Rank Up: Voice Search SEO Strategies

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A decade ago, a layperson might explain SEO by defining the link between “search” and “text.” Fast forward to today, and voice searches account for a significant portion of site traffic and online transactions.

Voice search has dominated the search scene in recent years. Consumers are increasingly using their smartphones to get information and interact with brands. It’s believed that voice searches currently account for half of all searches.

Our gadgets’ speech recognition has likewise gotten increasingly advanced and precise. Although voice search has been around for a while and isn’t a wholly new idea, the arrival of voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri has marked a technical leap in recent years.

So we ask these important questions:

Does your company need to prioritize Voice Search?

Yes, adopting a voice search strategy is definitely the way to go. Today, having a voice search strategy is critical not just for ensuring that your customers can find you, but also for preventing prospects from finding your competitors instead.

Voice search is increasingly becoming ingrained in the lives of customers, necessitating the development of a voice search digital marketing strategy for businesses. Voice search affects not just how individuals perform searches, but also how they locate things and connect with companies. What this means is that to continue to attract customers who are transitioning to largely aided search inquiries, your company’s SEO strategy will need to stay up with voice search components. Your content will need to be more direct and conversational to match the types of search queries in the search results.

The only way to increase traffic is to become more visible and credible, both of which can be achieved by optimizing your site and content for voice search inquiries ahead of the competition.

Now,

What does Voice Search mean for your Business? 

A voice search strategy isn’t just about staying relevant in an ever-changing digital world; it’s about figuring out how to use voice search to create digital experiences that boost consumer loyalty and brand recognition. The more convenient and accessible a company’s interactions with customers are, the more likely they are to engage with the brand.

To simply put it:

1. Adjust for natural language, in both content and SEO: Make sure your marketing staff knows the difference between written search language and spoken search language. Then, to account for the highest-value natural language searches, optimize your content and copy. Depending on the level of purpose behind each search, choose and change keywords.
2. Incorporate a FAQ strategy: Consumers will likely use words like “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “why” in their question-related search inquiries. Implement a FAQ strategy by identifying which questions are most essential to your customers and immediately respond to them in your blog articles, social media postings, and website text.

How is Voice Search Going to Change Our Digital Marketing Strategy?

To a considerable extent, we don’t know where voice-activated searches will lead us yet. But when it comes to SEO, because voice searches are slightly longer than text searches, you may compensate by including some lengthier keyword phrases (at least three words) in your content. And since voice searches are frequently phrased as entire questions, businesses may begin employing question keyword phrases that will mirror what the prospects may be asking.

Furthermore, with voice searches, consumers are given the top result or response rather than a full search engine result page and then decide from there which link to click. As a result, companies will no longer compete for a spot on page one, but for the top result in every search term.
So, how are you going to ensure you’re coming up as the most relevant search result? That’s where Voice Search Optimization comes in:

What is Voice Search Optimization?

Voice search optimization allows you to better grasp the intent and reason behind a user’s search query, which is crucial information for understanding your target market. It’s essential to optimize your content for both broader question searches and local search results.

The way this works is that when a voice assistant provides an answer, it will also provide users with the ability to open the website from which the answer was pulled. If you frequently appear as the top result or highlighted snippet that is utilized for voice responses, this could mean a great increase in website traffic.

Preparing to Optimize your Website for Voice Search

Along with the changes that Voice Search has brought on Digital Marketing and SEO, it is undoubtedly a great tool for increasing web traffic and beating competition as long as you have a solid Voice Search strategy that would ensure your brand to get to the top of the search engine result pages.

Here are some strategies to consider if it applies to your Voice Search digital marketing strategy:

Keyword Targeting for Voice Search SEO: You must first determine the queries people are asking about your products and target keywords in order to optimize for voice search. Answer the Public, a digital marketing tool, may assist you to figure out what questions people are asking that are relevant to your keyword strategy.

Mapping Questions to the Buyer’s Journey: To increase brand awareness, You must generate content that answers consumer inquiries at each stage of the buyer’s journey; you must be visible every time a client calls and uses voice search to discover answers to their concerns and pain points. thekeenfolks gives a great example of voice search queries for a VR headset:

• • Awareness: What can you do with a VR headset?
  • Engagement: What are the best VR headsets?
  • Evaluation: What’s the difference between Oculus Rift and HTC Vive?
  • Purchase: Where can I buy Oculus Rift near me?
  • Post-Purchase: I don’t hear any audio from my Oculus Rift headphones.

This ensures that your brand is competing in search results when your customers are actively seeking to engage and find out information about your products or services

Schema: Optimize for featured snippets as well, because Google’s highlighted snippets contain more than 40% of all voice search results. You may achieve this by structuring your information as structured data. To demonstrate the importance of your material, use bulleted and numbered lists, tables, and schema markup. 

Content: Produce high-quality video material for certain elements of the company, such as product evaluations or instructive demos. Make sure the meta tags are optimized as well. This adds value to a search query, especially for practical purposes such as how-tos.

Google MyBusiness: Make it easy for your target market to discover you by optimizing for local voice search opportunities. Keep your Google My Business page up to date so that when a potential client uses voice search to find a “near me,” your business is visible and accessible.

Authorship and EAT: Improve your domain authority and become a subject matter expert in your area, because Google values the quality of its results and prefers to show information from authoritative sites. Engaging and value-adding content, high-quality backlinks, organically growing social sharing, and a seamless user experience may all help you achieve this. This helps increase the chances of your content becoming a voice search result.

Core Web Vitals: User experience, such as the speed at which your website loads, is also a ranking element with Core Web Vitals, so calibrate page experience and increase performance. Since the average speed of a voice search result is 4.6 seconds, your website shouldn’t take that long to completely load.

Adopt an Agile Approach to Future Voice Development: The most essential thing you can do to prepare for any more changes in the voice search technology is to take an agile strategy to identify and capitalize on voice search possibilities before your competitors do. As more people use voice assistants in their everyday lives, you’ll need to figure out how your company can fulfill your customer’s needs using the technology.

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