How to Optimize Your Site for Voice Search?
Marketing research firm ComScore predicts that 50 per cent of all Internet searches will be made by voice. Not only is voice search gaining popularity every day, market developments in smart speakers, wearable software and other IoT gadgets are also on the rise.
In other words, we’re quickly entering a voice-first future when it comes to browsing, just as how we’ve moved into a mobile-first world lately. Since the way consumers browse is changing (again), this means that we need to re-optimize our businesses, content and websites to stay up to date. Also, you can opt for SEO packages as well.
1. Get notified online
If you’re a small company, then making sure you get classified online is the most important thing you need to do to plan for a voice search revolution. Because wearable device devices have small display sizes, in addition to the fact that smartphones using voice assistants such as Siri and Google Assistant are unable to display as many results as Google text queries, your website does not often display search results, particularly if it is a local business. Instead, smartphones and other smart devices tend to view company listings first, since they realize that consumers are seeking to identify businesses with a local intention.
2. Reduce Loading Time on Page
Page loading speed has been a ranking consideration for quite some time now and will matter much more in the future.
As we have seen from the Backlink study earlier, websites with easier-to-understand content were considered best suited to ranking on top of Google Home searches. Another feature found to be favoured by Google Home searches was the loading time of the pages of the website.
There are a lot of ways to make sure the website’s loading time stays minimal. You could:
- Optimize the photos on your website
- Minify the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on your website.
Using the content distribution network to “distribute services spatially relative to end-users to provide high availability and high performance”
3. Using SEO Long-Tail
Capturing long-tail SEO as a place for optimizing voice search is definitely one of the easiest ways to plan for the wearable technology and voice search environment. This is partly attributed to two reasons:
- A lot of voice searches are far longer than text searches, as we have seen before.
- The trick to using smart wizards is to provide responsive answers to search requests, and features like Google’s Featured Snippets do exactly that. Using long-tail SEO helps you to optimize for featured excerpts by sending you straight to the top of the search results.
Long-tail SEO and material is hardly a sprint in general. If you’re all set to take on a voice-driven environment, producing content tailored for long-tail keywords needs to be an important part of your SEO plan.
4. Write more of the local material
Like what we talked about in Phase #1, it is important to meet this need of people by creating as much locally appropriate content as you would like to boost your SEO voice quest. Much as you can optimize for long-tail keywords, your marketing plan needs to include local content from keyword analysis to rank monitoring if you want to get on the SEO voice search train at the right moment.
Even if it benefits a lot, your company doesn’t actually need to be a local business for you to write local material. You will also distribute plenty of local content that can bring the related traffic to your site depending on the industry to which you belong.
5. Using Structured Data Mark-up
By now, you’ve already found out that voice search results rely heavily on items like featured snippets and company listings to provide fast results to consumers. This is attributed solely to the fact that certain forms of data are available as clear answers to the customer’s voice search questions.
Structured data labelling is something that operates along the same lines to provide users with reliable and rich data on a website or company. If you have never heard of a standardized data mark-up or schema, check out this article.
Structured data let’s search engines read and display information about the website in a much faster and more effective way, making it a win-win for both the company and the search engine.
That takes us to the end of the top five things you’re going to have to do to plan for the voice-enabled future that we’ll be living in soon. Although SEO voice search is a bit different from standard SEO services, it also follows much of the core SEO principles—though a good knowledge of the particular tasks you need to do for voice and wearable tech search will ensure that your website is properly configured.
It also includes improving the mobile SEO website and digging further into other SEO fundamentals to make sure they’re all-in order.