6 Changes You Need to Make to Voice Search Optimization

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6 Changes You Need to Make to Voice Search Optimization

In this tutorial, you’re going to learn 6 big changes you’ll ever need to make to voice search optimization (VSO) in order to boost local traffic exposure for your business. Many years ago, technology was an innovation, an awesome tool to examine, with sometimes insightful and most other times, absurd replies to voice queries.

Not too many people foresaw it would turn out to be an utmost digital drift of the future. However, voice search has evolved a lot over time.

Currently, there are a myriad of voice-actuated technologies in the online market (such as Amazon’s Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant, and so on).

People do leverage voice search on their Smartphones, and over 400 million digital voice assistants have been auctioned.

Now, most people have started using the digital voice assistants more than ever, most significantly for commands (Call Mom, Schedule a meeting, Organize a coaching session, Set an alarm, and so on). However, there’s a ton of increasing potential for local search marketing also.

This is mainly because the AI technology on the trail of voice search has turned out to be intensely more accurate. As stated by Google, voice identification accuracy has increased to 95% ever since 2013.

The Advantages of Voice Commands for Search

As voice identification technology turns out to be more flexible and accurate, searchers are coming to figure out more of the advantages of leveraging voice commands when they want to perform a search.

From a study by Google, here are the utmost reasons most people want to use their voice-actuated speakers:

  • It ensures that they can do some things faster than using other devices.
  • It commits them easily to more multiple tasks.
  • It makes their everyday routines more convenient.
  • It warrants them to receive vital information and answers almost instantly

Voice commands are an excellent tool while in kitchen and in need of checking a cooking recipe while the whole of your hands are thickly spread in flour. It’s equally an accepted method to receive some local business information without using hands while driving on the road.

All things being equal, almost everybody can orally ask a question faster and louder than they can do while using the keyboard to type, particularly while on mobile phones.

While several people today still get to understand and learn the advantages of leveraging voice search to obtain vital information, it’s turning out to be a prominent tool to clarify the search process and speedily obtain answers without peppering your other everyday routines.

Optimizing for Voice Search

While acquisition of voice search is currently growing steadily, smart marketers will begin to optimize for voice search in order to maximize search marketing in the future.

Optimizing voice search is now significant for both local small and large businesses. Most people frequently leverage voice search while in cars driving, searching for information about locations of businesses, operating hours of stores, and all of that.

Both iron companies and local small businesses trying to optimize their businesses for local SEO should be leveraging voice search queries thoughtfully and constantly.

People aren’t concerned alone about getting location-specific information from businesses via digital voice assistants. As stated in a Google Survey, people are interested in getting valuable information about upcoming occasions, sales and deals, customer support, personalized tactics, and lots more.

Numerous enterprises today that are optimizing for voice search are doing it as an afterthought. They modify their existing content to make it suffice for their voice search results. While this methodology can really be proficient, it will not be worth it in the future.

More enterprises are really going about voice search optimization daily, implementing the same tactics and turning out to be equally contentious.

If you are going to stand out from the multitude for ranking, then you should take voice search optimization into consideration when coming up with content from the onset.

Here are 6 great changes you must make to voice search optimization:

1. Keyword Research for Voice Search Optimization (VSO)

You must give thought to the semantic disparities in voice search queries.

The way people speak and type is quite different.

For example, assume some people want to put money into a new home digital voice assistant. On the keyboard, they can type their search query as “Home digital voice assistants”, whereas, with a voice search, they can speak to a digital assistant and express their query in a question pattern.

Thus, you must consider brainstorming what category of questions folks are asking related to your specific keywords.

There are some tools that you can leverage to get this done.

One of the most popular tools out there is Answer the Public. You just need to enter your root keyword, and then a chart and a complete list of all frequently asked questions relevant to that keyword will be returned.

To continue brainstorming more question ideas, you can leverage a Google enabled feature called People Also Ask. Simply enter a question idea you came up with after brainstorming, and then other related questions will be displayed.

