How to Leverage the Power of Voice Search Optimization for Your Business

As technology evolves, so does the way we search for information. 

With the advent of voice search, many people are now using their voice to find what they need on the internet. 

This paradigm shift presents a new opportunity for businesses to reach their target audience more conveniently. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can optimize your website and content for voice search and how you can benefit from it.

By understanding how voice search works and the impact it has on SEO, businesses can take advantage by aligning their strategies and goals to achieve the desired results. It’s still relatively new, so businesses have a great opportunity to get a competitive advantage and stay ahead of the curve. 

What is Voice Search?

Voice search is a technology that allows users to submit queries to a search engine by speaking their search query aloud, instead of typing it out. Voice search has become increasingly popular in recent years, as advances in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and speech recognition have made it user-friendly. It relies on these three to understand a user’s spoken words. Voice search is particularly convenient for mobile users, who may be driving or otherwise unable to type out a query. 

How To Optimize Websites For Voice Search?

When optimizing your content for voice search, you must remember that people speak differently than they type. For instance, people often use natural language when speaking, so keywords that sound like conversational phrases are often used in voice searches. 

Use Conversational Language

To ace voice search optimization, you should work on adjusting your content for natural language to reflect a conversational tone. To gain traction and attract leads, it’s imperative to optimize your content with high-value keywords that people often use in their routine conversations. Also, you should adjust intent-based keywords to understand the psychology behind the user’s query.

Use Interrogative Words

Most people, who prefer mobile shopping, pose questions to their smart assistants. It is a good idea to use interrogative words: “who,” “what,” “where,” “when,” and “why.” in your content, as you optimize it for voice search.

Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

People use smartphones for voice searches on the go, so it’s important to ensure your content is mobile-friendly, responsive, and compatible, enabling the users to access it on various devices.

Use Long-Tail Keywords

The length of queries is an important fact that you should consider while optimizing your content for voice search. On average, text-based searches are quite short, one-to-two words, whereas, for voice searches, the phrases that get the most hits and impressions, consist of three or four words. By taking advantage of long-tail keywords, you can make your content more relevant and resonate with your target audience.   

Advantages Of Voice Search Optimization

If used purposefully, voice search optimization can help enhance your website’s visibility. It can also help you attract more qualified leads. Most people who use voice search, typically have the intention to look for specific information. By optimizing your website for the same, you can ensure that your website appears in the results for relevant queries. 

Boosts Online Traffic

Implementing a result-oriented voice search strategy, helps you attract more leads and turn them into your customers. Also, optimized content will help your website rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), leading you to get a featured snippet for that query.   

This is a long, time-consuming process, but if you want to take advantage, the endeavor is worth your effort. 

Better Customer Experience

If you want to succeed in this ever-changing business world, you need to deliver exceptional customer experience while remaining relevant to your target audience. Investing in a comprehensive voice search optimization can help you in this regard, thereby offering you an opportunity to reap the benefits in the long run. You can also turn your prospects into your loyal and trusted customers. After all, business is all about making customers happy and satisfied.

To augment your customers’ experiences, you must provide each of them with a customized solution that is tailored to meet their requirements.

Alexa and Google Assistant can differentiate between peoples’ voices. You can use the unique voice-related data to your advantage and offer solutions to address their individual needs, thus enhancing their experience. Similarly, Whirlpool has collaborated with Amazon to design a voice assistant for their consumer electronics product line, to ensure to provide their customers with ease of use, flexibility, and convenience.

Competitive Edge

All your efforts for success come down to your desire to keep your customers engaged so that you can win their trust and loyalty. Realizing this dream requires you to invest time, energy, and money in implementing a voice search strategy. Apart from the efforts you put in, it requires you to be consistent in delivering an exceptional experience to your customers, while ensuring your competitors don’t provide the same value as you do.

If your competitors use voice assistants, then it’s high time for you to grab the opportunities that they provide, otherwise, you’ll lag behind. As the situation stands, voice search optimization is a relatively new phenomenon, so you can use it to your advantage and still stay ahead of your competitors. 

Potential Disadvantages Of Voice SEO

Apart from advantages, voice search technology has its fair share of disadvantages. Some of the disadvantages are:

Misinterpretation

In most cases, the smart voice assistant, or the voice recording software may misunderstand or misinterpret the speech, which may lead users to get irrelevant results.

Voice Search is slow 

Voice search takes more time to generate results than text-based search. As the mechanism for voice search is quite different, the software first transcribes the user’s query and then searches for relevant results. 

Privacy Concerns

Leveraging the power of voice search can also lead users to compromise their privacy. A voice search software typically stores recordings of the user’s spoken queries to improve the accuracy of future searches. Hence, users who are concerned about privacy may prefer to use traditional text-based search.

Voice Search Optimization Best Practices

If you want to ace the voice search optimization game, the following best practices will help you achieve your goals. 

Use Natural Language: When optimizing for voice search, you should use natural language, to ensure that your content sounds just like how people talk. Generally, people use long sentences when they converse. Therefore, targeting long-tail keywords in voice search will give you a competitive edge. Using a conversational tone will make your content rank higher, and the voice search assistant will find it easy to understand.

Structure Your Content: Using schema markup or structured data can help your content attract the attention of voice search assistants. Therefore, it’s better to structure your content to make it easily understandable for the search engines, which leads your content to rank higher in relevant results. 

Optimize For Local Search: People use voice search on the go, which means they don’t have time to type their search, and chances are that they are looking for a product or service nearby. Therefore, while optimizing for voice search, you should consider local SEO as a significant factor. It will help you appear in local business listings and make it easy for people to find you easily. To get a competitive advantage, do ensure to get your business listed in Google Business Listing.

Optimize For Speed: Page load speed is another important factor that you should consider when optimizing your web content for voice search. Pages that rank higher in voice search results, load in 4.6 seconds are 52% faster than average. Most people use voice search on their smartphones, hence, apart from being responsive and compatible, you should optimize your content not only for mobile but also for speed to get the desired results. 

What The Future Holds? 

Voice search is here to stay. There is no doubt about it. As the evolution of technology and the business landscape continues, voice search is set to influence businesses in the future. Organizations must invest more time and effort to adopt voice search SEO best practices to reap the benefits.

But stay put. The future of Alexa – the Voice Assistant – seems to be in jeopardy. Amazon is planning to cut down 10,000 jobs, due to a massive loss of $10 billion, across the Devices Unit and the Books Department. Earlier this year, Alexa also suffered financial losses to the tune of $3 billion.  This so-called ‘colossal loss’ is unprecedented. 

On the other hand, Dave Limp, Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, remains optimistic, committed, and upbeat about Alexa, highlighting plans for making a huge investment in voice assistant.  

The question is: how adversely will it impact the future of voice search? 

Unfazed by the looming crises for Alexa, people continue to spend more money online, with most of them preferring to speak rather than type their search queries. With the e-commerce sector expected to exceed $40 billion by the year-end, it’s more important than ever for businesses to master voice search SEO. This paradigm shift in peoples’ searching habits calls for some significant changes in your business and SEO strategy.

If you want to implement or improve your voice search optimization strategy to make your presence felt online, Centric has got your back. We will collaborate with you to understand your requirements, and after conducting a thorough assessment and analysis, we will offer you a customized solution to help you implement a result-oriented voice search strategy. 

As a premier, all-service digital transformation company, we can help optimize your site for voice search, and enable you to stay ahead of your competitors. 

Get In Touch