Voice search is HUGE right now. And voice engagement presents a new challenging way to keep your website in the search visibility.
Based on the rising trend in vocal search stats in 2018, we have now enough evidence to visualize where this trend will next travel. Although voice search has taken some time to be able to understand and accepted by the people, it is becoming more important now a days.
27% of search queries made with a mobile are voice searches.
This means if your site is not well optimized for those keywords, you are actually losing a good number of potential customers.
What about desktop users? Yes, even desktop has 25% of voice searches (how can we forget Google Home and Amazon Echo).
So why do people like voice searches?
People like voice search because it is faster than typing. The faster they give query to Google, the faster they get result.
A NEW CHALLENGE – How to optimize website for voice search?
We while working for our clients, and analyzing the strategy to optimize your website for voice search came up with 3 things:
#1 All voice searches are longer and more conversational.
#2 People who make voice search for local business don’t ask for a business in a certain city, but they use more the “near me” phrase.
#3 With voice searches, Google acts as a tool to get answers. You get your answers straight away in SERP without getting into multiple websites.
#1 STARTING WITH KEYWORDS AND CONTENT
With above findings in mind, we need to optimize website with keywords and content, so as to answer people’s questions.
We are already using long tailed keywords, but now make those long tailed keywords more conversational. There’s a good online tool, Answer The Public, that gives you suggestion on what people might ask as questions relevant to your focused keywords and that are more conversational.
Let say for a keyword “plumber”, what we found as result.
As you can see, the most common questions started here with ‘Who, ‘Where and ‘How’.
But this doesn’t mean that these will be your keywords. These are the questions that usually people do voice searches and Google uses this content to search for answers of the question. So keeping these questions in mind, you can now optimize your website’s content which gives a short answer, making your website a desired one in the search query.
HOW EXACTLY TO PLACE THESE VOICE SEARCH KEYWORDS ON YOUR WEBSITE?
The easiest way to do this is having a FAQs section on your website or targeted landing page. Keep the content short and sweet and straight to the point. There’s no benefit to keep the content long. So keep your answers short and precise that answers a user query.
Need more ways to optimize your website for voice search? Talk to our digital strategy experts & get free consultations for your business’ online marketing strategy.
#2 NEXT IS THE SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS PAGE
Organic Ranking – is no longer the only best way to increase your organic search traffic. Because there are so many other features that Google has introduced to distract users from organic search list. They are typically called SERP features which includes featured snippets, knowledge panels and local packs.
With the increase in these SERP features, it is must that one should be aware of how to manage this. You will need to monitor which features pop up when your keywords are entered and keep track of your ranking with these features.
One of the most prominent way to do this is identify the right queries that users search for and analyse your ranking based on that keywords. Analyze the query intent and focus on informational transactional keywords.
What is “informational transactional keywords”? These are the hybrid keywords with dual intents – (1) informational intent: search query seeking for information (which will trigger a featured snippet) and (2) transactional intent: search query with an intent to buy products or services.
“People Also Ask” section is the best source of inspiration to identify right informational transactional keywords, relevant to your business. With all these information, you’ll be armed with enough data to create optimized content.
FINAL THOUGHTS
SEO will be an ever changing thing and very soon many factors will outweigh the old traditional way of getting keywords ranking and organic search traffic. So it is must for every website that they keep it updated with latest SEO strategies as this affects how visible your website is.
So if you aren’t able to stay on top of these updates and changes then make sure to get the help of a professional Digital Marketing Agency.
