Is voice activation the upcoming gigantic trend?

Domino’s Pizza’s virtual buying helper Dom, is an interactive voice Chatbot. It assists consumers and gives order via mobile devices through a cheerful and bouncing microphone which has a Domino’s cap, many emotive expressions, and answers to thousands of queries. Domino’s sale went up to half-million orders from the time of its launch in 2014. It conveys that more brands should think about investing in voice search technology.

It also shows that voice search has raised the business profits of early adopters.

The voice search was pretty new when Siri first came into the market. But these days there are Google Voice Search, Alexa, Cortana and many more voice identification mechanisms. One shouldn’t be astonished to know that, more than half of inquiry will be done by voice search around 2020.

The above google trend graph clearly shows how popular voice search is becoming over the past 12 months.

Some of the well-known sources are displaying stats for example:

• According to comScore, “50% of searches will be done voice search by 2020.”
• “The voice recognition market for smartphones in US to reach over $601 million by 2019” – Technavio
• On the basis of Geek Wirereports,” Amazon has sold 4.4 million Echo units in its first full year of sales.”

Voice search has gained the momentum mainly because of the following reasons:

• Users love to speak than to type.
• The outcome of voice queries also emerges faster on search result pages.
• The process of voice search is faster than going on a website or an app
• It can be used while driving
• Voice search procedure is more enjoyable than any other search method
• It simplifies the process of searching for users, who find it difficult to type on small devices

As a marketing professional, you are required to know what voice search is all about. Voice search is being used for multiple objectives, and it’s going to make a great impact on growing and established businesses.

In Webmaster Central Hangout, Google’s John Mueller talked about optimizing content for Voice Search. John gave ideas about the different type of content that works for voice search.

Entrepreneurs can surely take advantage of voice search by optimizing their website content and following all ethical SEO standards. They have to keep in mind that their customers are already using voice search. It is 100% for business owners to meet them there. To achieve that objective content is the only way out.

After this article, you should be able to update and optimize your content for voice search. This will increase traffic on your page and earn you more business.

Here are some remarkable and profitable content optimization tactics for voice search:

1. Mobile and Voice Search:

The fact is people are using voice search, particularly on mobile. On the basis of Google, 20 percent of all mobile search questions are on voice search, and that count will only fly up.

In order to get good business and low bounce rate on your website, it is always good to optimize the content of your website for mobile and voice search. Mobile and voice search optimization co-exist.

While optimizing the content of your website keep mobile friendliness in your mind. If you optimize the content of your website by implementing following points your website will surely pop up in SERP for voice search:

• A responsive website design is must for the mobile-friendly website, which is advised by Google.
• The page loading time or page speed is must for perfect mobile content optimization. Otherwise, your content will not pop up on time in search result pages and you may lose the potential customer.
• According to Google Webmaster Central Blog, “People want to be able to find answers to their questions as fast as possible — studies show that people really care about the speed of a page.” And this is also related to Voice Search results.
• Query-based content search, which is totally based on the intent of the people, is liked by voice search smart speakers.
• Use of the long tail keyword in the content will rock you in SERP.
• But be careful not to over optimize your content. Google’s John Mueller cautioned about over optimization. Therefore try to balance and make your content look natural and unique to readers.

2. Create a communicative, natural and Q&A style content:

Artificial intelligence gives the power to voice search, and it becomes smarter with every conversation.

Here are some of the tips for the perfect voice search content style:

• Voice search goes by searcher’s intent.
• It is better to create content in an informal way for voice search.
• Voice search is often conversational. “How is the weather like in San Diego today?” It is an example of a colloquial or natural language query, which is to be spoken to a digital helper.
• With voice search, a query or command goes like this: “Ok Google, order more pizza” and “Siri, where is the nearest restaurant?”
• It is better to develop a content that keeps the communication going, rather than ends it. If you compose naturally and you write in an easy kind of language that’s similar across to the type of questions you want to target then that’s the type of material that search results could show up for voice search.
• Many people will keep Q&A-style content for their FAQ pages, but it’s time to diverge. Now you have to think that how you can build your blog posts and e-commerce pages to optimize for these types of queries.

Voice searches mainly target an action based tone, which has words like ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘when’ and ‘how.’

The graph shows the most popular word used is ‘Who’. ‘Who’ phrases pop up 135 percent and ‘How’ phrases show up 81 percent times for voice searches.”

3. Long Tail Keywords and Voice Search:

If people are inquiring verbally rather than by typing in search result box the long-tail keywords rocks.

It is best to think about using keywords that include filler words and prepositions.

 What is the cost of vegetarian pizza in pizza hut?

Basically, you should focus on keywords that imitate the way people communicate.

4.Include Structured Data in your Website:

• John Mueller also conveyed that everything you can do to transmit what the page is about will be useful, mainly indicating Structured Data.
• He said, “I think that’s really complicated because from Google’s side, what we try to do is to understand your page.. and to figure out with which type of voice queries match those pages. So that’s something you can help us with using structured data on the pages so if you tell us a bit more about what this page is about.”

There was rarely an SEO meet-up or conference in 2017 that didn’t talk about the importance of structured data.
You should implement structured data markup on your website to get best results for voice search.

5. Optimization of Featured Snippet:

When you search for something on Google, you might see search results with a featured snippet box at the top of the search result page. The featured snippet is meant to be a quick answer to your question.

While doing a voice search with the question, “how to make omelette” below is the answer:

In today’s voice search world, the old “10 blue links” format doesn’t work as well, giving featured snippets number one position.

