What is Voice Search?
Yes! You are right!!! It’s just using one’s voice to search. Simple as it as… It really simplifies the daily life of consumers. You own an IoT and voice assistant duo? You won the easiest life on the planet. Gone are the days when people make fun of slow voice assistants which were pulling out funny results, as they found it difficult to understand and answer questions. The voice assistants these days have evolved far more. Giants such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft are investing huge money and time on their voice assistants to ease the life of their customers and thereby giving a tough competition to their rivals.
The rise of Voice Search:
Voice Search is seeing an immense growth both in popularity and usage in the recent years. “Voice Search” is being a “must include tip” in any article on digital marketing that speaks the trends of SEO for the year 2019. Though Voice Search has continuously existed for years, it’s trending due to increase in the availability of Voice Search assistants from the industry’s giants.
Large quantities of customers opt for Voice Search rather than performing a search by text. One of the major reasons behind this increased chunk of migration is the growing number of IoT (Internet of Things) and the evolution of virtual assistants such as Google’s Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s iPhone Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Samsung’s Bixby and many others. We at Lemon Adverts have already provided a brief data on why websites are to be optimized for Voice Search queries and a statistics related to the same in our previous article.
The most alarming statistics result for the digital marketing world is from Comscore that stated 50 percent of search made in 2020 will be a Voice Search.
Why to optimize a ranking website for Voice Search?
The reason is simple! The search trend varies when the input is through voice. Let’s dig this a bit deeper. However smart these voice assistants grow, they will have to end up with our websites to feed their owners with expected answers.
When a search is made through text, bots search for those terms and their semantic related terms in our content and pull out the best as search results. Similarly when a search is made through voice, our content should be well optimized to be a best match for the search trend encountered.
You might wonder on, what big difference will this create? You also might assume that, be it a voice or text, the input is from humans and so the search terms remain same. Of course the search term remains same but the strategy?
Assume a scenario where you need to find an agency for digital advertising in Dubai. When the search is through text your search term would be
“best digital advertising agency dubai”.
When the same search is done through a voice the search term would be like
“Hey Google, Which is the best digital advertising agency in Dubai” or
Where can I find a good digital advertising agency in Dubai” or if you are a person from Dubai then your search query might be
“Find a good digital advertising agency near me”.
Pause..
Compare difference in search queries..
Great!!! And this is why we will have to start optimizing our websites for Voice Searches.
How to optimize a website for Voice Search queries?
Having learnt on why it is necessary to optimize a website for Voice Search queries let us dive into knowing how to do so? To optimize a website for Voice Search queries,
- Focus on long tail keywords
- Optimize the site for mobile use
- Optimize for featured snippets
- Update local citations
- Make the website fast and secure
- Optimize the content
- Add FAQ pages
Long tail keywords
Remember our scenario of finding the best digital advertising agency in Dubai. You could have realized the search strings for Voice Search is quite longer than text search. Also Google says every day they encounter at least a few new combination of search queries and the number increases when the Voice Search queries are considered.
Almost every Voice Search is in the form of questions for any given scenario. It is good to consider the below tips while doing a keyword research/keyword finalization.
- Interrogative words – Keyphrases for Voice Search will be using words such as how, what, when, where and when.
- Using keywords in question form – As most Voice Search are made in question form it will be ideal to frame focus on such keywords.
Optimize the site for mobile use:
Though Google has begun their mobile first indexing, far way there are webmasters who pay least attention on how their websites respond to mobile devices. Having the stats of 50 percent searches through voice by 2020 mobile devices can never be ignored. Why? Because if a customer has patience to turn on desktop, and go for a Voice Search while he is in the midst of something else then Voice Search wouldn’t have seen this boom.
The main success of Voice Search is people get their work done, on the go, and without making any special efforts to conduct a search other than to speak up.
Emerging Voice Search has given the mobile devices a huge importance and only those sites that perform well on mobile devices will rank. So no options!!!! Optimize your sites for those tiny devices right now!!!
Featured Snippets
As of today, Google Assistants and Google home read the content available in the featured snippet while they answer a question. Being a digital marketer everybody’s aim is to attain that position zero so that our content appears even before organic results. Improving Voice Searches also emphasis the same. Hence it is clear that our content should be optimized for rich text.
Local SEO
A study says that 39 percent of people do Voice Search to have business information, globally. So it would be very appropriate for a website to optimize their location for search queries like “get me to the nearest digital advertising agency”. Serving the customers for what they need, right at their hand, is the ultimate aim of digital marketing.
Make the website fast and secure
Ever since the traditional SEO days speed is one of the major ranking factors as consumers do not want to look at that ever loading screen when they need some information. Now, the digital marketing world emerging towards Voice Search, customers really need the fastest reply as they search on the go. Especially as mobile devices plays major role in Voice Search, insisting our point number two, it is really the time to optimize a site’s speed to survive the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) race, be it a voice or text search.
A secure website is always recommended by Google and content from a secured site is preferred over a non-secured site. SSL certified websites rank top in desktop. As per Backlinko, content that ranks highly in desktop search is also very likely to a rank high for mobile devices. Therefore obviously SSL certified websites rank top in mobile devices as well.
Optimize content:
Content plays a major role in SEO, as always. Though a website ranks well for text queries, below are the tweaks to be made so that they rank for Voice Search queries as well.
Content clarity
Allocate specific pages for each specific topic containing keyword. Use simple language and make sure the content is of very high clarity. Avoid mixing distinct topics on the same page so that this eases the job of voice assistants.
Answer based content
Think of questions people may ask about your products and services and then write content that answers those questions.
Content length
Long form content is always preferred by SEO. Long form content favors SEO in such a way that longer the content, more there are possibility to answer all questions related to them.
Add FAQ pages:
This is the best of all possibilities to optimize a webpage for Voice Search. Make sure the questions are in conversational way (think on the best digital advertising agency in Dubai search query optimized for Voice Search) so that users get instant answers when they place their queries in conversational keyword phrases.
Search engines are evolving so fast and no strategy those did well a decade back performs the same today. Optimizing for Voice Search is one such evolution of SEO. One benefit of Voice Search in SEO is almost all searches are conversional and there are many chances to gain quality leads when a website properly optimized for Voice Search. Reach out to Lemon Adverts to get your websites optimized for search engines especially for Voice Search.
Really informative, thanks for sharing this!