Voice search has been around for a long time, mostly as a concept or something we could only witness in sci-fi movies. However, in the past couple of years, this technology has grown by leaps and bounds.
In fact, it has grown so much that it cannot be ignored as some novelty or a gimmick, especially by marketing and SEO experts. Voice search has been embraced wholeheartedly by consumers, and the numbers reflect that.
According to research done by BrightLocal, as much as 58% of consumers have performed a voice search to find information on one of the local businesses in the past 12 months. Furthermore, 76% of users with smart home speakers use them for local searches every week, and around 53% do it daily. And judging by the rate at which search engines and digital assistants are evolving, voice search is poised to play an even bigger role in our lives.
To optimize your content for voice search and keep up with your competition, here are 5 rules that you should follow religiously, according to Proessaywriting SEO specialists.
5 rules you should follow to optimize your content for voice search
1. Focus on Local SEO
According to statistics, 39% of consumer voice searches involve local businesses. What does this mean for your business? Well, it means you should work on your SEO and add your company to the Google My Business page, and update it regularly.
For example, if a user is looking to find the nearest restaurant and owns a restaurant in the area, you’re going to want to appear as the first result. This means providing all the necessary microdata, such as opening and closing times, address, phone number, and email. Another way to optimize for voice search would be to use schema markup and utilize the power of online reviews.
2. Features Snippets Are Essential
Featured snippets are probably the most important aspect of optimizing for voice search because digital assistants read their content to answer user inquiries. Despite some useful research, there is still no definitive answer to what you need to do to grab that top spot. However, there are some general guidelines.
Seeing as most users will formulate their voice search as a question, your content should be shaped as the most common answer to that particular topic. When answering questions with your content, try and stick to a conversational tone and language without too much jargon, but most of all, keep it concise.
3. Make Use of Long Tail Keywords
When you perform a text search, you will probably use only a couple of words that describe the subject you want to know more about, and they don’t even have to make sense together. You could search for “florist” or “florist new york,” and you would get relevant results.
With voice search, however, your choice of phrasing should be more conversational and specific. This means you would focus on long-tail keywords, such as “florist in new york selling roses.” This signifies strong intent and will get you highly targeted traffic since you address an audience that is really interested in your product, and better conversion rates.
4. Your Website Needs to be Mobile-Friendly
More than 50% of all searches are done on mobile devices, but as much as 20% of all mobile searches are done via voice. Seeing as these numbers are probably going to keep on growing, you will need to invest some time and resources into mobile optimization.
Also, even if most of your customers regularly find you through mobile searches, you still need to make sure that your website’s desktop version is responsive since Google tends to rank mobile-friendly websites much higher than the search engine results. In addition to that, a responsive website provides a better user experience, which is also one of the ranking factors.
5. Optimize Your Site Speed
Arguably, site speed is even more important when it comes to voice search. The whole search process is more organic, which means that users won’t have the patience to wait more than five seconds to receive an answer to their query. In fact, bounce rates are higher on mobile devices, and since a lot of voice searches are done on smartphones and the go, mobile users tend to be less patient than their desktop counterparts.
Summary
Voice search is here to stay. Not only that but in the future, it is probably going to account for a huge chunk of all searches. This means you can’t afford to ignore it any longer if you are serious about running a successful business. The tips laid out in this article will help you do just that. Good luck!
