Six Essential Tips For Voice Search Optimization
Here are six voice search optimization tips to set you up for marketing success in the years to come.
1. Understand the language.
There’s a difference in how people formulate voice searches versus how they construct text-based search queries. When you’re typing something into a search engine, you’re likely stringing keywords together and most sites are optimized for that type of search. Think “Italian food San Diego.”
But when you’re talking to a human-sounding machine, like Alexa or Siri, you’re likely to address it the way you would a human being -- in complete sentences. For example, you might ask your device, “Where can I find the best spaghetti alla puttanesca near me?”
This means Italian restaurants (and every other sort of business out there) need to optimize their content for this new type of search by including more long-tail keywords and complete sentences that answer specific questions.
2. Be conversational.
Piggybacking on the use of complete sentences is the growing importance of conversational language. The user asking their voice device a question is likely using a fairly conversational tone, and your site needs to respond in a similar fashion.
In fact, Google tells its raters to evaluate voice search results by how well the spoken response answers a user’s query, as well as how it sounds. And believe me, you don’t want your content to sound like a machine wrote it! There are other factors involved in the rating, including grammatical correctness and length, but these are the two biggest ones you need to keep in mind when optimizing your website for voice search.
3. Optimize content for answering questions.
What’s your No. 1 reason for using the internet -- aside from looking up memes and cute cat videos? Most of the time, you’re probably searching for information. As stated above, those using voice search are more likely to use some form of long-tail keyword phrase or question.
To capitalize on this growing trend, you’ll need to collect as many questions about your industry as possible, then do your best to answer those questions across all your marketing channels. The more voice-optimized content you have on those channels, the more likely they are to get picked up by search engines and fed through voice search devices.
