8 Ways To Optimise Your Content For Voice Search

Understanding user intent has become key to optimising for conversational search as crawlers and its algorithms become more and more complex. While this is fairly standard practice for SEOs and content marketers voice search is seen as uncharted territory for most. Voice search comes with its own set of technical tweaks while content and user internet is much more conversational and long tail which doesn't always suit current content strategies.

Voice search should not be the sole focus of your search efforts as yet but it should be considered especially for common questions around your products and services as well as brand and contact details related searches which are common voice search queries. So how do you optimise your site for voice search? Keep reading!

What is voice search

Voice search is the processes of speaking on a mobile phone or computer and asking it or search engines questions or providing queries and having it return visual or audio results. This new way of search has been made popular by Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Googles Ok Google proposal and devices like Google Home and Amazons Alexa.

The growth of voice search

• Google has stated that "20% of all android searches are coming from voice!”
• Cortana now has 133 million monthly users according to Microsoft
• 19% of iPhone users make use of Siri daily according to Hubspot
• Studies by ComScore predict that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020

How to optimise for Voice Search

These are our top tips to optimise for voice search, Google Home and Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa:

1. Find out what your visitors are searching for

Analyse the queries to your website using the Search Queries report on Search Console and your Search Terms report from Google AdWords to find out which searches can be assumed to be voice queries. These queries are usually 5 words or longer and appear to be natural, conversational type searches. They are often question based and include ‘why’ (most popular), ‘what’, ‘how; and ‘when’ in the query.

2. Identify additional questions people are seeking answers for

Using your Keyword Research tools, identify additional search queries that could be used as part of your strategy. Keyword Planner, Answer the Public, What Google People Also Ask and Moz Keyword Explorer are some great tools to assist you in doing keyword research.

3. Find out if your competitors are answering these questions

Find out what your competitors are offering users who enter these search queries by looking at what comes up for the target search terms. Identify which questions don’t have a suitable answer and prioritize your content strategy around these questions – including both commercial and information type questions.

4. Create content to answer these questions

Create content to provide answers to questions that people are asking by incorporating these search terms in your content, including the Heading (H1) and Title (Title tag) and in the content itself. Be sure to write content in a natural, conversational tone at the average readability level of an 8th grader.

5. Apply Structured Data Markup

Optimize every single question on a page by wrapping it with Schema markup (schema.org) by giving users what they want, to ensure that it can rank in zero ranking (i.e. Rich Snippet and Rich Answer) position (which is a ranking above the number one conventional result. Schema markup is the Holy Grail to obtaining Featured Snippet visibility which is a fundamental component to ranking for voice search.

6. Optimise your content for location-based searches

Optimize your content for NAP (Name, Address and Place) and claim your business in Google My Business as search engines like Google take this information into account when determining which companies to show for geo-targeted searches.

7. Leverage Conversational Agent

Getting slightly more technical, once all of the above is in place, leverage Conversational Agent and train your website’s conversational agent to learn, understand and build up a database of common questions and best results to display for the question.

8. Leverage Web Speech API

Finally, leverage the Web Speech API to allow the API to convert spoken words into text. The API will go onto your website and find the best answers to the questions driven by voice queries.

Having your own voice

While voice search is growing it is still very much dwarfed by conventional search so don't see this as a silver bullet for ranking boosts. Google and Bing SERPs will continue to become more competitive to be on page one and personalised search becoming more and more important search results are more fragmented than ever. This could see early optimised sites for voice receiving a gradual boost in traffic and will also save you from retrofitting your content and strategy in the future.

Contact us

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Tags: Content Marketing, SEO, voice search