Voice Search Optimization – The Future of SEO | Are You Optimizing Your Website for Search by Voice?

Nowadays, the way people search for information online is constantly changing. According to ComScore, after the inception of voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Siri, and Google assistant, people do more search by voice. Hence, Voice Search Optimization has become inevitable. As we know, the percentage of people using mobile phones are getting higher than desktops or tablets. So, people are trying to find easier ways to search. And of course, voice search is one of the best ways to search, especially on mobile phones.

By the year 2020, nearly half of the online searches will be through voice, which will definitely affect the current SEO practices. Moving forward, doing SEO for voice search is as important as text search. So, it’s time to re-build the SEO strategy and approach. Before we get into VSO(Voice Search Optimization), it is significant to know about how people search in different instances.

Let’s assume you are in Tampa, Florida and you need to find the best IT services company using desktop or mobile. In this case, you would most likely be typing in “Best IT services company in Tampa.” When it comes to voice search, the way you search might be quite different. You would probably say “Hello Google! Which is the best IT services company near me?” However, the question remains the same, but the approach is different. Text searches are short and precise; whereas voice searches are a detailed, and conversational question. Now, you might be thinking about how to optimize for voice search. Here are some of the effective voice search optimization tips.

HOW TO DO VOICE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION?

Featured Snippets:

Have you ever heard about featured snippets? The featured snippet is a small summary of an answer to your search query, which is displayed in a box on top of Google search results. Nearly 20% of the clicks go to featured snippets. When you perform a voice search and if the result is included in the featured snippets, then the voice assistant will grab that information and provide it to you. So, if you want your content to rank for a voice search result, then you have to pay more importance on narrating such quality content so that Google displays it in the featured snippets.

User Intention:

While creating your web content, it is advisable to understand the user intent. It is because if a person searches for your website, how would you know his intent? The person might be searching your website for purchasing something or for knowledge gaining. Sometimes the user intent would be clear with the search terms like “purchase”, “buy”, “how much”, etc. But, in other cases, it is not always easy to find the user’s intent. To overcome this issue, Google has come up with a new solution called Google Hummingbird (updated version). Google Hummingbird helps Google to display the most relevant content for a specific search query. For example, if you are searching for “Clutch awards,” you would like to see the recent results and not the older results. So, search engines understand your intent and display the actual result. Hence, before content curation, understand the user intent and come up with the relevant content.

Page speed:

No matter how strong your content quality is, your website won’t be ranking on the top of the results page if your bounce rate is high. Optimizing the page speed is more important, especially for mobiles. Because as stated earlier, most of the voice searches are happening through mobile devices. As per Google’s report, the bounce rate on mobile devices is 9.56% higher than that of desktops. So, if your website doesn’t load fast, then you can’t retain those users. Hence, make sure to optimize your page speed for better ranking.

Note: You can check your website page speed using Pingdom.

Structured Markup Data:

Structured markup is a code that generates rich snippets which helps the search engines to crawl, and read your content effectively. Featured snippets and structured markup are interconnected. Your content is more likely to appear on the featured snippets and voice search results if it contains markup data. According to a recent survey (search metric), web pages with schema markup are ranking 4 places higher than the normal ones. Structured markup is more effective for websites pertaining to categories such as movies, food blogs, TV series, etc.

Note: You can use schema markup to generate a variety of rich snippets

Target Long Tail Keywords:

Focusing on long tail keywords is the best practice for both voice search and traditional SEO. Keyword phrases containing more than two or three words face less difficulty and results in increasing the chances of ranking your content on the top of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). When it comes to voice search, people tend to behave like they’re talking to a human. Therefore, instead of using two or three keywords, they go for more. Hence, it is advisable to pay more importance to long tail keywords.

More than before, we could clearly witness there are a lot of voice searches being performed by a majority of mobile users. Hence, optimizing your website for voice search is highly important. The practices suggested above are distinctive in nature and further customization based on the target audience, industry, and various other factors has to be done accordingly.

Feel free to get in touch with us for Voice Search Optimization (VSO) related queries and we will resolve your query. You can send in your queries by emailing them to media@techaffinity.com.