How To Optimize Your Voice Search For Future SEO Success

Just a few years ago, the idea of talking to voice assistants was like talking about any science fiction that cannot be real. But today, voice search is a part of life. Anyone can speak to Alexa, Siri, and any other virtual assistant and get useful recommendations for their queries.

Also, voice searches have gained popularity because they offer a fast, convenient, and easy way to search as compared to typing any query. However, there is a twist; the text search is not as similar to the voice search, and that’s why you need to optimize your voice search for SEO.

The voice search phrases are very different from text search and for this reason, we need a different set of strategies or find ways to optimize your website for voice search.

In this blog, you’ll read about what is voice search optimization, why should it be optimized and what are the different techniques to optimize the website for voice search.

What Is Voice Search Optimization?

Voice search optimization is a process where you can increase the chances of appearing in the voice search results using some set of different SEO techniques. The major aim of this process is to address the most common verbal queries. Using this process, you can allow virtual assistants and voice search technologies to showcase your data to the relevant users in the voice search results.

Why There Is A Need to Optimize Websites for Voice Search?

Voice searches are no more a craze rather it has become a new normal. It allows users to cut the clutter of typing and enables them to say their queries out loud to the search results. Many businesses today have reached the top of the market by just including voice search queries on their website and building a mobile app consisting speech to text features. Voice searches provide an excellent opportunity to increase organic search traffic regardless of the industry that you are serving.

Planning intelligent strategies for voice search also enhances the site’s SEO and rankings and helps your site gain authority. Ultimately, you will experience a good number of result pages spotted that will fall on the relevant search results.

Top 8 Ways to Optimize Your Website for Voice Search

1.  Pay Heed to Local Search

People are likely to go for local searches more than text searches. Specially, when an individual is out and looking for a quick search then, they prefer to ask a question more than typing it. This notion marks the importance of the local SEO for websites.

But the major thing is that you must consistently answer which are relevant to your local areas. Include these points to ensure that you are going ahead with the local search.

• Include “near me” in your tags, interlinks, anchor texts, and meta descriptions
• Include local institution titles that are relevant to your business
• Use phrases that describe the vicinity of your location
• Include the most relevant landmarks near the location of your business

2. Make Use of Structured Data

People search for multiple things and for some of the searches, there is a need for different types of strategies other than local searches.

Using structured data is one of the well-known strategies to stay on top of the Google SERPs.The data uploaded in a structured manner appears differently on the searches as compared to the normal searches. For instance, if you are searching for picnic spots then you will see some visual searches categorized under “picnic and images”. The results appearing in front of you will be the websites that have actually used structured data.

The strategy of using structured data immediately helps in grabbing user attention and getting much more traffic than others.

3. Prepare Content in Conversational Language

Staying conversational is the basic need of voice search queries which must be leveraged to get higher rankings on SERPs. The use of robotic language can bring down your chance of appearing in the voice search.

However, it is quite difficult to understand the search pattern of users in voice searches but a deep study of what they are searching verbally can help you understand their requirements. The major areas that you need to look for include:

• User’s conversational style
• Type of keywords
• Type of questions being asked frequently
• Type of answers as per the query
• Research on the answers performing well & displayed for those searches

Useful insights related to the above points will help in getting an idea about what people are searching through voice results.

4. Enhance the Loading Time of Your Website

The loading time of any website has a direct connection with the voice search. Websites having a longer load time tend to abandon soon as compared to the ones that load quickly. More loading time leads to an increase in bounce rate which must be optimized at any cost. There is a generic rule that works with the voice search “If your website responds slowly then your content will not be able to reach the verbal search queries.” Check out these essential points to ensure how you can improve the loading speed of your website:

• Make use of the Contact Delivery Network
• Use videos & images in compressed size
• Lessen all the HTTP requests
• Minimize the number of redirects and plugins that you use

5. Use More of Long Tail Keyword Phrases

Voice searches are obviously longer than your keyboard searches because you speak in a conversational style in your voice search. In addition to this, Google loves long-form content more as compared to short ones. So, instead of investing your time and efforts in creating multiple search queries, you can choose to include all the long tail keywords in a full post which will automatically appear in the voice search queries.

For example: how can I cook restaurant-style biryani at home?

Such search queries including long-tail keywords and required fillers will automatically help in increasing your voice search query.

6. Create an FAQ Section

It is quite common that an FAQ page on any website works well for SEO and it has a solid reason i.e. people visiting your site with relevant queries get readily available answers which increases your site’s visibility. But the key trick here is to deal with the relevant questions and answers. As voice searches are conversational in nature, so, you need to frame your FAQs accordingly.

Conduct thorough research on how other people are using voice searches to prepare a list of relevant questions and answers.

Try to create detailed questions and answers but do not make it too long. Every other person prefers to get quick answers and the answers to the voice searches can also be on the shorter side.

7. Make use of “Near Me” in Titles, Tags and Content

People have a habit of making a lot of voice searches by including the term ‘near me’ in their voice searches or other search queries. You can really benefit from this term by adding them to your tags, meta descriptions, titles, URLs, and content to improve the rankings of your website.

Try to add the term “near me” as your side keyword i.e. best restaurant in the town then you can use near me along with it as “best restaurant in the town near me”.

This technique will help in getting a higher ranking of the website for the relevant searches and can elevate your business game towards success.

8. Try to Improve the Ranking of The Videos in Your Search Results

Users prefer more of the videos as compared to the simple text that you post on the website. Videos related to the user’s query are also suitable for voice searches. If your video is ranking high on the Google search then Google can easily suggest relevant parts of the video to the users’ search queries.

Now, how can you make your videos rank higher in the search engines? Check out some tips:

• Include relevant keywords in the video description and transcript
• Add a clickable thumbnail
• Add some conversational long-tail phrases in the titles which need not be identical for the users. Majorly how-to videos work best in this case.

Summing Up!

The SEO world is moving ahead at a much faster rate and voice search is helping a lot in moving it ahead. So, it is not just important to include the voice search queries in your website strategy rather you must also focus on working on this significant section.

The method of voice search will be especially important for small or local businesses that are trying to gain a huge amount of traffic and engagement.

Above shared tips and strategies can help you gain traction in the growing market and align yourself with the market trends. The Voice Search Strategy will definitely help you hold a good position in the market and gain more voice search traffic.

However, no one can guarantee immediate results but voice search will improve your SEO and drag you towards a win-win situation.