More and more of us are embracing our ‘outside voice’ and using voice search and voice assistants (Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri) to answer all of our worldly dilemmas and questions. In fact, Google estimates that over 20% of all searches are voice searches. That’s a lot of searches.
And it’s likely that these numbers will grow as we see more and more tech on the market that has voice enabled functionality (Amazon Echo etc) and the tech gets more sophisticated.
Obviously, this has an impact on SEO, so it’s important to adapt your strategies and optimize your content so you can increase your chances of showing up in voice results and not get left behind.
Change your Keyword Research
When it comes to voice search, you have to think about keyword research in a different way. People don’t search out loud in the same way as they would when typing out a search term. You’ll need to work these voice-centric terms into your content.
Voice search queries tend to be longer, around 3 to 5 keywords in length, so start researching longer long-tail keywords.
More active language is used by searchers, such as ‘who, how, what, where, when’ – this could be because they want to speak with more clarity out loud. Reflect this in the way you optimize your content and the topics you use to provide value to your audience and solve their problems.
Try and think about the ways you’d ask a question out loud or language that comes naturally to you when speaking out loud. Natural language is incredibly important here.
It’s worth playing around with language and doing a few focus groups to try and grasp the types of speaking terms people use when asking questions out loud. It can be very different from typed searches.
Schema Markup
Lots of people are wary of changing code, so if you’re not too sure, it’s worth getting in touch with some digital geeks to help you (hello J get in touch with us here). But adding schema to your website can really help with optimizing for voice search. Schema is the vocab that search engines use to understand the content on a page.
Google likes JSON-LD and Schema will let Google know what your page is about and the contents – maybe it’s a page about your products or it could be a contact page with business details.
So when you include Schema on your pages and content, Google will understand what’s on them and they’ll be searchable by voice assistants, which is what you want.
As we mentioned, it’s worth getting someone to give you a hand with coding and Schema if you’re not too sure what to do.
If you’re after more advice around optimizing your content and website for voice search then don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team and we’ll be more than happy to answer any of your questions and give you some pointers.