2. Content Development & Site Structure

When coming up with content tactics to optimize for voice search, you might want to plan question ideas into numerous points of your client journey, which makes it feasible that you’re constantly available via voice search whenever the clients need you.

Keep the following points in mind in the client ride:

  • Interest: Can you leverage Google Home to make a phone call?
  • Awareness: What is the most popular home digital voice assistant?
  • Purchase: How much does an eBay solar inverter cost?
  • Evaluation: Who is brighter out of Google or Siri?
  • Loyalty: What items will suffice best with Google Home?

Arrange the question ideas you’ve brainstormed into separate categories that are mapped onto the client journey.

3. Organized Data Optimization

Unlike with well-organized search results, whereby the subsequent result for any search query is distinctly possible to drive a ton of quality traffic, voice search only brings back an answer to users from the most-optimized result.

Thus, the main key to optimizing for voice search is coming up with relevant content for the targeted search queries.

Improving the crawlability of your pages is an essential part of this. So, if you’re yet to do so, create and submit a sitemap to GSC.

One of the feasible things you can simply do to make Google spider better understand the relevance of your content is leveraging organized data markup.

Organized data (schema) markup enables you to set up Metadata for all of your content which communicates with Google the basic idea of your content, but this does not impact your content visibility in search results.

Let me give examples of the kind of information that will help Google spider understand the relevance of your content to search queries.

  • Places
  • Products
  • Organizations
  • People
  • Recipes
  • Events
  • How-to-content
  • Reviews
  • Creative ideas and news posts

Organized data markup does not have direct impact on your search rankings, but can bring about an improvement in voice search results by describing your content relevance to targeted queries.

Leveraging organized data markup is equally a great SEO best practice, and can, of course, help the feature components of your content in Google search results.

Once you’re done implementing the organized data markupfor your voice-actuated pages, you may leverage Google’s Organized Data Testing Tool to examine your work. You can then create and submit another sitemap to GSC.

4. Create Alexa Skills or Google Actions

Another tactic you can implement to improve your content accessibility for users of a home digital voice assistant is to set up custom techniques in Alexa or create Google Actions by utilizing the Google App.

Those actions are significant tools that increase the Google Assistant’s abilities or Alexa to engage with your audience using your content or app if you own one already.

Google Actions enable users to come up with forth-and -back chats with your content or Alexa App, increasing the relevance and value to users of voice commands.

So, when creating actions, don’t do that for fun.

The Assistant directory in Google is constantly assigned with so many unexhausted Actions that most marketers set up for the purpose of voice optimization.

If you want to come up with an Action that will get used by many people, then make it optimized and useful to suffice the needs of home digital voice assistant searchers.

For a single app, you can create a broad diversity of Actions.

It’s possible to create a wide variety of Actions for an app.

In order to create content that is full of actions, it has to be for a recipe, podcast, or news post that constantly leverages Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and organized data markup. The only action on your side is claiming your Actions via the directory.

5. Mobile-First Optimization is Voice Friendly

The recent changes to the search algorithm have seriously turnedsearch engine marketing into a mobile-friendly community.

There’s nothing to talk about if someday, the search algorithm update prioritizes voice-optimized results for rankings; however, that wouldn’t be an amazing end result depending on the advantages of voice search and its present growth path.

Fortunately, doing optimization for these entire search experiences are mutually inclusive tactics.

Note that the majority of voice searches performed is coming from mobile phones. And some of the things you can simply do to go about voice search optimization is helpful for mobile-first voice optimization.

Here are examples:

Improving Page & Site Speed

Brian Dean came up with an analysis of prospective voice search ranking signals and figured out that the voice search results can load 52% faster than the average pages.

Page speed is a crucial mobile ranking signal in that searchers look forward to quick results when they are performing searches for information that is important to them.

Thus, upgrading site and page speed is instrumental for both tactics.

Using Structured Data & AMP

As earlier mentioned, utilizing structured data can help make all of your content more and more relevant for optimized voice search results, and you need to use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) if you really want to retain Actions on Google app.

