The world of digital marketing has undergone drastic changes through the years due to the emergence of various technologies, voice search being one of them. The popularity and use of smart assistants and smart speakers like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home have also become widespread. With these trends, users are now able to find the information they need online through voice commands.
Such developments have also prompted marketing professionals to optimize their websites to perform well not only for traditional text searches but also for voice. After all, this relatively new search method gave birth to a different consumer search behavior and intent. These are all crucial details that businesses must study and learn to handle to ensure sustainability.
If you are in the process of reinventing your digital strategy to optimize your website for voice search, here are some key strategies worth considering:
1. It’s Not Enough to End Up On the First Page
When it comes to optimizing your website for traditional text searches, appearing anywhere on the first page of the search results can already be considered an achievement. This is because users are known to commonly scroll through the first page and check out other results. Considering this, marketers identify the best keywords to target and the best strategies to use to improve their position rankings.
However, voice search has significantly changed this system up.
When users give a voice query, they are usually only presented with one answer. If they find what they need from this first result, they are usually satisfied and stop the search altogether. On the other hand, if they don’t get what they want, they will change the voice command.
Considering this, it doesn’t matter anymore if you rank second or third on SERPs for traditional searches. Voice search in Google only gathers the top result.
2. It’s Essential to Study Voice Search Intent
Just like how you study your consumer’s search intent to provide relevant written content, you must also study how they use smart assistants and voice search to identify the best strategies.
One key difference between a typed query and a spoken one is that in the former, users commonly type phrases or sentence fragments. In the latter, people usually use longer and more complete sentences, such as “What is the weather like today?”
One insight you can get from this is that content incorporating more natural language patterns may perform better for spoken queries. Rather than using shorter keywords or phrases, you will do better with long-tail searches and adding full sentences as your targeted keywords.
You can get ideas for long-tail keywords by checking out the “People Also Ask” table in a Google search result page.
3. There are More Spoken Queries with Local Intent
Voice search is found to be used more by consumers when on their mobile devices rather than in a desktop environment. Moreover, a study revealed that 53% of those who used Google voice search used it when driving. Additionally, spoken queries using mobile devices are found to be three times more likely to be local-based than text-based queries.
If your business has a physical location, these insights are something that you must take advantage of. People are possibly using their devices to find directions for queries such as “doctors near me” and the like. You can improve your visibility and boost your business by making sure your website comes up in relevant local-based searches.
Conclusion
Voice search is still a relatively new technology. Considering this, optimizing your website for spoken queries allows you to be one step ahead of your competitors. Additionally, it enables you to work your way to the top result in voice search results while everybody else is still getting started!
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