Voice search is a search technology that is rapidly gearing. Through voice search, you can search things online with the use of voice commands. Although this technology has been around for quite some time, its use has tremendously increased now.
Everyone has a smart phone and there is an evolution in the way people search things online, people are more informed about the new features that save time and effort. It can be said that this is the time when people have made the transition to the voice-first world when they have to search something. This makes it important for every business, whether ecommerce or any other business to optimize their website and content according to the developing technologies. Optimizing the website for voice search is one important step that every business needs to implement for being a strong contender in the competitive world.
It is true that the people who do voice search are less in comparison to the people who type out and search online. But there is competition here as well and you have to gear up for that!
How do you optimize your website for voice search? Here are some easy and profound ways:
Make A Plan Of Action
As more and more people have started using the voice search feature, it is important for you to optimize your business website for both – the current voice search requirements and for the future voice search requirements. This means that you need to devise a plan about how you are going to implement things. The first step of your plan is to analyze all the keywords related to your business, your existing website content and your future requirements. You can also plan on producing new content if required.
Get Your Website Listed Online
If you have a local business, getting your business listed online in the business directories will be a good move for you. If you don’t just operate locally, then you can skip this step. If you have a local business, a great way of preparing your business website for voice search is by making sure that your business is listed online.
Smart phones execute voice search through voice assistants like the Google Assistant for Android and Siri for the Apple smart phones. Unlike the text search results shown in Google, the voice assistants are not able to display the search results especially for the local businesses. What the voice assistants do is show up the online business listings first, therefore you will benefit from listing your website in online business directories.
Analyze Your Keywords
It is important to keep in mind that your customers will be using voice commands and not keywords. This means that you will have to plan for the increased keyword length because of the way of human communication.
For instance if you have a web hosting business, instead of a generic keyword like ‘shared server hosting’, you will also have to focus on big keywords like ‘search for a reliable web hosting company for shared server hosting’. The voice search does not operate by displaying the result options for you but what it does it that it directs you to the product’s action. As the voice searches are made up of a longer string of text, the smart phone voice assistants are created for delivering answer-like results for all the queries made. The use of long tail keywords will help you to optimize your website for the featured snippets. Therefore, it is important for you to narrow down on many related keywords that people might use for voice search.
Related : How Long Tail Keywords Will Benefit Your SERP Rankings?
Reduce The Page Loading Time
Everyone is well aware of the fact that the page loading speed of a website is the most crucial ranking factor. With an increase in the volume of digital content (including voice search), the page loading speed of your website has a direct impact on your search engine rankings.
It has been researched that a website that has a faster page loading time, has content that can be easily processed and is supported with an efficient web hosting server is fully capable of getting impressive search engine rankings. If people are able to find you through voice commands but if your website takes a long time to load, your prospective customers will quickly start looking for an alternative.
Related : 14 Factors That Speed Up Your Website Loading Time
Related : The Connection Between Your Website Speed and Google Rankings
Focus On Creating More Local Content
Many voice searches are done for getting local information and content. If you focus on creating locally relevant content that is in line with the local needs of the people, it will help you to a great extent for better responses to voice search and wearable tech. The idea is to create and publish a lot of local content that helps in getting more traffic to your business.
Pay Attention To The Small Details
In contrast to the regular search engine results, the voice search technology concentrates on one website for quering. Therefore, it is important for you to ensure that the voice assistant is able to get to all the information quickly. This goes on to say that you need to pay attention to the small details like making sure that your website is mobile-friendly, it is fast and it is secured with HTTPS.
Related : How To Make Your WordPress Website Mobile Friendly?
Don’t Ignore The Regular SEO
When you concentrate on producing and publishing great and informative content and when you implement the standard SEO strategies for your website, you have more possibilities of doing great when it comes to voice search too. You must focus on having a good online presence, a great social media presence, better search engine rankings, an impressive domain authority with good amount of authoritative backlinks.
Related : Top 23 Content Marketing Statistics That Will Rule
Create An FAQ Page For Your Website
By now you have a clear idea that there is a major difference between text search and voice search. If you want your website to be optimized for voice search, it is important for you to provide answers to your website users/readers. In your FAQ, you have to feature answers to the most common questions asked by your readers/users that are related to your niche/industry. Include the questions that the users might ask verbally. For instance instead of writing a post on ‘cloud hosting benefits’, you can reframe the title as ‘What benefits I will get after hosting on a cloud server?’ Get the idea? You need to think about what people might ask verbally and feature answers to those questions.
Make Use Of Simple Words
People, who use the voice search feature, generally ask simple questions. Therefore, you need to focus on questions that the AI may understand and will be able to easily translate it in the search results. A short answer will be shown first when it comes to voice search results. If the answer provided is valid for the user, the user might go ahead and click on the link for visiting your website. If your answer is easily framed, useful for the user and written in comprehensive words, then you are certainly working on the reach of your website when it comes to the organic search results.
Be Highly Informative
A virtual assistant pulls up information from the internet and so it is crucial to make sure that you have put out a lot of information about your business that can be found easily. It is important to have complete information about your business on your website, Google My Business, Yelp, other important business directories and third-party websites. Ensure that you have updated things like your contact information, your hours of work, location etc. This is just about the basic information, but you need to get deeper! Display information like do you accept debit/credit card payments? When can you have client meetings in your office? If you own a shop, then you can have information like if it is a good place to take kids etc.
The more information you put out there, the more questions you are answering about your business!
Related: The Future Of Retail: 5 Big Digital Transformations [Check #4]
Format your documents using schemas and structured data
Based on Backlinko’s study, 40.7% of all Google voice answers came from a Google Featured Snippet. They are summaries from selected websites with links to the original sources, sometimes called quick answers.
In order to be featured on your website, you must ensure you are answering the questions most often asked by your audience concisely.
Conclusion
Voice search has become an important trend and to be a part of this stride, you have to adapt to it. Making sure that your website is optimized for voice search will ensure a competitive edge for you.
