Voice search is on a constant rise and soon everyone will be using it. With each year passing, more and more people are using voice search on their mobile devices to search for products and local services near them. Consumer behavior keeps changing, mostly to what is more convenient and easier. This is also the reason why voice search is prevailing against manual search. There is a couple of reasons why consumers prefer voice search. It is faster than typing, it’s more convenient and just perfect for mobile searches.
The list of actionable tips from our SEO experts below will help you create a solid voice search optimization strategy and start ranking better. Continue reading to get prepared to meet your customers’ expectations and earn more revenue for your business.
Why Is Voice Search SEO Important for Your Business?
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Voice search changes when and how people search for products and services, as well as what they search for. With voice search, online searches become longer and more conversational, while Google slowly becomes an ”answer engine” instead of a search engine. This means Google doesn’t require its users anymore to visit a site to get an answer to a question or queries. The answers are now right there, in the search results. This is the reason why the number of organic clicks has dropped by 37%. Featured Snippets and Knowledge Graph make this possible.
But why is voice search so important for growing businesses?
Because of the fact that voice search has driven over $2 billion in sales. By optimizing for voice search, you’re increasing chances for your business to capture the attention of people who use voice search to find and buy products or services, get more leads, and close more sales.
About 1 billion voice searches are carried out each month
It is expected that by 2020, voice search will drive more than $40 billion in sales. More and more people are using devices like Google Home to search by voice for products, services, and local places and the technology of voice search is getting better and better in recognizing what they are looking for. As a business or a brand, you should catch the wave, adopt voice search, and use the potential to boost your revenue on time.
55% of people use voice search to find local businesses
Are you a local business? Then the fact that more people are now using voice search to find local business rather than typing in the query, should be the crucial reason to adopt voice search, adapt your local SEO strategy, and attract more qualified leads looking for you.
20% of all searches on mobile phones are voice-based
And this number keeps growing as the mobile industry expands and voice search technology gets better. Make sure to include mobile voice searchers into your strategy and capture their attention.
65% of voice search devices owners like to make purchases through their smart speakers
The convenience of shopping is often the crucial factor affecting purchasing decisions — whether a product or a service will be purchased or not. So the voice search is not only about attracting people but also about direct sales, especially for e-commerce businesses. Don’t forget about the owners of smart speakers and don’t risk losing sales.
How to Optimize Your Website for Voice Search
Use Longer, Conversational Words
Voice search is all about using longer, conversational words. This means that when optimizing your website content for voice search, you shouldn’t use short, unnatural sentences and phrases. Voice search queries are natural and spontaneous. Understand the searchers’ intent, study, learn to predict the query style, and learn the lingo the searchers use when asking verbal questions. Then use it to optimize your content and make it easy for them to find you.
Focus on question phrases, research, and study what words, expressions, and idioms people use when searching, looking, and asking about your products or services. Tools like Asking the Public can help you start your research and understand your audience. Just enter any keyword related to what you offer and get a list of questions in return that you can use to optimize your content.
Focus especially on ‘Who’ and ‘What’ questions and rejoice if voice searchers are asking ‘Where’ questions because this means they are most likely ready to make a purchase.
However, don’t mistake long, conversational expressions and questions with long-tail keywords. The easiest way to make a distinction between the two is to keep in mind that voice search is more about question phrases.
Use Long-Tail Keywords
People mostly ask questions when looking for local businesses using voice search and you should understand their intent before optimizing your content to help them find you. So answering their questions in your content will help. However, using long-tail keywords relevant to your business, product and service will also help. Although these keywords most likely don’t contain question phrases and will probably attract text-based queries, you should optimize content for both voice search and text search. Aim for long-form content pieces, pages and blog posts, and make sure to include long-tail keywords that show up in voice search queries.
Use Local Keywords
Make sure to incorporate local keywords into your SEO voice search strategy.
- ‘Near me’ phrases: include them in your anchor text, meta description, title tags, and internal links
- Titles of other non-competitive businesses and institutions relevant or close to your business
- Different landmarks close to your location
- Expressions, phrases, and idioms people use when talking about your location and neighborhood
Provide Direct, Quick, To-the-Point Results
People who use vocal search won’t bother to visit your website. They expect to find answers to their queries and questions right there in search results. Their questions describe a clear intention and Google is capable to provide them with immediate and straightforward answers in Featured Snippets and Knowledge Graph, for example. Also, the search can return a list of closest businesses near them offering the services or products they’re looking for. The results can include addresses, reviews, descriptions, and distance from the user’s location to the business location. Most probably, the searcher will have an option to choose a business from the list and click to call a business and book an appointment.
