How to Optimize for Voice Search and Voice Assistants
Voice search is easy and fun, and this is probably the reason why you shouldn’t get surprised if half of the searches become voice searches by 2020 as predicted by ComScore. No doubt if you want to stay abreast with the trends and harness the benefits of technology you have to optimize your website for voice searches. Listed below are few of the ways to keep your website optimized for voice-based searches.
Be locally listed
Most of the voice searches are to get information and whereabouts or inquiry of physical places or where people want to go. The voice assistants can find out the location of the mobile phone and can search the places near that location. For collecting such information, the search engine goes to the business listings. Thus, it is important to make sure that your business is listed in the business listing accurately. Mention the categories specifically so that it appears for the right voice search. The best practice is to have only one address in all the places so that it is easy for the search engine to locate and refer.
Emphasize on questions over keywords
When people type they tend to use short keywords, but when they speak they are more likely to ask full questions. As voice searches are more about answering the users’ questions, individual keywords have rendered unimportant. Voice searches are more about long-tail keywords, and the best practice is to address the sort of questions the users are most likely to ask. The easy way is to answer such questions that the users may ask in the FAQ section of the website. Answering such questions that users may ask may be helpful for voice searches as Google’s search bots may recognize a question asked by users through voice and may pull up your site. Another way could be joining question and answer forums and message boards like Quora, or you can also refer to your email list to look for areas where your customers need help.
Make your website mobile responsive
Your website should be mobile responsive, or in other words, it should be good to go on mobile devices as most voice searches are conducted on some kind of mobile devices. With Google announcing mobile-first indexing, it hardly matters how responsive the desktop version of your website is if the mobile website is not responsive and SEO optimized your site ranking will be low. Thus creating a website which endows a positive mobile experience to the users is a must. Consider using shorter paragraphs and avoid making the content too lengthy. Make your content as succinct and precise as possible, and care should be taken to ensure that it answers the questions of the users right away and does not treat the subject in a circumlocutive manner.
Create videos
Post videos on YouTube that answer all the questions on the topic that you are dealing with as YouTube videos show up frequently in voice search results. It is a known fact that videos on YouTube outrank the static websites and web pages in the usual search engine result pages which is even truer in case of voice searches. The best practice is to create an explainer video of the services you provide and on the subject with all the questions answered that the customers may ask.
Conclusion
As looking through all the statistics, data, and content and optimizing the site for voice searches can be really pain-staking, the best practice is to answer the customers’ questions in the content. This will ensure that your site ranks with the voice searches carried out by users in the form of questions. Figuring out those questions of the users is where the effort has to be put in, and that relates to your primary keyword research. Once the long tail keywords are decided upon with the set questions of the users answered in your content for voice searches results will start pouring in, which might well surprise you.
Key Takeaways
- If you want to stay abreast with the trends and harvest the benefits of technology you have to optimize your website for voice searches.
- Voice searches are more about long-tail keywords, and the best practice is to address the sort of questions the users are most likely to ask.
- As looking through all the statistics, data and content and optimizing the site for voice searches can be really pain-staking the best practice is to answer the customers’ questions in the content.
- Once the long tail keywords are decided upon with the set questions of the users answered in your content for voice searches results will start pouring in, which might well surprise you.