Throughout the past decade, we’ve frequently heard that the future of online search lies with voice search, and now it’s finally here. Today, 66.3 million American households own a smart speaker, and 71% of these owners say they prefer to use them instead of typing out their queries. Experts believe this number will continue to grow. So, how do you optimize your SEO (search engine optimization) so that you can keep up with this trend?
Find and Use Conversational Keywords
When you optimize your SEO, you want to avoid short and vague keywords. Opt for mid- and long-tail keywords instead because the more specific they are, the more likely you’ll get a customer. Additionally, you’ll want to use full phrases and questions (e.g., who, what, why, where, when, how). You can find these in Google’s autocomplete and “People Also Ask” features, forums (e.g., Reddit), and websites.
Build An FAQ Section
Having an FAQ page on your site is great for your SEO, especially with voice search, whose essence is “questions” and “answers.” Keep your answers quick yet detailed here.
Go Multilingual
When you optimize your SEO correctly, you’ll attract a diverse pool of visitors who speak a variety of languages. Therefore it’s essential to prepare content they can find and use. With voice search, you need to make sure that your content translation’s quality is very accurate so that you sound like a trusted, authoritative source.
Claim Your Google Business Profile
Approximately half of those who search by voice is looking for business information because it’s user-friendly. Therefore you can’t overlook optimizing your Google Business Profile. It’s easy and free. All you need to do is fill out all the information you can provide and then wait for it to be approved.
Go Mobile-Friendly
Approximately 20% of all mobile queries are made by voice. These users won’t stick around if your site isn’t well-optimized for mobile. Since you don’t want this to happen, you must create a responsive design without intrusive pop-ups. Make sure that it loads quickly and is easy to read too.
Improve on Your Domain Authority
Voice search chooses the top search result for the spoken query. Therefore you must optimize your SEO so that you not only appear on the first page of Google but you’re as close to number one as possible. To do this, you’ll need to work on all aspects of your SEO (e.g., local search, backlinks, user experience, technical issues).
Get Featured Snippets For Your Site
Remember, voice search chooses the top search result. This includes Position 0. Research shows that 40.7% of voice search results come from these featured snippets. Your FAQ page will do most of the work here for you since short, concise answers to users’ questions are preferred. You also want to make sure that you write at a 9th-grade level instead of using academic language.
Use Schema Markup
Another important way to optimize your SEO is by using schema markup. Although there’s some debate regarding whether this has much of an effect, you should still use it anyway. It’ll help search engines understand each of your page element’s purposes so that they can then decide what’s relevant to the user’s question.
Engage With Users On Social Media
Many people don’t realize that social media is voice-search-friendly. These results get tons of likes and shares, which is why you want your active pages there to engage with users. The more they do, the more they’re likely to get discovered through a virtual assistant later.
Rank Your Videos In Search Results
Informative videos offer users much better answers than plain text. They’re also beneficial in voice SEO since Google can already isolate relevant parts of your video, but it’s up to you to make sure they’re ranking high first.
Wrapping it Up
Voice search is here, and marketers are rushing to see who can optimize their SEO for it the best. Although this may sound tricky, what it all comes down to is research, observation, and continual work. Feel free to use everything at your disposal, including our services at the Local SEO Tampa Company in Tampa, FL. Get in touch with us today to help you stay on top of your competition.