Backlinko, voice search SEO is not much affected by  Schema. 

But, other sources recommend using Schema.

Schema provides structured data. It helps search engines understand the purpose of each element on a page. You can select from it, what is relevant to the user’s question.

Besides, Google is busy developing a “speakable” Schema property. It’s used for marking up the text on your site which you want your smart assistant to read.

We expect that Google wants Schema to play a prominent role in voice search. The “speakable” property is still in its beta version. So,  so be sure to keep a check on the updates and get ready to implement them.

Improve the Readability of your Content  

When it comes to the content you publish on your website, it should have good readability.  Write points with precision and standard reading level. This will help in ranking our content.  

The Flesch Kincaid Grade, recommends a ranking around 8 as per a voice search study. At least, you should aim to achieve that.

Loading Time of Your Website Is Important 

Users tend to abandon websites that take longer time to load compared to those that quickly load. The loading speed of a website has a direct effect on the bounce rate. Thus you should optimize your site at all costs. 

Google released its speed update to add some important insights. It emphasizes optimizing the load times of the website. The rules are similar for voice search too. Voice searchers need quick results. So, if you have a slow website that takes a long time to load, your content won’t get used in answering verbal queries. 

Engage With Users Through Social Media

Social media platforms are also voice-search-friendly. Voice search results get huge amounts of likes and shares from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.

Make sure that you have active pages there and shower lots of love and care. If you engage more with users, more will find you through a virtual assistant later.

Your Videos Should Rank In Search Results

Instead of plain text,  an informative video can provide a much better answer to a user’s query.

You can help your users with any videos. They are also useful for voice search.

According to the relevance of users’ requests, Google can already isolate parts of the video. Make sure that your video is ranking high, on the first page.

You may need these things to get your videos to rank so high in Google and appear in voice searches:

• Titles with a conversational long-tail phrase.

• Keywords in the description and transcript of the video.

• A  thumbnail should be clickable.

To Wind Up 

Voice search is already a part of SEO. It is getting more popular day by day. If you want to stand out among the other marketers, you must master it. 

Various tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are already on the way. They have already optimized for voice search to have the upper hand over others. Specializing in voice search SEO and monetizing is essential to compete. Voice search keyword research is crucial for voice search SEO strategies.

Hope you find the above-mentioned insights useful. Do visit us to read more such insightful topics. If you are a marketer and you are looking for digital marketing strategies, feel free to contact our digital marketing team.