Is your online business ready for voice search optimization?

If not, here are some stats telling you the importance of voice-enabled searches:

• 27% of the global population is using voice search on mobile.

• Over 50% of smartphone users are engaging with voice search in 2020.
• 30% of browsing sessions are expected to include voice search in 2020 and beyond. 
• The estimated number of digital voice assistants is around 4 billion in the world. 

So it is quite clear that more and more people are using voice search for their day-to-day online searches. Not being optimized for voice search means that your business is missing out on a huge audience as well as opportunities. 

These stats show that voice search is the fastest-growing form of online search. 

Voice search lets users say their queries out loud rather than keying them into the search box to see the results.

The speech recognition technology can understand the “verbal queries” and show the best matching results orally. Popular examples of voice search are Amazon, Siri, and Cortana from Microsoft. 

HOW TO DO VOICE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION?

First of all, keep in mind that voice search SEO is different from conventional SEO. Users who do voice searches generally look for a particular action, such as finding a room, playing their favorite song, or getting information on something. On mobile devices, voice search with Google displays one top result known as “featured snippet”, “positions zero” or answer box. 

Here are some tips to get started with a voice search for your website. 

To know about the top SEO strategies you can’t afford to miss, click here

Prefer Natural Language Over Keywords:

Searching over search engines as Google has largely made us change our search behavior to input keywords over a syntactical phrase for well over a decade. We were told that “New York + Holiday + Plan” was the right way to explore Google, and not something that sounds natural such as “suggest a summer 2020 holiday plan to New York”. 

However, with voice searches mimicking the latter more than searches that include disconnected phrases, the way we search has changed a lot. 

The search engine companies and voice assistance devices prefer natural language processing to extract keywords from such searches. 

This means that webmasters also need to change the way they optimize so that they find their results to get on the top of the SERPs for voice searches. 

Get Mobile Friendly:

Voice search mainly occurs on a smartphone or mobile device. It goes without saying that your website has to be mobile-friendly. 

Google stresses a responsive web design. Most WordPress themes come with a responsive web design. You can use free Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. It shows how easily a visitor can browse your webpage on a mobile device. All you need to enter your page URL to see the score. 

If everything is up to the mark, you will get a message that your “page is mobile-friendly”. If your website lacks key criteria for mobile-friendliness, Google will tell you the specific steps you require. 

Create Content that Answers Your Customer’s Queries:

People don’t speak the phrases as they are used by webmasters in keyword form. For example, a user might type “coffee shop near me”, but utilizing voice search, they are more likely to say “what is the nearest coffee shop to me”.

That’s why you need to find out what people speak while searching for businesses like you. 

Once you get their common questions and phrases, you can use them in your content. 

Most websites list those questions on their FAQs page. To stay one step ahead of them, you can create dedicated articles or blog posts based on their questions. 

Even the existing content can be optimized according to these queries. 

Collecting the questions of your target audience and resolving them through blogs post will help you improve your ranking in both text and voice search. 

Improve Page Loading Time:

Page loading speed has been a key ranking factor. A page with good loading speed ensures a good user experience. Otherwise, it is quite frustrating to see those ugly buffering circles. This is important if you want to appear in the voice search results. 

The average voice search result page appears in 4.6 seconds—that is 52% faster than the average page.  

That’s why you need to consider this factor, too. 

Here are some tips to improve the load time of your page:

• Optimize the images of your website
• Minify the CSS, HTML, and JavaScript of the webpage
• Use a content distribution network
• Reduce redirects

Optimize for Local Searches:

Voice search Optimization is generally used for local queries. 

For example, many people just want to get information in the place they are. They might order the voice assistant to tell them the nearest restaurant or the plumber in their area. 

To optimize for local searches, do the things given below—

• List your business 
• Include the region in content and metadata
• Create location-specific pages 
• Use images specific to your city with alt-text tags
• Tag videos and images with the name of the geographic area.
• If your videos and audio tell about a particular location, make sure to provide a transcript to improve the website’s accessibility when a search is made for that area. 

So you must have understood how to do voice search optimization. What do you think? Let us know by commenting below!  

About the author

Internet Marketing Analyst, present Director @kvrwebtech.com Since 2009. Providing Internet Marketing as a medium for all kind of businesses to achieve the modern era goals. Have been highly successful in cultivating projects in Real Estate, Financial and Education Sector.