Before you think about implementing best strategies for the featured snippet for voice search, it is better to first use best SEO strategies on your website. 

Besides from having a strong domain authority, you are supposed to make a way for search engines to understand and capture your content easily.

That aim is achieved by optimizing your content for the featured snippets that often shows up in the “rank zero” position, which is above the normal search results.

This is a feature which you should not ignore because Google has clearly declared that featured snippets help in the ranking with mobile and voice search.

6. Local search, Business Listing and voice search:

Are you aware of the fact that 50% of local mobile queries by a customer results in a store visit in a day?

If you want a simple way to assist your consumers to discover you then you should:

• Put your business contact information on your website.

That is the location where users are used to seeing it directly if they visit your website.

“A Dental Care” in Houston does a good job on their website by sharing relevant business information in their contact section.

But while finding common and local information on the search engine, don’t expect your customers to visit your website’s contact information.

They have a fair intent when they are looking for something provided by a local business.

For example, if a person wants to inquire about a nearby clinic. He performs a voice search for a clinic near me.

Google shows the nearby clinics with their addresses, distance from the individual’s location, timings, and the reviews.

You can get much more profit in your business by smartly including the keywords given below into your SEO strategy:

• The group of words which people form to express the surroundings around your location
• The words “Near me” should be included in your title tags, meta description, internal links, and anchor text
• Some significant landmarks around your business area

Google acknowledged that “near me” search has tremendously gone up.

It is obvious that this is the result of the development based on mobile and voice search, which makes “near me” searches popular.

On the basis of the ratings and their choices, people can opt for a clinic and can straightaway click on the “Call” button to make an appointment as shown above.

Therefore make the best use of your business listings in Google my business.

• On the basis of a blog on Yext, July 24, 2018, “Yext, Inc. (NYSE: YEXT), the leader in Digital Knowledge Management (DKM), today announced a global integration with Amazonto give businesses control over the answers Alexa provides about them. With this new relationship, consumers using Alexa for voice search can receive the most up-to-date facts about businesses—locations, contact information, hours of operation, and more—straight from the source: the business itself.”
• Howard Lerman, founder, and CEO of Yext quoted, “Amazon has changed the world with its innovative, market-leading voice-enabled devices, the Amazon Echo family of smart speakers, and the Alexa voice service. Now, the tens of millions of consumers who ask Alexa questions can get authoritative answers from the business itself with the Yext Knowledge Engine.”

Marketers should get ready to catch up with these technologies and get the maximum benefit from it.

7. Schema Markup and New Speakable Markup for voice search:

• Schema markup or structured data is a form of HTML data you insert in the website so that it becomes easy for search engines to find the content of your website.
• By implementing schema markup to your website you can improve your online existence and guide voice search to find your content without difficulty.

To know more about using structured data on your website you can visit schema.org, which has a semantic vocabulary of tags that you can include in your HTML code. It will help search engines to know about your website.

• Recently Google launched new Speakable Markup for voice search.

Here is the Google’s statement:

• “In order to fulfil news queries with results people can count on, we collaborated on a new schema.org structured data specification called speakable for eligible publishers to mark up sections of a news article that are most relevant to be read aloud by the Google Assistant.”

Nevertheless, voice search is getting advanced with time and to have a schema related to voice search may be a great challenge for content marketers. 

8. HTTPS – make your website secure:

• According to Backlinko, “HTTPS websites dominate Google’s voice search results. In fact, 4% of Google Home result pages are secured with HTTPS.”   
• Voice search results prefer and catch HTTPS naturally more than the other results on Google’s page no. 1, which are mainly optimized simply for SEO.
• We can say that using HTTPS should improve the chances of your website to show up in voice search result.

9.High Authority Domains:

• On the basis of Backlinko, “In order to see if backlinks play a role in voice search, we analyzed each result for its Domain Rating and Page Rating (two metrics developed by Ahrefsto evaluate website and page-level link authority). And we discovered that the average Domain Rating of a voice search result was 76.8.”
• Backlinko further added,” Authoritative domains tend to produce voice search results significantly more than non-authoritative domains. In fact, the mean Ahrefs Domain Rating of a Google Home result is 76.8”.

It clearly shows that authoritative domains have a very positive impact on voice search.

• Voice Search and Social Engagements:

Immensely shared content on social media often shows up in Voice Search result pages. Actually, Google has conveyed many times that social signals are never used in their algorithm.

• But according to Backlinko study,” ….voice search results tend to have a relatively high number of social media shares.”
• Brian Dean said in one of his articles published on Feb 28, 2018,” With that, I should be clear about something: it’s extremely unlikely that the voice search algorithm uses social signals. This is likely a case of correlation, not causation.”

Therefore it is proven that content with the good number of social engagement performs extremely well in voice search.

• In fact, on the basis of Backlinko study, “the average voice search result has 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets.” 

Conclusion:

There are around 40 and 50 million smart speakers in US houses currently and they are predicted to rise positively. Voice search content optimization will definitely make your write-up near to language of a human being. It is a good time to jump on the voice SEO plane and go ahead of your competitors. Time is in favor of the marketers who can make out and feel the power of voice search and start optimizing their content for the challenging time. Voice Search is the future of the upcoming online marketing era and we should know that it’s gaining remarkable momentum and its

About the author

I worked with Yellowpage Singapore as SEO Strategy Manager and iProperty Singapore as Internet Marketing Manager. I was employee of Currency Solutions in Central London, UK as Search Engine Optimisation Specialist Currency Solutions. My previous experience is with MNC’s from USA and UK, in India as a Web Marketing Associate and Business Development Associate.