The world of digital marketing is constantly changing and it is often difficult for a small business to keep up. One major change with the rise in digital assistants is the increasing importance of voice search.
Let’s take a closer look at what this is and how to optimise your website for voice search so that you have more chance of your website getting found.
What is Voice Search?
Voice search has come to prominence with home devices such as Alexa. You ask questions or make requests and Alexa or Siri come up with the relevant answers. Digital assistants are now used on smartphones and other mobile devices, and as consumers, we’re becoming more reliant on them.
- According by ComScore, half of searches by 2020 will be voice searches
- Mobile voice searches are three times more likely to be based on local needs compared to queries that are typed into Google
- Nearly 36% of millennials use voice searches each month
Why Is It Important to Optimise Your Website for Voice Search?
When you type a search term into Google, you get a whole list of options stretching down the page. With voice search, you get a limited number. How we construct voice searches is also different. We might type ‘best Chinese restaurant London’ into Google where we would ask Alexa ‘where can I find the best Chinese restaurant in London’.
Voice searches tend to be longer and less abbreviated than text searches. It’s an important distinction to understand when you come to writing your small business web content.
Tips for Optimising Your Site for Voice Search
It’s a challenge to optimise for voice searches. It means tweaking your content and having a slightly different focus.
- Ensure your website speed is optimised. Speed in search is very important in rankings, so make sure that your site downloads at the optimal speed. It’s a small factor in voice search, but an important one.
- Have a content-rich site. Good quality content has long been important in digital marketing, so ensure that you provide valuable, interesting content. This is less about hitting the appropriate keywords as setting yourself as the expert, go-to site that puts you at the top of searches.
- Have blogs written in a conversational style. Because we’re asking voice search devices for information, make sure areas of your site such as blogs are written less formally and more conversationally.
- Focus on longer tail keywords. This is one part of how people search using voice and it’s important to understand all the different permutations of language that they are likely to use.
- Add a Q&A section or page to your website. Users are likely to ask questions such as why, what, when etc. Adding a FAQ section to your website quickly creates search-friendly entries that are more likely to show up on voice.
- Structured data in the site backend. This is something more on the technical side. Structured data and schema mark-up allow search engines to crawl your website efficiently. The backend is basically everything on your website that you don’t see such as the underlying code.
Implementing these relatively simple tips should help your small business manage search results for voice better. It means thinking about the content on your website a little differently based on how the average consumer will be searching via voice.
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