Voice search SEO is gaining popularity amongst online customers. A report suggests that approximately 111.8 million users in the US alone use voice search on a daily basis. This is almost one-third population of America using their voices to search for businesses products and services. Therefore, it is safe to say that optimizing for voice search is of the utmost importance
If you are a business looking for ways to improve voice search and improve your rankings, this post is for you.
7 Strategies to Improve Voice Search
Here are seven areas to focus on and boost your rankings through optimized voice search.
1- Building Customer’s Persona
Creating a customer persona will help you identify who your target customer is. Where do they live? What are their interests and needs? Other factors include age, gender, profession, etc. Knowing these factors will help you determine the choice of words, products, and different ways a customer can voice search for products and services.
Optimizing your content for voice search requires relevant content and conciseness. Your search result must clearly answer the customer’s question. You must also work on creating detailed answers for the most commonly asked questions related to your products and services.
Follow the below-mentioned steps for an effective and straightforward strategy to improve voice search.
- Make sure that the headline of your content always starts with a question. (most commonly asked preferably).
- Right under the headline you must provide a clear answer to the question.
- You can then further explain the answer in the remaining content underneath. However, try to be concise and only provide relevant
Following these steps will create a robust page with better search engine rankings, especially for voice searches.
2- Using the Right Keywords
No matter how great your products and services are, the short-tail keywords for SEO make all the difference in SEO. However, traditional keywords are not that effective when it comes to improving your voice searches. Why? Because consumers do not use keywords to voice search an item.
For example, a customer looking for a pair of shoes will not say “shoes.” Customers will use long sentences looking for a product or service such as “where can I buy clothes?”, “show me a clothing shop near me” etc.
Therefore, as a marketer, you must focus on finding the specific long-tail key phrases with a conversational tone and questions.
3- Knowing Your Customer’s Device Behavior
Certain data points such as locations are one of the focal points of voice search algorithms to provide precise information to online customers. Therefore, you must research and understand your customers’ behavior, wants and needs, and the type of device used.
Use variations of the same query in different styles and tones. This is because different customers can voice search for the same item in various ways in different circumstances. For instance, a user sitting at home may voice search asking a longer question, such as “where can I buy a Christmas present?” or “show the best places to shop this holiday season near me.”
On the other hand, a driving consumer may use short questions such as “show me a shopping mall near me” or “where can I buy a Christmas present” Etc.
The more variation of voice search SEO you include in your content, the better your ranking. This will translate into increased organic traffic to your website and increase your lead generation and sales conversion rate.
4- Focusing on the Mobile-Devices First
While people still use laptops and computers, more and more customers are moving towards mobile devices. Therefore, you have to ensure that your XML sitemaps and content are easily readable for search engines as well as visitors.
Therefore, besides optimizing for voice search, you must make your content both desktop and mobile-user friendly. For instance, instead of using a location’s name in your voice search questions, you can use words such as “near me” for voice searches.
Think about it, people on the move may not always know the exact area, so they will search by asking “gas station near me,” or “supermarket near me” etc. Therefore, a mobile-friendly strategy is a natural choice for quick results and faster load times.
5- The Schema Markup
Schema Markup for voice search is very important because it will allow your business to inform the search engine algorithm what your content is all about. This requires HTML add-ons, as it will help your content rank better while adding relevancy for queries made by online customers through voice searches.
Google will use your schema to understand your content’s language and rate it for its relevancy. The better your Google ratings, the higher your content will be in search engine results. However, this is something where you will need to hire an SEO expert to develop a schema and update it with evolving and latest trends in a customers’ behavior.
6- Leveraging Google My Business
Google’s algorithm will search the existing Google database for the relevant answer to voice search queries. Therefore, listing your business on Google My Business with as much relevant information and answering commonly asked questions can help you optimize voice search strategy.
Provide information about your business name, address, contact details, website address. This will especially help when a customer makes a voice search with “near me” queries. If a local customer searches for a product you provide, Google will first show your name based on your business’s location on Google map.
7- Leveraging Frequently Asked Questions Pages
A FAQ page on your website serves as a magnet to voice searches. Try to add as many relevant questions about your business. You will normally start these questions with what, where, why, how, who, etc.
This is a one-stop page for an online customer to ask one question but continue to read more and find answers to other questions they may have in mind. This will entice visitors to spend more time on your website, which improves your Google rating for a better user experience. However, you must remember to use a conversational tone to answer the question as it will help build a personal rapport with your customers.
Conclusion
It is still not too late for businesses to adapt and deploy a voice search strategy for marketing. Therefore, whether you are looking to integrate voice search into your marketing campaign or improve voice search, we at FireStarter SEO can help. Our team of experts can develop and optimize voice search strategies customized and personalized to your business needs.
