In recent years, voice search has found its way into businesses across various industries. Companies use it to enhance their customer care and reach potential clients seeking information through voice queries.
In this guide, we’ll explore 10 best practices for optimizing your business for voice search, along with a clear explanation of what voice search and voice optimization entail.
Table of Contents
What Is Voice Search?
Voice search is an innovative, assistive technology that allows users to perform verbal searches through an enabled device. Unlike traditional search methods that rely on typing, voice search involves speaking commands and queries.
Currently, 58% of US users engage in voice searches daily. As a result, this prompted changes in the way Google and other search engines rank content to accommodate this growing trend.
What Is Voice Search Optimization?
Voice search optimization, often referred to as voice SEO, is a strategy many SEO agencies use to improve a website’s visibility in voice search results. This involves optimizing website content so that it’s easily understood by voice assistants and provides clear, concise answers to common voice queries.
Some of the key techniques for effective voice search optimization include understanding conversational language and adding relevant keywords and phrases that users commonly speak. Creating content that sounds natural and conversational can improve your website’s visibility in voice searches.
Voice Search Best Practices
By 2030, the global voice recognition market is projected to reach $15.87 billion. With this growth on the horizon, brands and agencies must be ready to meet the rising demand for voice search optimization.
To help you optimize for voice search effectively, we’ve compiled a list of top 10 voice search best practices:
- Understand your customers
- Research keywords
- Optimize your content for local searches
- Consider adding an FAQ page
- Don’t forget mobile optimization
- Work on your web content
- Leverage link building
- Improve technical SEO
- Optimize for Google Featured Snippets
- Monitor your performance
1. Understand Your Customers
For starters, you must understand what the customers in the industry want. User intent will guide you toward structuring your content and analytics to give the clients what they need.
By conducting user analysis, you can find out the questions and phrases people use in their voice searches. Use your findings to build your site, so that when customers search with voice assistants, your business appears among the top results.
2. Research Keywords
Once you know what users want and what topics you can use, perform thorough SEO keyword research to identify the most relevant keywords for both traditional and voice searches. One key difference is the length of keywords, as voice search queries tend to be longer.
Brands should focus on including more long-tail keywords in their content. Similarly, many top search phrases are questions, so your content should be informative and provide clear answers or solutions.
Additionally, consider using conversational keywords that reflect natural speech and conversations, which is what you need when optimizing your voice search. This helps search engines immediately recognize your site as a conversational response to users’ queries.
3. Optimize Your Content for Local Searches
Brands not only need to use longer keywords but also focus on their local presence. Why? Over 58% of consumers use voice search to find local businesses, meaning you can boost traffic to your website if you optimize for local voice searches.
Users typically perform voice searches to get quick answers about questions that affect them. These often include finding nearby stores, restaurants, and products so they can pick them up quickly and easily.
Therefore, brands should research where these searches occur and identify key local terms being used. This way, you can create relevant local content that connects with users.
4. Consider Adding an FAQ Page
One often overlooked voice search optimization practice is creating an FAQ page. Here are two reasons why it can benefit your business:
- First, the more content available on your site, the more likely it is to be picked up by a voice search — plain and simple.
- Second, as more questions are being asked on search engines, dedicating an entire page to answering these questions allows you to incorporate longer keyword phrases effectively.
According to Statista, there are an estimated 227.5 million smart speakers worldwide today. So, it’s important to ramp up the content on your website to make it impactful and valuable for voice search users.
5. Don’t Forget Mobile Optimization
Users aren’t just using devices like Amazon Echos and Google Home devices for voice searches; they’re also using their smartphones. According to Google, 20% of mobile searches are voice searches.
Hence, make sure you’re taking a mobile-first approach to your marketing, design, and development projects. This will improve user experience and ultimately user satisfaction.
6. Work on Your Web Content
Among the many SEO best practices, working on your content is always at the top. Start by auditing your existing content to see where you can include new keywords. More importantly, check for duplicate content or instances where similar keywords are used across multiple pieces.
For example, if your main keyword is “SEO optimization” and a secondary keyword is “good SEO optimization”, there’s no point in writing two separate articles. Instead, merge them into one post that includes both keywords. This way, when voice search is activated for either keyword, they’ll both lead to your site.
7. Leverage Link Building
A Backlinko study found that sites with more links tend to rank higher. Backlinks play a key role in voice search, so building your linking strategy is one of the must-have voice search best practices. You can buy backlinks, build them organically, or use other backlinking strategies.
Link building helps boost your authority, letting search engines know that they can trust you as a source. Hence, when a customer performs a voice search, the search engine will display your site as a relevant answer.
However, avoid overstuffing your site with links. If not done right, backlinking can backfire, causing your rankings to drop instead of improving.
8. Improve Technical SEO
Technical SEO ensures that your site is recognized by search engines, driving more traffic to it. It directly impacts how you rank on search engine result pages (SERPs), making it more likely that voice assistants will present your site to users.
Performing a technical SEO audit quarterly or monthly can help boost your website’s ranking. Here are a few things you can do to improve your technical SEO:
- Improve page speed
- Optimize the site to fit mobile screens
- Update SSL and HTTPS security
- Analyze the site’s hierarchy and navigation
- Check URL structure
- Fix broken links
9. Optimize for Google Featured Snippets
Google’s Featured Snippets are snippets of texts that appear at the top of SERPs, right above the link to the site where the text is sourced from. You can also find them in the “People Also Ask” section or alongside Knowledge Graph information.
Google automatically identifies pages that could serve as good Featured Snippets based on the quality of their answers to certain questions. It takes out the relevant section where the answer is given and features it on the SERP. These snippets are extremely helpful to mobile users and those who use voice search.
To optimize for both voice search and Featured Snippets, analyze the most commonly asked questions related to your topic and provide clear, direct answers to them. Additionally, remember to reoptimize your metadata, headings, and content to make it easily crawlable, thereby increasing your chances of appearing in Featured Snippets.
10. Monitor Your Performance
The final voice search optimization best practice we have is monitoring. It’s very important that you keep track of your web performance as it will allow you to promptly fix any issues.
Analyze key metrics like voice search volume, conversion rates, and site engagement, and build your strategies around them. Constant monitoring will also allow you to stay on top of voice search trends and include them in your content to improve ranking.
What Is Voice Search: Key Takeaways
Voice search is rapidly taking over the digital marketing world, with many businesses, from digital marketing agencies to IT services companies, integrating it into their offerings. As customers increasingly turn to voice search, businesses must act fast and adapt to this shift.
To stay ahead, you must know how to optimize for voice search. Here are some key best practices in voice search that any business can implement:
- Conduct thorough keyword research
- Optimize content for local searches
- Add other content in the form of Q+A pages to answer all search questions
- Prioritize mobile-friendly content, layout, and design
If you need help fixing your website, consider partnering with top web development companies to help you get on board with voice search trends!
Voice Search FAQs
1. How do I use Google Voice Search?
To use Google Voice Search, launch the app and follow the on-screen instructions to enable Voice Match. This allows Google Assistant to recognize when you say "Hey, Google." After that, you can enter any command or question you want.
2. How to turn on voice search?
To turn on Google Voice Search on your smartphone or tablet, follow these steps:
- Open your Google mobile app.
- Tap your Profile picture or the initial Settings in the upper right corner.
- Select Voice Match from the "Voice Match" menu.
- Activate with "Hey Google."
