In these times, when digitalization is everywhere, it is high time to fix voice search optimization if it isn't already a part of your SEO strategy. Voice searches are incredibly easy to use, and people can't get enough of them. With the advent of smartphones, voice search soon expanded to smart speakers and voice assistants around the world. With almost every generation welcoming voice search today, we are experiencing a voice search revolution.
The world is changing rapidly as the hands-free convenience and rapid response time allow users to multitask and get answers immediately, which they all appreciate.
How does voice search work?
In layman’s language, voice search is an organic method of speaking to a virtual assistant and getting a spoken response in no time. It is an improved and advanced dialogue system. The virtual assistant transcribes your speech into text and analyses it for questions and commands when asked a question. It is likely to search for relevant information in its respective external data source, and it would also translate it by speaking back to the user.
The following are the tips to optimize your website for voice search users: 1. Add structured data- When you add structured data to the website pages, it will help search engines understand your content more clearly with more focus on semantic search. Structured data is also beneficial for claiming rich features that are more popular in voice search results, besides having high relevance and quality. The Speakable markup is a type of markup, in particular, that was designed specifically for voice search answers which allows them to learn about your content that is ideally written for audio playback, including text-to-speech (TTS).
2. Optimize the google my business listing- Virtual assistants tend to turn to Google My Business (GMB) listings to find information about local businesses. The best part about the GMB listing contains essential business information, including your name, address, and phone number. You would also include additional information like your business hours, website URL, a description, other contact information.
3. Develop a mobile-friendly site- You need to know that mobile-friendly and voice search optimization tend to go hand in hand. Mobile-friendly features can be incorporated into your website, and you can use voice search capabilities as well. AMP is also explicitly designed to improve the load time of mobile website pages.
4. Optimize the content- Content is one of the most crucial parts of voice search optimization as voice search tends to be phrased as some questions or requests, so you need to ensure that content strategy should involve a focus on long-tail keywords. Lastly, you need to know that longer pages must rank higher as they need to fully encompass a topic while creating more authority and trust in the site.
5. Enhance the site loading time- A ranking factor for desktop and mobile search results and is also incredibly influential in bounce rates and user experience is page speed, and it tends to play a crucial role in voice search results. Hence voice search is here to stay, so you shouldn't think twice before incorporating it into your SEO strategy.
Conclusion Without any doubt, voice search is here to stay. It is high time to prioritize how your website looks to the voice search users. Marketers and designers must pay attention to voice to ensure that voice search users have a natural experience. Responses must be conversational, practical, and easy to understand. The above-listed points will help achieve the same.