Are you losing out on web traffic because people aren’t searching the way you want them to?
If your website is not enhanced for voice search, that could be the situation. These six convenient SEO methods and resources for voice search will not only assist you in getting more traffic from people making use of Siri and Alexa, but they will also become essential pillars of your overall SEO strategy.
What is voice search?
Voice search is a way to search the internet through speech. A device can recognize your voice and enter the query into a search engine using artificial intelligence.
Voice recognition has been around for an extended time (since the early 1950s). Still, it’s only since 2011, when IBM’s Watson was launched (you may remember how it beat contestants on Jeopardy!), that it’s had practical relevance in the world.
This underscores the ubiquity of devices that support voice search.
6 Ways to Optimize for Voice Search
Voice search is on the rise. Devices that support voice search are everywhere, and voice search continues to grow as a percentage of total searches (usage increased eight percent between September 2018 and early 2019).
The great news is that you do not have to throw your current SEO strategy out the window to optimize for voice search. Voice search fits into the overall trend of meeting user intent and providing the best user experience possible, so the tactics you use to optimize for voice search will benefit your SEO in general.
1. Optimize for local search
Many voice searches are about local information; they are three times more likely to be local than text-based searches.
When you are on the go and looking for a quick answer to your question, it is easy to pull out your mobile device and ask a question. Therefore, it’s essential to focus on the local element of your SEO. If you think about it, this makes excellent sense.
Local Search engine optimization is a fundamental part of digital marketing for many businesses anyway. Local searches account for about 46 percent of all searches, and they are incredibly engaged buyers. Local customers are the ones who come into your store and make a purchase. This means that ranking in local search results is critical, especially if you are a brick-and-mortar business.
Local search engine optimization follows the same principles as regular search engine optimization. The most important thing (which many websites neglect to do) is reiterating that you are a local business. Ensure you create content relevant to your region and incorporate local keywords into your text.
- to get ideas for local keywords and make sure you are responding to local people’s questions:
- Expressions individual use to describe the area around your location
- Places of interest in the area around your business location
- Titles of a local organization that are relevant to your business
2. Develop conversational but concise content
The days of packing your content with keywords to please crawlers are long gone. To succeed with SEO, you need to be authentic, use natural language, and provide valuable content.
It would be best if you were human (we all are, so that shouldn’t be a problem).
Voice search is a case in point because when people search by voice, they tend to speak a lot more naturally than when they type a query into a search engine. Your content should match the way people ask questions of their voice assistants, but not just for voice search reasons
Today’s rankings are based on user experience. The pages that best answer users’ questions while providing the best experience will be at the top of the rankings.
3. Use structured information
Ask your voice-activated gadget this question, “Who was the initial president of the United States of America?” And what happens?
Chances are, your device will read out an answer regarding George Washington.
However, these details come from a long page about George Washington, so how does it know which section of text to read aloud? The answer probably lies in the structured data.
Search engines consider some factors and content to determine the relevance of a page and its position in search results. Professional SEOs use these additional factors to optimize their content for search engines.
Schema markup, also described as structured data, is one such element. It does not directly affect rankings, but it can give you an edge over your competitors, especially in voice search.
Essentially, it’s metadata: Data about the information on your website. They are included in the source code of your website. Visitors do not see it, but microdata helps search engines organize and classify your content. It is a little-used strategy because it requires work.
4. Apply for your Google My Business listing
Your Google My Business listing is essential for local SEO and voice search.
Since voice search is frequently used to find out essential details about your business, such as contact number, address, and hours of operation, Google needs to have accurate information about these details.
Your website and structured data do a lot to help Google get the correct information about your business. Still, Google wants to be very specific, and it does that by looking at your Google My Business listing.
This provides Google all the information it needs to understand what your business does, who it’s for, when it opens, where it’s located, and more. This is precisely the information that voice search is asking for, so you’ll quickly get accurate results to users’ questions.
5. Be mobile-friendly
How are most voice searches conducted?
You want to appear in results on mobile devices and need to provide an excellent mobile experience. This is an essential part of Google’s algorithms, but websites are still not optimized for mobile devices.
If this holds with your website, visitors will click on your website and leave immediately because the page doesn’t work correctly on their device. This shows to Google that your site is not worth ranking, and it will hurt you in both voice search and traditional search queries.
I mentioned earlier that modern search engine optimization is all about user experience. Considering most traffic (and virtually all voice traffic), you need to consider this.
You can do many small things to make your site more mobile-friendly, so make sure your site provides the right experience for users using voice search.
6. Create content that answers frequently asked questions from your audience
Individuals tend to ask questions when using voice search.
The great thing about this is that Google gives you great insight into the questions people frequently ask.
Type in a question related to your website and look at the results. Chances are you’ll see a box titled “people also ask.” The FAQ feature will show up for many queries and show you your audience’s questions regularly.
Once you have a clear image of the questions people are using to search for information, you can start creating great content that answers those questions. As I said earlier in this article, it’s all about the customer experience, and the first thing you require to give someone the right experience is valuable content.
Answer users’ questions, help them solve their problems, and make it fun. If you can do that much better than any other website, you have an excellent chance of ranking well.
Wrap Up
To enhance your organic traffic, you should rank well for voice search. Not only are there a considerable number of voice searches per day, but the techniques you use to optimize for them are a fundamental part of modern search engine optimization.
Voice search has changed the method people search for info, and search engines have responded with updates to their algorithms. You need to respond to this as well. By taking users’ search intentions into account and providing the right customer experience, you can make sure that you get more organic traffic from voice search.
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