There was a time when people hesitated to use the voice search technology to ask a question. They preferred to type their queries on a keyboard or keypad instead, because:
a) Their questions weren’t always understood properly.
b) They felt awkward talking aloud to a voice assistant in public.
c) They were accustomed to using the keypad, and were having trouble vocalizing what they actually wanted to know.
With advances in voice search technology and popularity of home devices like the Amazon Echo, that initial reluctance to the idea of talking with a personal voice assistant is gradually melting away. People are getting more comfortable and confident with the search feature, and instead of only teasing iPhone’s Siri with inappropriate questions to see if her calm composure will crack under pressure, they are now learning to use her as a convenient resource for hands-free internet searches when they are driving, shopping, walking etc.
Those that were initially unconvinced that the Amazon Echo could really simplify tasks around the house, cannot live today without asking Alexa (Amazon’s virtual assistant) to remind them of doctor’s appointments, set a timer, read the news, pull up traffic information, make their grocery lists, find recipes, play a song or tell a joke. To quote statistics, the Echo Dot was the bestselling product on Amazon during the Holiday season last year, and 65% of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home say they cannot imagine going back to the days before they had a smart speaker.
It’s a matter of habit, you see. With repeated use, voices searches are getting easier to do every day, and demographically speaking, its adoption is all across the board, from teenagers to senior citizens.
According to projections, by the year 2020, 50% of all searches will be conducted via voice, which means marketers have to begin optimizing their content for voice searches right now, in anticipation of the imminent voice search revolution.
8 Things You Can Do Right Now To Optimizing Content For Voice Search
# 1: Understand That Keywords For Voice Searches Are Different
Search phrases get longer when people speak them instead of typing them. Longer queries require less effort when you’re speaking them out loud, and by adding more words, people naturally expect to get more specific results.
# 2: Think In Terms Of Questions
Voice searches are often framed as a question. For example, “What’s the weather in Seattle today?” instead of “Weather in Seattle.” Or “Is there an Indian restaurant in Cliffside Park, New Jersey?” instead of “Indian restaurants Cliffside Park NJ”.
See the pattern? It is a natural human impulse to ask an easy, spontaneous question rather than try to make a cryptic statement out of a query – which means your content SEO strategy has to adapt for keywords that end with `?’.
There are several tools out there that will help you with your research for voice search optimization. Answer The Public is one I highly recommend because when you enter a keyword, it returns a huge database of questions that people are asking about that subject. The questions are segregated according to the word they begin with: How, Where, When, What, Can, Where, Which etc. Other tools you can also check out are Question Samurai and Storybase.
# 3: Study The Questions To Reveal User Intent
A lot of clues about user intent can be revealed if you study the nature of the search queries closely. For example, questions prefaced with `how’, `what’ and `who’ signify interest in a subject, person, product or service, whereas `where’ is a strong suggestion that the user is much further down the sales funnel and is ready to take an action that aligns with your marketing goals.
# 4: Create Content That Answer Customer Questions
It’s just common sense when you think about it. People are asking more questions when they are using voice search. If you create blogs and other content that specifically answer those questions, you are not merely helping your customers but you’re also building up your potential to show up as a Google `featured snippet’ — the summary of an answer to a user’s query, displayed on top of Google search results, which is extracted from a webpage, and includes the page’s title and URL. (Currently, Google Home and Google Assistant read out featured snippets when they answer to voice search queries.)
# 5: No More Buzzwords
Marketers love buzzwords because they believe buzzwords add authority and gravitas to their content. Alas, that is not the case because ordinary people do not talk that way. The more conversational your content is, the better optimized you will organically be for the voice search revolution.
# 6: Build Up A Solid FAQ
Improve your existing FAQ or build a new one that captures both long-tail and voice search traffic. This is a great way to keep answering relevant questions from your customer base, even if those questions don’t lend themselves to longer content, like blogs, anywhere else on your website.
# 7: Improve Site Speed
Website speed has always been an important element in most SEO strategies, but voice search users are way less patient than those who type their queries into a search box.
When users type, they make and correct spelling mistakes, which unconsciously primes them to also expect delays and interruptions with the page load time. They are more willing to blame outside circumstances like a weak signal at their current location as well. But when they are speaking into their device, they expect answers as quickly as they would if they were speaking to a human.
This is why you cannot afford to ignore your page load time. According to available stats, a page that takes 5 seconds or more to load is 90% more likely to suffer bounce backs, than one that loads in just one second. What’s more, Google has found that bounce rates on mobiles are 9.56% higher than desktops.
# 8: Improve Your Local SEO Game
More than 39% of voice search users are looking for information about local businesses, so there’s never been a better time to make sure that your structured data, listings etc are Google compliant and up-to-date if your products or services depend on a local traffic.
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