Structured data can as well ensure that your content is easy to summarize and find in search results that show up on a Smartphone. AMP optimized pages are equally excellently given a high priority in mobile search results.

Improving Local Search Optimization (LSO)

A much greater percentage of voice and mobile searches are location-specific queries.

Users leverage their mobile phone’s search potentiality and mobile web browsers to obtain information (such as business operating hours, location, available items, and so on) regarding local enterprises they’ve planned to check into.

Thus, the more you can try to get your content and website optimized for local search results, the better you’ll optimize for both types of search queries.

You must first claim your Google My Business listing to get started. Then come up with content that resonates with the audience and provides quality answers to location-specific questions.

6. Get Ready for Future Improvements

While you’ve learned several steps you can leverage in this tutorial to integrate voice search optimization into your search engine marketing (SEM) tactic, it’s just the starting.

Home digital voice assistants are seriously now turning out to be popular.

Several people are getting to learn the potentiality of these tools more and more, and chances are, they can explore more voice command potentialities on their Smartphones eventually.

For the time being, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and many other major competitors in the field are frequently coming up with new potentialities and features to help maximize the usage of voice searches.

What you can simply do to go ahead of the voice search competition is to be willing for future improvements as they come to reality.

As people increasingly leverage the technology, you’ll be getting more insight into how your local business can suffice user needs via voice searches.

One of the likely improvements we should expect in the future is the plan Google has towards including voice query data to GSC.

Incorporating voice search query into GSC implies that you’re going to have personalized, practicable insights into how searchers are currently visiting your website via voice search results.

Thanks for reading my blog post.

I am Chris. I want to hear what you think. Please leave me your comment in the comment section below. I will reply to you as soon as I can. Please share.

You may also like to read my other posts:

Passive Income Ideas for Beginners

Chris

Chris is an affiliate marketer based in Bolton, in the north west of England, United Kingdom.

10 thoughts on “6 Changes You Need to Make to Voice Search Optimization

  • Hi Chris,

    I really enjoyed reading your article about changes you need to make to voice search optimisation. I must admit it’s not something I usually think to do. After reading your article I will start to use my Alexa and also Siri on my apple devices. Thanks again for a useful reminder, Regards, Andrew

    • Hi Andrew,
      Thanks for reading my post.
      I am happy you enjoyed it.

  • Chris thank you for this informative guide. It really helped me a lot. I also read on Neil Patel’s blog that voice search is going to make an impact in 2020. That is why it is good to pepare and optimize our websites. And that is why I’ am going to follow your advice and start optimizing my own website.

    Thank you.

    • Hi Strahinja,
      Thanks for reading my post.
      I am happy you enjoyed it.

  • To be honest, I have only made use of the voice searching for some times and I will say that I am not really involved in it but seeing all you have highlighted as ways to exploring the voice searching for proper optimization, I feel this could be a great offer to me and worthy. I never truly give time to figure it out before but then, you have opened my eyes to some vital things. I will surely share this out with others. Thank you

    • Hi Rodarrick,
      Thanks for reading my post.
      I am happy you enjoyed it.

  • AmandaParson

    Whether you run a small or large business, a great way to increase visibility and sales is by driving traffic to the products or services you render. Since technology has been deployed in nearly every phase of human lives now, you can implement it in your business by optimizing voice search technology. I believe a good amount of research should be carried out on this technology to find the best voice search devices/softwares that’s most suitable for your business and will help you attract your ideal target audience. 

    • Hi AmandaParson,
      Thanks for reading my post.
      I am happy you enjoyed it.

  • Unfortunately I don’t know how to use voice commands on my smart phone. Your post made me realize the advantages of using them.

    I didn’t know anything about voice search optimization either, so as a website owner I’m glad I found your site. I didn’t understand the keyword optimization for voice search -part very well, but I’m happy you mentioned mobile optimization as a tool for voice search optimization.

    Improving my mobile speed is something I’m working on, so that’s great news it can help with voice search optimization.

    Thank you for a great article!

    • Hi Kirsti,
      Thanks for reading my post.
      I am happy you enjoyed it.

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