How to Optimise For Voice Search

How We Can Help

If you haven’t yet optimised for voice search, your company could suffer. Here’s why it’s so important, and how we can help.

Voice search is becoming more and more popular, and it’s essential that businesses optimise for it effectively. As the experts in SEO Essex companies trust, we’re well placed to help you discover how voice search could open up a whole new range of opportunities for your business.

Growing popularity

During recent times, the popularity of voice search has soared. It’s not hard to see why either. It’s really easy to get to grips with, it’s really fast, and it allows users to multitask. Most importantly though, as we still battle the COVID-19 pandemic, it is hands-free. So it goes without saying that it has become the default way of searching the web for many people. It’s become much more reliable and accurate too, so users know that they can count on it to deliver the results that they want.

More than a passing fad

Voice search is actually the fastest-growing method of searching the web. Recent US studies have shown that 55% of users use the voice search function on their smartphone to ask question. In addition to that, 39.4% of American internet users use a voice search at least once a month. The rise in the number of Google Home and Amazon Echo users has also contributed to its popularity. So it’s clear to see that it’s so much more than a passing fad. If you aren’t paying attention to voice search right now, you could soon find yourself lagging behind your competitors.

Get to know your customers

One of the keys to optimising for voice search is understanding your customers.

Voice search algorithms use information such as data, location to understand the context of a search. However, you need to dig deeper to truly understand your target audience. Real time data and in-depth research on consumer behaviour can help you to understand how different people are using voice search, and what devices they are using to carry those searches out. You’ll be able to tailor your efforts to meet their needs much better as a result.

Focus on keywords

Think you know all about keywords? Think again. People are much more likely to use conversation keywords when they use voice search, so you need to be sure that you are using those as much as possible in your content. Short tail keywords are still very relevant, but they simply don’t match people’s natural speech patterns. So see which conversational long tail keywords could bring users to your site, and start to focus on those alongside their shorter counterparts.

Think local

People are using voice search to find the information that they need while they’re on the go, so you do need to think about local searches. Users are likely to ask hyper-local questions that are very specific, so you do need to think about things like directions and sitemaps and ensure that they are readable to users. You should try to deliver a different experience for mobile users if you can, optimising for ‘near me’ searches.

Create the right kind of content

You need to create the right kind of content and anticipate your customers’ needs if you are going to fully optimise for voice search. You need to bear three things in mind: simplicity, context, and relevance. You’ll want to create detailed answers for common questions, and ensure that you answer simple questions clearly and concisely. A good way of doing this is to create a page of content with a title that asks a common question. You should then immediately provide an answer below that, and then use the rest of the page to go into more detail about the topic.

Think about FAQs

Last but not least, be sure to focus on frequently asked questions (FAQs). ‘Who,’ ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘when,’ ‘why,’ and ‘how’ are all words that you should be focusing on. Voice search users will often begin their queries using one of those terms. You should create a FAQs page and start each question using one of these adverbs. Then answer them clearly and conversationally to appeal to voice search.

While you’re focusing on this, please ensure that your page load times are fast. Nothing will put users off quickly than a website that takes forever to load, no matter how good the content is!

We’re here to help

If all of the above sounds a little bit daunting, there’s no need to worry. We have plenty of experience when it comes to optimising for voice search, and we will be able to kickstart your efforts right away! We work with a wide range of clients, and we get to know them to ensure that we are working with their unique needs in mind at all times.

Contact us today

If you’re curious about what voice search could do for your business, please do get in touch. A member of our friendly team will be happy to answer all of your questions and schedule a meeting with one of our SEO experts as soon as it suits you.