Voice Search Optimization: 6 Tips for Optimizing Your Website

The development of the search engine industry has dramatically transformed the ways in which users engage with the web in the modern digital environment. One of the most prominent innovations introduced in this domain is voice search. Given the ubiquity of virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant in our lives, websites must have voice search optimization to attract and maintain online visibility and relevance to remain competitive.

In this article, we’ll explore the details of Voice Search Optimization to help you understand its meaning and importance. We’ll also discuss its benefits and recommend tips to improve website voice search performance.

What is Voice Search Optimization?

Voice search optimization is the process of making your content more visible using voice search queries. The primary goal is to get voice assistants to pick or mention you while users are doing voice searches. Digital assistants include Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa.

Voice searches can be performed on a search engine such as Google through a desktop possibility, and the results are traditionally shown much in the same way as text-based searches. It is important to understand that voice search is unlike traditional text query search since the search includes different user behaviors.

For instance, when you are searching for an Italian restaurant around you, you might type “Italian restaurants near me” in the search engine. On the other hand, a voice inquest might sound like this: “Hey, Siri, can you find me an Italian restaurant close to me, please?”

Such inquiries are conversational and more extended and are written in the form of complete sentences or requests, imitating a discussion with real people. As such inquiries can increase the chances of being picked by voice assistants, they should be optimized.

Benefits of Voice Search Optimization

Businesses can now determine the benefits of a voice search optimization strategy on several operations. These benefits include:

Increased Sales and Revenue

Voice searches account for more than $2 billion of total sales, so the revenue-generating possibilities are massive. Failing to optimize your website means missing out on this revenue-generating option.

Increased Target Operations

By the end of the decade, voice search is expected to account for more than half of all purchases and questions. Businesses must invest in voice search to participate in this intense commercial interaction.

Proximity and Reach

Over 55% of voice search optimization is used to identify local business people. This implies that such optimization benefits small businesses, too. Businesses in the niche will use such an approach and may reach more leads.

Capture the Upward Search Trend

With over a billion monthly voice searches, businesses require an optimized strategy to use this increasing user habit. Companies that integrate voice search generate 30% more digital commerce revenue, which is a clear indicator of prospective growth through the approach.

Minimize the Risk of Redundancy

By simply accounting for 29% of searches in 2018, voice will account for over 50% of all searches by 2024. Develop a long-term search engine strategy to avoid being redundant – invest in this as soon as possible.

Commercialize the Potential of Modern SEO Techniques

Voice search optimization can also complement your traditional SEO strategies by boosting your brand’s visibility on different platforms. This SEO technique will not only increase brand visibility online but also earn the client’s trust.

Enhancing User Experience

Voice search optimization is required to provide the most optimized client experience. It is the most straightforward method of convincing customers that the business they’re dealing with is completely reliable.

How to Optimize Website For Voice Search: 6 Voice SEO Best Practices

Research Keywords for Voice Search

Finding the keywords that are relevant to voice search and targeting them will significantly increase your chances of displaying your content to people who demand to find the most common answers from their voice assistants. Therefore, when starting to research voice search keywords, you should target the following:

• Long-tail keywords: These are precise queries with relatively lower search volumes, such as “ways to edit a pdf.”
• Question keywords: These keywords start with question words how, what, why – “how to edit a PDF.”
• Conversational keywords: These “key phrases” mimic the way people communicate and ask questions and can even include questions about the process with “self-instruction” additions—“How do I edit a pdf?”

In practice, such keyword groups have overlapping features, which means that question keywords can be long-tail, conversational, and so on. You can pick the ideal keywords for your content with the right keyword research tool.

Use Conversational Language In Your Content

Voice searches are conversational, meaning that it would be necessary to make your content conversational as well so that you can connect with people effectively. Compromising your authenticity and readability and foregoing the conversational tone may be putting off the expectation of the answers that these voice queries users seek to obtain. These could include:

• Using conversational words such as “I,” “me,” “you,” and “we” in blog posts so that you can create the impression that you are addressing the audience directly.
• Avoid jargon and overly technical speech that may make it difficult for someone to understand your content or come off as awkward.
• Be humorous where appropriate when making a point to lighten the mood around the conversation.

If your brand has a unique way of speaking, focus on making that language casual and optimize for voice search queries as long as you remain true to your brand identity. However, this should not be at the expense of the quality of your content. This means that instead of getting a writer to curate excellent content for your online platform, the quality of that work diminishes when the same writers write in a more conversational tone. Google still values the content. Thus, your content must still be engaging, valuable, and original.

