It’s a Wednesday morning. You missed the alarm and wake up thirty minutes later than usual. As you rush to get ready for work, you ask Alexa for the weather report, traffic update and then to play some of your favorite songs as you have your breakfast.

As you get into the car, you ask the voice assistant to turn on the map, make a call to your mom and then listen to some more music. Then you remember that its your college friend’s birthday and you ask your voice assistant for the nearest gift shop from which you can get some flowers sent. The day goes on, you come back home in the evening, and Alexa tells you the score to the game you missed. It tells you of the new chicken recipe you were meaning to try out, and then finally sets your alarm as you head to bed.

That’s a typical day in the life of so many people across the world. Up until a few years ago, talking to a machine and getting a response back, and that too factually accurate, was a dream. Voice assistants have now become an integral part of daily life. Whether you are searching for the nearest pet store, spa, or a fashion brand outlet, voice search is becoming more and more popular as a way of looking for businesses online. All major search engines have a voice search option integrated into the search bar.

Voice Search Optimization for your business

For most consumers and high-intent customers today, search engines are the go to source of information for all kinds of businesses. Optimizing your website for voice search entails curating the content in a way that addresses common queries that people may be asking their voice assistant.

When a user asks a question to their voice assistant, it is usually in a conversational, long form way. With advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) and voice recognition technologies, search engines are now able to understand and interpret the meanings of most common queries put up by users.

According to a data report released by Google, 20% of all searches made on its app are done by voice. Another report by Google says that 52% of voice search users say they would like to receive information about promotional deals, sales and promotions from brands.

So what does it mean for brands? If you are trying to sell your product online and have an established local presence, then optimizing your offerings to voice search technology has the potential to bring in great results for your business.

How do you develop a plan for voice search optimization?

First, it is important to understand your target market and customer segment deeply and they ways that your product or service can help solve their problems. Once you have developed a persona of your customer, it is time to think about how a typical user searches for items via their voice assistant.

Long tail keywords, which are a vital part of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plan are a key player in voice search. Users ask questions in a conversational way to the search engine. For example, one may ask “Ok Google, where is the nearest pet store?”. Here, the target keyword is “nearest pet store”, and not “pet” or “store”.

Let’s examine a slightly different query, “Hey Siri, find the cheapest plant nursery near XYZ Road”. This is a very specific query put up by a high intent customer, with a high probability of sale. Another advantage of long tail keywords is that they are less competitive and easier to score on.

Hence, while setting up a voice search optimization plan, you must think of the ways how an average person might be asking questions, the various synonyms to the product or service that you are selling and marry these with your brand’s positioning strategy.

Voice search optimization for your business is not very different from the usual search engine optimization. In fact, it can just be an extension of your ongoing search strategy. Understanding the various segments you can score and feature on the web engine’s search results page can take you a long way in setting up your digital plan.

5 ways to optimize your web page for voice search

If you are working on building a plan for optimizing your website’s content for voice search users, here are a few things you can take in to account.

1. Developing personalized content

Whether you are a seasoned marketer or someone who has stepped in to this field for the first time, you will be well aware of hyper personalization advertisements and content online. Regional language, context and humor have become part of most consumer product promotional work. Hence, a deep understanding of your consumer’s demographic, need and behavior and building a personality based on the same is very important.

No matter how compelling your work is, keep your content brief. It is helpful to put primary and long tail keywords in a question form, write a short and holistic answer below the question and then elaborate more as people scroll down. User attention spans have come down significantly, and most of them are now looking for targeted information and brevity. If a user has to read through scores of sentences just to get a small bit of information about your product’s features, they may as well lose patience and move on to the next website. That is not to say that everyone who enters your website will only look for a single sentence solution, but the majority of quick consumer service and product related queries need brief answers, tailored to the geographical location and demographic of the user.

2. Tailoring for local business listings

Most people now look for businesses, services, prices and locations online before venturing out in person. Optimizing your content for the local SEO and business listing helps people to recognize your service provision in their area and check out your website. Setting up your Google Business Profile in an optimized way helps users locate your offerings in their area.

If you have a physical store in a particular area, selling your products and services becomes really easy with an online local business listing. Whether you have in-store pickup or takeaway or even home delivery services, you gain good visibility and consumer awareness if you list online. An article published by Hubspot states that 46% of all google searches are for local businesses, and that 88% of consumers who search for these visit or call the store within a day.

Fit all relevant data about your business on your profile. This helps the voice search match their user’s query with your information and show you in the results page. Using target keywords like “near me”, “XYZ road”, “Gourmet restaurant in my area”, and so on in the meta description, optimizing the anchor text and internal links accordingly, and mentioning landmarks and location pins helps people know about you very easily.

3.Optimizing Schema Markup

This refers to structured data, or the content that search engines use to understand what you are talking about on your product’s webpage. Schema markup is the information you put in to your website’s HTML code to help the voice search assistant find, pick and present the exact information that your customer is searching for.

For example, if you are a restaurant that specializes in hand tossed, brick oven baked pizzas, then you may want to appear in a search for “Brick oven made Italian pizza in XYZ Road” or “Menu of Aldo’s Pizzeria XYZ Road” or “Ok Google, I want to book a table at Aldo’s Pizzeria for tonight”. For any of these searches, you can set your schema markup to show your google location pin, menu, and contact number for table booking.

Hyper personalization and localization helps you slip in to your target audience’s usual pool of consideration and offers you a better chance at a customer visit.

4. Building a mobile-friendly website

Our handheld mobile phones serve us for a majority of our online search requirements. Making sure your website has optimal mobile phone view is really important to get more visibility through voice search.

If you are building a new website test your site for mobile view before you even build on large amount of content. A chic, smart view with easy access, hassle free payment gateway integration and other informational pages helps you rank higher on UI, and in turn on the search results page. This also involves making sure your website loads fast and offers smooth navigation.

5. Optimizing content for customer questions

As mentioned already, most people ask specific questions to their voice assistants. To create and upload content optimized for queries, you must first understand the kind of questions that people might ask about your products and services, or the type of business in general.

Once you have this figured out, you can start building on the content. It might not always be possible to add targeted questions to your product description. One solution to this is to have a separate Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page built only with all common questions and their answers. This helps you target featured snippets section on the Google search results page. You can also add the keywords tied to high intent users on the meta description of your webpage.

The “People also ask” section in the search results and other keyword research tools can help you list on the most important keywords that you want to rank for.

Moving ahead

Having an efficient SEO strategy for your webpage is the first step to setting up a high ranking website. Voice search optimization helps you rank high in organic search and have more high intent buyers land on your website. So, there’s your win-win!

With years of experience in SEO and setting up of digital business spaces, and with a record of delivering fantastic results, SpikeOn can help you in the process of voice search optimization of your website.

You can reach out to us at [email protected] for all kinds of business queries.