Answer Your Customers’ Questions
You can create an FAQ page on your website to answer your customers’ questions or special blog posts and pages with thorough explanations and answers to their inquiries, issues, queries, and challenges. Another option, if you don’t have time to create new pages or write blog posts, is to optimize the existing content on your website by adding content for these queries. These can be product or services pages, about us page, and so on.
To make sure your audience finds you and these answers you’ve prepared for them, make sure to carefully listen and study the words and expressions people actually use when talking about your products, services, or about your business specifically. Collect the most common questions, queries, issues, and challenges, create a list, and answer them. Explain, reassure, and encourage your audience.
Optimize Your Website for Mobile
Voice searches are mainly conducted on mobile devices, so you want to make sure your website offers content that is optimized for mobile views. Responsive and mobile-friendly design that loads fast is not only recommended but a must if you want to collect more hits from voice search than your competitors.
Using WordPress themes is a safe bet because most of them are responsive and mobile-friendly.
To make sure your website meets Google’s guidelines and best recommendations regarding optimization for mobile, use Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.
Mobile searchers want content that is easy to read. Don’t overcrowd the pages with heaps of sentences. Use easy-to-understand and simple words, short paragraphs, and engaging headers in the form of questions. Lots of white space that allows pages and users to breathe is a must as well.
Secure Your Website with SSL Certificate
Certified and secured websites are favorited and pushed up in search results by Google. Search engines trust these websites regardless of their industry or what they offer thanks to HTTPS protocols that ensure the website meets and respects all the requirements and standards of recommended online practices.
Create Long-Form Content
Long-form content is one of the major requirements for any sound and stable SEO strategy. SEO involves meeting some technology requirements, but continuous efforts on creating and optimizing content are crucial for the success of your SEO strategy for voice search. If you’re in the business for the long run, it is recommended that you should regularly create long-form blog posts on topics that describe and solve your target audience’s and customers’ questions, issues, challenges, and problems. The more informative and the more quality content you create, the higher will search engines rank you. This is one of the best ways to attract your target audience, get more leads, conversions, and close more sales. Don’t forget to check on your content regularly and add whatever it misses.
Claim and Perfect Your Google My Business Listing
Creating Google My Business listing, filling it out and optimizing it to perfection is an absolute must if you’re a local business and you want your customers to find you through voice search.
- Add the name of your business, phone number with the area code, and address. Make sure they are all accurate and consistent with the information on your website and in other listings and directories.
- Fill out the introduction field because this is your chance for a pitch to your audience. About 400 words are usually enough to describe and make your products and services interesting to potential customers.
- Don’t miss to describe what your business is all about and link your Google My Business listing to the categories that are relevant to your business.
- Give a preview of what your customers can expect when they visit you. Upload photos of your business, exterior and interior, and products.
- Gather reviews from your customers on Google My Business. When people find you through voice search, reviews about you will pop up. These can be a powerful motivator for the searchers to book an appointment with you.
- If possible, use your business domain when creating your Google My Business listing and login rather than using a free Gmail account.
Be Active on Social Media
Social media is not detrimental to SEO adapted for voice search but is a valuable asset that will increase your reputation and relevance in your industry. Also, social media can produce a significant number of backlinks to your website. The more backlinks you have, the higher you will rank on Google.
After you studied all the best practices to optimize your website for voice search, which technique are you going to try first?
If you’re planning on hiring professionals, consider the Persist Digital SEO team.
Why Choose Persist Digital for Voice Search Optimization Services?
With years of experience promoting local businesses in various industries, Persist Digital knows SEO and SEO for voice search in-depth. But this doesn’t mean we stop learning. On the contrary, we stay continually active and remain up-to-date on the latest news, changes, and best practices to create groundbreaking strategies for our clients.
You can clearly see our passion for our clients’ success in testimonials we get and our clients’ growth. Check out our case studies to see how we help our clients to up their game in digital marketing and meet their goals. Until today, we drove more than $10 million in revenue for our clients.
You too can get more revenue with voice search optimization services from Persist Digital. If you’re looking for voice search optimization services that drive real and fast results, you can count on our professional and expert SEO team to help you reach your business goals.
Contact us online today to get started or give us a call at 973 358 6565 to get a free custom quote!