Analyze Search Results for Keywords You Want to Target

One of the first steps involves analyzing content already displayed on Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs. SERPs provide relevant results to a user’s query. Analyzing this content reveals what type of content is likely to appear for a similar query and guides your approach to optimization.

However, you should pay special attention to SERP features, which are additional elements that enhance the visual appearance of the search result beyond the typical blue links. While conducting a study on voice search in 2019, Search Engine Watch observed that 70% of voice search answers originated from SERP features. Some common SERP features on Google are:

• Featured Snippets: Concise text snippets offering a preview of a page’s content, providing quick answers to user queries.
• People Also Ask: Curated sets of questions related to search queries, accompanied by brief answers, aiding user exploration.
• Local Pack: Displays top business listings along with a map for location-specific keywords, enhancing local search visibility.
• Rich Snippets: Also known as rich results, these showcase additional information such as ratings or reviews, enriching search results.

Although SERP features add value to the searcher’s content discovery process, their appearance is dependent on whether search engines pick your content to be featured. That’s why you should analyze SERP features to better understand what search engines, or Google in particular, are looking for and then optimize accordingly.

Audit & Optimize Your Website Content

Before creating new content, it is also more reasonable to conduct a content audit, which is a methodical examination of all content currently posted on your site’s pages. This will help identify more efficient ways to modify this content and optimize it so that it will come up with a voice search that has a keyword of a specified nature.

Suppose you have a post in the website’s blog section called “How to Edit a PDF.” Nowadays, it is not necessary to make new posts on “how do I edit a pdf” or “ways to edit a pdf” keywords. Get optimized WordPress hosting, use the content you already have, and improve it with keywords related to videos on the website’s platform.

Improve Your Site’s Technical SEO

The concept of Technical SEO involves optimizing a website to ensure its accessibility, crawlability, and indexability by search engines. Consequently, this exponentially boosts the overall performance of the given site in respective search engines.

Additionally, boosting your technical SEO will positively impact your user experience and improve voice search ranking. It increases the chances of acquiring prominent SERP features pulled by voice assistants, which could be vocalized.

For example, when optimizing your website for voice search, consider optimizing the following technical SEO aspects:

• Page speed: The frequency at which your web page loads similarly affects the indicators of quality. The optimal caliber of page speed acts as a ranking factor. It also leads to enhanced site performance, which aligns with search engine preferences for swift and efficient navigation.
• Mobile SEO: Since most voice search users interact via mobile, optimizing the website for mobile phones is vital. Mobile SEO behaves like other types of SEO, ensuring your website performs optimally on a mobile phone or is mobile-friendly.
• Responsive design: A responsive user interface guarantees that your website uniformly reformats as the screen size widens or as screen widths vary. This matches Google’s recommendation for ideal on-site optimization.
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure: It ensures the high security of your website visitors by encrypting the information being transferred. It has been a strong ranking factor since 2014.

Technical SEO transformations can be simplified using tools like the Site Audit.

Practice Local SEO

Local SEO is optimizing your online presence to increase local traffic and visibility and promote brand awareness to target the largest local SEO areas. It is especially critical for voice search, as voice assistants rely on local business directories such as Google My Business Profile, Yelp, and Bing Places to provide local results to voice queries. Here are some local SEO tips that can help you increase your voice search presence.

1. First, optimize your Google Business Profile. The potential of this aspect will dictate how well your local business is displayed on Google platforms such as search, shopping, and maps. Google Assistant is responsible for collecting relevant information on local voice queries. Therefore, optimizing your Google Business Profile increases your chances of having your business included in the Google Assistant’s response.
2. Next, use other local directories. While Google Business Profile is essential for the Google Assistant, other assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s Siri use different local directories. Therefore, it is essential to include more local directories to ensure that your business is visible in as many voice modes as possible.
3. Last, target local keywords. Addressing local vocabulary in the production increases your chances of being a local package representing local businesses. Target these keywords, and your business will likely be featured in voice-activated local searches.

Conclusion

The increasing prominence of voice search signifies a clear departure from tradition in user engagement with the digital world. Therefore, businesses aspiring to remain relevant online and competitive must optimize their sites for voice search; otherwise, they will be locked out of this option in the future. Companies can ensure increased visibility and website traffic by learning the language of voice search optimization, following optimization best practices, and utilizing local SEO.

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