Have you ever tried to search online when multitasking or when you were engaged in some important tasks and couldn’t type in the query?
If your answer is in the affirmative, thank voice search because multi-tasking would be quite challenging without a voice search feature.
According to the reports, more than 70% of respondents would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than physically typing in their text query.
The Importance of Voice Search
Voice search optimization is incredibly important for both large and local small businesses. People often use voice search while driving, cooking, asking questions about a business location, store working hours, etc.
Remember that location-specific information isn’t the only thing people want from brands out of a voice assistant. According to a Google survey, people want to get information about upcoming events, festivals, shows, exciting deals and sales offers, personalized tips, and much more.
Five essential factors to consider in voice search optimization
Whether you’re a corporate giant, or a small business – it is quintessential to optimize for local SEO and voice search optimization is an incredibly important ranking factor now, to say the least. So how do you harness the power f voice search? Here are the five essential factors to consider while doing voice search optimization.
1. Target Featured Snippets: If you’ve not heard of “featured snippets,” you can still certainly recognize what they look like.
Featured snippets appear at the top of the search engine result pages.
Featured snippets are important because more than 30% of ~1.4 million tested Google queries contain them.
You must ensure that your pages are optimized and mobile search results include a featured snippet so that voice assistants pull all the relevant information from your site.
So if you want to rank in voice search results, you must prioritize such quality data that Google displays your pages in the featured snippet.
2. Don’t Overlook User Intent: When users go through your website, are they looking for something to explore? Do they want to buy something? User intent tells us the specific reason that a user has typed a query in Google for.
Sometimes intent can be clearly expressed in the query with words such as “what is,” “buy,” “Shop”, “price,” “how-to,” etc.
When creating content, therefore, you should consider user intent to enhance the relevance of your pages to specific search queries.
3. Prioritize a Mobile-Friendly Site: Unarguably, mobile is the primary source for voice search and you must ensure that your website or blog is mobile friendly!
To make your site mobile-friendly, invest the time and resources in eliminating any chronic issues. If you are using a CMS, i.e. WordPress, you might consider aspects like themes and plugins that implement responsive design principles.
Furthermore, page speed is also important as it influences if / how far your page will appear in voice search results.
4. Use Structured Data: Structured language doesn’t mean users can see or read your content. Instead, it is micro-data embedded in your code that search engines can read to better understand your content.
If you’ve ever searched for any business and seen search engine results showing hours of operation, contact information, and other data, this is what structured data means.
Remember that most people often use their mobile devices to find contact info or phone numbers, location or directions, the working hours of a business.
5. Consider Google My Business Listing: In simpler terms, voice search is local search, so the best way to optimize for voice is to optimize for local.
All you have to do is, on your website, include the location and contact information at a place that’s noticeable. Don’t forget to include the information on the header or footer of each one of your web pages.
Ensure that basic information like name, address and phone number (NAP) is accurate.
Final Thoughts
As the use of smartphones continues to skyrocket, users will employ voice search more frequently, so optimizing for voice lets you reap countless benefits such as improved overall mobile optimization, seamless content communication to Google, and increased chances of showing up in local results.
