Whether you are a small business operating on a local level or a large business house that has ongoing operations on a global scale, you will understand the importance of digital marketing and why it is so crucial to have a strong online presence. With a dominating online visibility and influence on different social media channels, your business will be more likely to grab the attention of your targeted audience and engage them with your brand and its offerings.
This not only helps in increasing your sales and causing a higher ROI, but it also displays your credibility on the search engines, showing that you are a potential business who understand the SEO game perfectly well.
The Background of Voice Search Optimization
In order to establish such dominance and having a firm command over your business’ performance on the major search engines, you will need to optimize your business website for both the audience and the algorithm that will index your content. Earlier, the users used to type the search input in order to get the relevant answers for their queries. This search intent of the users determined the keyword strategy for online businesses that used it to formulate their content. However, ever since Google has laid out voice search for finding content and websites offering different products and services, the SEO game has changed drastically. Although it is the very nature of search engine optimization to endure and embrace new trends, the rise of voice search has driven the SEO efforts for most websites at a very different level.
With that being said, here is a guide that will provide you with all the required and important information related to voice search and its impact on the ongoing SEO.
Voice Search: What Does It Convey and How Does It Work?
Voice search is the latest trend forged by the major search engine platform Google that confers users to use their voice instead of typing to find answers to their query. The voice search is mainly monitored by voice assistants that are widely termed as “digital assistants”. These digital assistants are created to guide you throughout the search process. All you need is a voice-enabled device such as the smartphone, tablet or other similar devices. This has also lead to the development of smart speakers such as Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, Apple’s HomePod, all of which promote voice search and making the trend globally popular.
According to the marketing experts all over the world, voice search is going to extend its reach even more in 2018, which means if you have not optimized your site for the trend, you are likely to miss out on half of the searches made by your target audience and lose your position on the SERPs.
Traditional Search vs Voice Search: The Major Differences
In order to optimize your website for voice search, you will first need to understand the major differences between the earlier traditional search and voice search. Here are some of the differences that make voice search a thing of the future:
- Total Number of Words: When typing a search query, the total number of words varies and is mostly unclear and summarized. However, with voice search, things are pretty different, as it allows users the freedom to utilize as many words as they want to make their search query more specific and clear.
- Statements and Questions: The traditional text queries are generally made in short statements comprising of three to five words. While with voice search, on the other hand, you can form your queries in natural questions.
- Location Optimization: Perhaps the best part about voice search is that it will be more likely to be geographically specific rather than based on simple text queries that are mostly short in nature.
- Search Intent: This one is a major groundbreaking difference that will help the Baltimore SEO services professionals to optimize the website accordingly. After all, search intent is the major part of SEO and online marketing that determines the content creation and further promotion of the content. From running sponsored ads to promoting your content on different platforms, if you get to acknowledge the search intent of your targeted audience, everything will be streamlined for you. This seamless opportunity is provided by the voice search function, which makes its optimization even more important than ever.
Tips for Optimizing Your Site for Voice Search
As Google has made it pretty clear that it is going to hold voice search results into preference when it comes to SERPs and online visibility, it goes without saying that you should drive all your efforts in optimizing your website and make it friendly for voice search. This also means that you will have to craft your content more relevant to search queries and audience-specific along with making it easily decipherable and indexable for the search engines.
Take a look at the various components that you need to work on for optimizing your website for voice search.
- Effective Keyword Research: The traditional SEO practice used to deal with targeting the relevant keywords and the voice search optimization for your site is exactly the same but with a distinct approach. Basically, it is all about making the search with your voice and hence, you should also research and target your keywords and get ideas by voice inputs instead of typing the words. The trick is to going for long-tail keywords and making your keywords sound more like a general conversational tone.
- Build a FAQs Page: If you have not done it already, make sure you create this page as users visit this page looking for common questions related to your brand. They expect clear and precise answers to the frequently asked questions, which will ultimately help you in focusing on keyword and long-tail phrases for your voice search optimization.
- Mobile Site Optimization: Voice search is more or less exclusive for compact devices that make optimizing your website for mobile devices extremely important. In order to determine whether your site is fully optimized for mobile devices or not, you can avail the Google mobile-friendly test and see the results.
Conclusion
There is no doubt about the fact that voice search is here and it will rise and be more effective this year. Make sure you optimize your site well for voice search and ensure success on the search engine.
