Voice Search Optimization: How it works and its Importance

Voice Search Marketing

The volume of voice searches is increasing daily, and the voice search marketing trend is getting bigger year after year.

Modern-day internet marketers now have strong interest in voice search marketing, and optimize their contents for voice search.

Although voice search keyword research is not easy unlike text search, because there are limited tools to help, the importance of voice search optimization can not be overlooked.

Importance of voice search optimization

Voice search is a big evolution to online marketing, and of course yes, it has imparts in the way contents are optimized for search engines and human users.

Your articles should be able to answer questions, therefore, your subheadings should be well structured, and each should be able to ask a specific question in the minds of your audience. This will make you to be featured in search snippets.

One of the advantages of voice search is that people with physical impairments can use the search engines easily.

Also, you can multitask with it since you can be communicating verbally and be active on other activities simultaneously.

How Does Voice Search Impacts SEO?

If you want to benefit from voice searches on search engines, there are a few points to consider while preparing your articles for publishing.

• User intent

In your article, you should provide a direct answers to certain questions that are asked in voice search.

Just ask the question in your mind, and answer it in your article. You need to make the answer short, meaningful and direct to the question.

In this way, the search engine would be able to understand the answer to the particular question asked.

Even for text SEO, fulfilling the user’s intent is the key to content optimization.

To implement voice search in your website, relevant search queries should be used in your headlines, formatted in the article and used in metadata of the page.

To optimize your website contents better for voice search, you can structure your articles in the FAQ style. This means, asking questions in your content, and providing direct answer to each question. This offers a high level of relevance for voice searches due to the question/answer structure.

• Impact of voice search on featured snippets

The type of keywords you should include in your articles for voice search should be short and straight to the point, for example, what is voice search marketing, how to get featured in google search snippet, etc.

Short and direct answers are easily featured on google snippets, this is usually referred to as “position 0”.

Google search snippet would make you outrank your competitors since your page will appear first, above other search results and are read out in the voice search.

Since only one answer is read out at a time, it is worth taking a deep look into the featured snippets.

However, you need to rank your website and webpage to be able to appear in the first 10 results for 1 or more keywords to be featured in snippets.

Google will not feature your answer if your webpage does not rank at all or in the top 10 for any keyword or keyphrase.

• Technical SEO for voice search

Page speed is now a ranking factor for most search engines, however, it is more important than ever for voice search.

Search engine users that opt for voice search do so most times because of time constraints, for example, because they don’t have the time to search via their smartphone or PC since that would take some time to type their questions.

Therefore, website speed is very important. If your website takes a long time to load, you’d not benefit from voice search. Mobile first optimization also plays an important role here.

• Long-tail keywords optimization

Yes, you can optimize your articles for long-tail keyphrases to rank on both text search and voice search engines.

In fact, most voice search queries are not short, perhaps, the reason the searcher prefer to make it in voice than typing it.

While you can insert the long-tail search queries, it would be better to provide relevant answers to long-tail search queries that are as well similar to voice queries.

You don’t need to stuff keywords in your article, just provide detailed answers to search queries as short as possible, use bullet points to make the answers more understandable by search engines.

• Local search optimization

To optimize your article for voice search, your answer should be themed towards a particular region. You can even mention the city or thing accordingly in the answer.

Since voice search often has a local connection, this should also be taken into account in the content.

Also, you should register Google My Business, and make sure your details are updated when the need be: address, phone number, hours of operation etc so that voice search engine can access them.

• Schema data structure

When it comes to voice searches, proper schema data markup is particularly important.

Speakable schema has been in beta for a long time, therefore, requirements and policies are subject to change.

Speakable schema optimization helps to draw out paragraphs within your article that are particular suitable for audio playback.

Speakable structured data uses text-to-speech (TTS) or Google assistance to distribute voice contents to more groups of audience.

Conclusion

Your contents should of course primarily be geared towards the audience.

To rank better, keyword optimization is very important, same with other aspects of on-page optimizations.

You should also use call-to-action keywords in your articles as this is very helpful.

However, you can theme your optimization towards voice search since the voice search trend is getting bigger now.

The above-mentioned tips would help you to rank for voice search queries.