Any device you use to help you find answers, places, recommendations, and more most likely has a voice search feature nowadays. Whether a smart speaker, smart TV, a personal computer, or smartphone, searching via voice is a rising trend for consumers worldwide. In fact, smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, and Google Home are becoming commonplace in households and workplaces alike. You may not realize it, but SEO is an important factor in voice search results.
According to the ADI Consumer Electronics Report released early last year, over half of all voice assistant owners used the voice search feature at least once per day and over 20% used it for online shopping. These findings illustrate why it is important to ensure your content and information can be found via any search device, meaning SEO optimization needs to take both text and voice search options into account.
We need voice search-friendly content. When using voice assistants, people want to speak naturally and use casual language that is understood by both humans and robots. The voice assistant is actually reading the text aloud for you so it’s important to get things right!
Engaging with your audience through voice searches helps them find what they are looking for in a way they’ll understand.
You’re probably wondering, “How do I optimize for voice search?” Here are some tips to make your site voice search-friendly and easily accessible to consumers!
Have Your Customers Intent in Mind When Optimizing for Voice
When performing a search of any kind, consumers are most often looking for the answer to a question. Focus your content on not only answering any why’s, who’s, what’s and how’s, but also include these questions in your content. Take into consideration the type of questions they are asking that bring them to your services or products.
Use Structured Data for Website SEO
Ranking at the top of Google’s search results can help gain website traffic because the first few search results are usually the first ones clicked by consumers. It’s important that your site is both engaging to humans as well as robots! Voice assistant speakers can’t read text aloud unless it has specific schema tags which help them understand what each part of your post is about.
Robots use these same tags when crawling websites too, so if your website is correctly applying schema markup (or structured data), it will help you rank in search engines, too! If your structured data is not in place, then it will make it more difficult to show up in the top results for a voice search.
Ensure Voice Results Show Easy to Read Content
Voice search tends to be more conversational and reflects how people speak in everyday life, rather than focusing on keywords alone. Content written in a natural and colloquial voice can help match consumers to your website in search results. Building content with context that relates to questions can help to streamline these results.
Other voice-friendly design features to consider are:
- Adding voice search functionality on your website – either through a plugin or by embedding it into the site directly, depending on what platform you’re using. This will help both humans and robots find what they’re looking for more easily.
- Creating an FAQ page with answers to frequently asked questions that people might ask via voice assistant devices too – if you have these types of questions coming up often then make sure they’re answered somewhere! Voice assistants may not know how to answer them otherwise.
- Ensure that the main ideas are communicated clearly and have pertinent information in them.
Voice searching is no longer the future, it is now. Is your business’s website prepared to yield the best results? If not, Hot Dog Marketing can help build an amazing, responsive site that sets you up for success in the digital future.
If you need an expert team to help manage your SEO contact the Hot Dog Marketing team!
Hot Dog Marketing helps expert service providers and tech companies build their brands at the same rate they’re growing their businesses. We have deep expertise in branding and online marketing for both business-to-business service companies and local consumer service businesses.