In this day and age, voice search has become ubiquitous. Since the start of the pandemic, especially, people tend to prefer using voice chat. This is not surprising, bearing in mind the ease of use: it’s fast, handsfree and lets you multitask. The rising popularity is showing in the numbers: over half of the consumers (55%) use voice search to ask questions on a smartphone and close to 40% of U.S. internet users operate a voice assistant at least once a month. It is therefore critical to understand how voice search works and how to optimize a website for it.
In this blog post I will present multiple tips to optimize a website for voice search.
4 Quick and Easy tips on how to optimize a website for voice search
Conversational Keywords
The first step to optimize a website for voice search involves focusing on conversational keywords: since users ask questions in a different way via voice search compared to type search (full sentences vs 3 single words), it is critical for the optimization of a website to focus on conversational long-tail keywords. As a result, if people ask a whole sentence question via voice search, the answer on your website will be shown as the top result.
FAQ’s
Second, when you optimize a website for voice search, you should build pages that answer frequently asked questions (FAQ’s). When people ask a question, more often than not they tend to start their inquiry with: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?. To help optimize a website for voice search, try starting a FAQ page where the questions start with one of those words. This is crucial, because with voice search the answer that gets returned can mostly be found in the “Position Zero” or “People also ask” boxes on Google. This is supported by research that showed that in a staggering 80% of the cases, an answer from Position Zero gets returned.
Persona-based content
Furthermore, you can boost your voice search optimization by creating compelling persona-based content. When looking to optimize a website for voice search there are 3 clear pillars to pay attention to: brevity, relevance and context. A good way to implement this is by using a headline that asks a common question, with a concise answer to that question immediately after the headline. That way, your website will be found when people ask common questions to their phone. So if you ask yourself: “How to optimize a website for voice search?”, this is a great solution!
Make use of mobile & local
Finally, think mobile & think local when looking to optimize a website for voice search: what’s important to remember is that mobile devices allow users to perform on-the-go local inquiries. So, make sure things like directions to brick-and-mortar locations and XML sitemaps are readable to visitors and search engines on your website. This will be the last final small step to optimize a website for voice search.
Hopefully these strategies will help you to determine how to optimize a website for voice search.
Sources used for this blogpost:
Barysevich, A. (2020, September 10). How to Optimize for Voice Search: 6 SEO Strategies for Success. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved 11 November 2021, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/voice-search-optimization-strategy/379946/#close
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