5 Key Components of Optimizing Your Website for Voice Search
Staying on top of all the latest trends is critical when applying SEO to your website. If you’re serious about reaching as many potential customers as possible, address voice search, as it’s definitely on the rise. When using this search type, with SEO services, make sure that your site has optimized for it to its full potential.
Approximately 1 search of every 5 conducted on Google from a mobile device is made using a voice command. This number is expected to become much larger day by day as more digital assistants become available for smart devices. This move towards voice search could definitely be a game changer sooner rather than later.
How to Optimize Your Website for Voice Commands
It’s important to note that at this stage of the game there isn’t really a lot of data available regarding voice search. A webmaster isn’t able to tell whether a search inquiry has been made through written text content or from a voice command. This is expected to change in the future but for now, you’ll need to work with the current tools available for basic SEO along with good old-fashioned common sense.
Optimizing your site includes the following 5 key components:
- Ensure your site is mobile friendly and quick to load
- Optimizing for natural language and conversational intent
- Targeting long tail keyword phrases
- Analyzing the technical elements of your site
- Testing and tweaking
1. A Mobile-Friendly Site
Optimizing for voice search always begins with the basics, and if your site is not 100% mobile-friendly, then that is the first area to target. You should have AMP running on your site to make sure that all the pages load quickly. Research shows that many mobile users will bounce off a site if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. If your site isn’t loading quickly enough, your visitors will be making their way over to your competitors’ websites.
2. Conversational Intent and Natural Language
What we type into a computer is usually much different from what we say when we are using a voice command app. For example, you are looking for high-heeled shoes in Boston, you may type in “high-heeled shoes Boston.” On the other hand, If you are speaking into your phone, you might say “Where can I find high-heeled shoes in Boston?” These are two completely different keyword phrases and you’ll need to make sure that your website has optimized for both types.
3. Long Keyword Phrases
Most shoppers are taking time out of their busy schedules to do their shopping and don’t want to waste a lot of time in typing their search inquiries into their devices. When it comes to voice commands, however, it really doesn’t take long to speak a few extra words to ask questions. This means that optimizing for voice search includes adding longer keyword phrases that would match up with the questions being asked.
At this point, you may have to change your mindset a bit since we’ve all been trained that the longer the keyword phrase is, the fewer people we’ll be targeting. This is actually not true when it comes to voice search so don’t be afraid to add those extremely long phrases when it’s necessary.
4. The Technical Elements of Your Site
While you are setting up your pages for voice search, you must use the proper paragraph and heading tags to identify the emphasis and the intent of the content. Your page markup and structured data format should be understandable to Google to see your pages listed properly. Your title tags should have the type of phrase that searchers are using to locate your products or services and your meta-descriptions should begin to answer their questions. The best approach is to use an SEO company to make sure all these elements are handled correctly.
5. Testing and Tweaking
As with regular SEO, analyzing your data and then working with it to define further actions will be key to your success. Once you have brainstormed your long tail keyword phrases, you’ll be able to pinpoint the top phrases that are bringing in the most traffic. You can then create more phrases based on the results — especially if there is an underlying common denominator between them. For example, You may discover that the phrases “I am looking for high-heel shoes” and “I am looking for high heel boots” are driving in a lot of traffic. At this point, you should try adding the phrase “I am looking for black high heel shoes” to test the waters.
First, you’ll need to come up with your own phrases based on the result of your tests on users’ intentions using common sense and then work your way forward from there. You’ll still be miles ahead of the competition since the most of your competitors will be not taking the time to optimize for voice search. You’ll be riding the wave of the latest trend and as a result, you’ll be able to build up a larger customer base and increase your revenue.
