When it comes to optimising your website, there’s a lot of things you need to consider and a factor that should be at the top of the list is voice search. Why? Because voice search technology has become one of the fastest-growing tools in the world.
In 2020, global smart speaker sales reached an all-time high of 150 million units and that number isn’t going to be slowing down any time soon.
This means more people are using voice assistants like Alexa and Google Home to search for and buy products online.
So, optimising your website for voice search is no longer just a ‘nice-to-have.’ It’s an essential part of growing your business and here are some tips for how you can improve the customer experience in connection with voice technology
Focus on long-tail keywords
Long-tail keywords are the bread and butter of a successful SEO strategy and are doubly important in relation to voice search. This is because long-tail keywords have an impact on how voice assistants detect and distinguish important information during product searches.
As an example, a finance company may have an article that focuses on the keyword ‘mortgage.’ That’s a competitive keyword, and while it’s plausible a user will type in the keyword to search for information related to mortgages, the article is unlikely to appear in the top search results.
A better approach would be to include long-tail keywords like ‘what is the best type of mortgage for me?’ or ‘what is the best kind of mortgage?’ This is the type of language that’s likely to be used in voice searches because it’s natural speech.
When you optimise your content with long-tail keywords you’ll be in a better position to tap into the power of voice technology.
Answer questions with a FAQs page
Due to the conversational nature of voice search, shoppers are going to be asking voice assistants a lot of questions. You’ll want to reflect that in your website content and a simple way to do this is to create a detailed Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.
When building your FAQ page, think about the most common questions that you get asked as a business and frame your answers in such a way that it provides relevant information.
Learn to love schema markup
Another way to optimise your website for voice search is to know the ins and outs of schema markup and how it relates to search engines. Schema is a structured data markup that helps search engines understand the context of website content.
In other words, schemas are useful for adding more information to your website and being relevant to specific voice search queries.
From this perspective, speakable schema is what you want to focus on, and it helps smart speakers determine what to say for the content on a certain page.
For a full list of speakable schema guidelines, click here.
Account for ‘near me’ local search results
Voice search has become a popular method for finding local businesses, with up to 58% of consumers finding brands in their area with ‘near me’ searches.
There are several ways to leverage local voice search queries. One method is to set up localised ads that are tailored to the geographic location of your audience.
Another way is to take advantage of Google My Business. Setting up a Google My Business listing provides Google with an idea of your brand’s location. When someone searches for similar businesses in that area, your company may appear.
Closing thoughts
We hope you’ve found these tips on how to optimise your website for voice search useful. If you’d like help with your SEO strategy, we’ve got plenty of experience to draw from and you can get in touch at [email protected] or call 0113 357 0440.
