With rapid growth in popularity, voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and others have become the default way to receive new information for many mobile phone users. Your target audience is now capable of making inquiries for things like weather updates, the most affordable summer styles, and performing tasks online. This means that optimizing your website for voice search can help you reach a larger audience and improve your SEO efforts.
SEO for voice search has all the usual hallmarks of classic SEO tactics but with a few unique twists. Here’s the rundown on how we separate standard SEO and SEO for voice search, but you’ll have to work with us to get a taste of our secret sauce!
What is Voice Search SEO?
Voice search SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the process of optimizing a website’s content and structure to improve its visibility and ranking in voice search results. With the growing popularity of voice assistants and voice-activated search, optimizing for voice search has become an important aspect of SEO.
Voice search SEO is most effective when a website’s content and technical elements align with how people speak and ask questions when using voice assistants. Voice search queries are often longer, more conversational, and have a different intent compared to traditional text-based searches.
Therefore, voice search SEO requires a different approach to keyword research, content creation, and website optimization to match the nuances of voice-based interactions.
Some key elements of voice search SEO include:
- Conversational language: Optimizing website content with natural language that mirrors the way people speak when using voice search. This includes using long-tail keywords, question-based queries, and a more conversational tone in content.
- Mobile optimization: Ensuring that a website is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and provides a smooth user experience on mobile devices, as voice search is commonly used on mobile devices.
- Contextual understanding: Creating content that provides contextually relevant answers to voice search queries and understanding the intent behind the queries.
- Structured data markup: Utilizing structured data markup, such as schema.org markup, to help search engines better understand the content on a website and provide more accurate results for voice search queries.
- User experience: Providing a positive user experience on a website, including easy navigation, clear content, and engaging elements, as voice assistants consider user experience signals when selecting results for voice search queries.
Does Voice Search Impact SEO?
Absolutely! Voice search simply captions what a user says into the microphone, then drops that caption into a Google, Bing, or Siri search. The biggest difference is that the results displayed on your cell phone or mobile device can also incorporate your previous voice searches to establish a pattern of your voice search behavior.
Standard SEO tactics will still pick up online traffic, and your website’s metadata will still get picked up by search engine machine learning algorithms, but with longer search criteria via voice, added keyword phrase targets are needed. Incorporate voice search SEO into your normal SEO tactics for your website by using professionals like the specialists at Fuze7!
Why is Voice Search SEO Important?
There are several reasons why your company should be focused on voice search as part of its SEO strategy. Digital trends are changing rapidly with the advent of AI, and how machine algorithms learn to align consumers with products and services. These trends include:
- Changing search behavior: Voice search is becoming increasingly popular, and people are using voice assistants to perform searches using natural language and conversational queries. This means that the way people search for information is changing, and websites need to adapt to this shift in search behavior to ensure they remain visible in voice search results.
- Growing adoption of voice assistants: Voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, and others, are being integrated into various devices, including smartphones, smart speakers, smart TVs, and even cars. The increasing adoption of voice assistants means that more people are using voice search to access information, and optimizing for voice search SEO allows websites to tap into this growing user base.
- Rise of mobile devices: Voice search is commonly used on mobile devices, as it provides a convenient and hands-free way to search for information while on the go. With the increasing use of mobile devices for internet browsing, optimizing for voice search SEO ensures that a website is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and provides a seamless user experience on mobile devices, which is crucial for SEO success.
- Local search optimization: Voice search is often used for local searches, such as finding nearby businesses or getting directions. Optimizing a website for local search, including local keywords, location information, and schema markup, can help improve visibility in voice search results for location-specific queries, which is particularly important for businesses with a local presence.
- Featured snippets: Voice assistants often pull answers from featured snippets, which are displayed at the top of search results, to provide quick answers to voice search queries. Optimizing content to be featured in snippets can enhance a website’s chances of being selected as the voice assistant’s response, which can significantly boost visibility and traffic to the website.
At Fuze7, we use SEO tactics focused on voice search by also using ChatGPT to help build out our strategy. With ChatGPT, our experts can ask the AI ultra-specific, tactical questions. The answers we receive go into our core marketing strategy foundations.
An Example of Voice Search Marketing:
Let’s build a case study based on a hypothetical company named “ABC Shoe Company” that offers plumbing services in a local area such as Portland. The main objective of ABC Shoe Company is to increase its online visibility in voice search results to attract new customers using voice assistants to search for local plumbing services.
Fuze7 would recommend a strategy based on keyword research, site content optimization, local search results keyword phrase targeting for customers searching with “near me” in the phrase, and mobile optimization of ABC Shoe Company’s website to ensure proper loading times and mobile-friendly text or graphic images.
In this way, we are still helping you with your SEO strategy for your website, but we are incorporating deeper SEO tactics for mobile site visitors using voice search.
Contact Fuze7
Voice search SEO is indeed complex, but it’s not impossible to tackle for a team of digital marketing professionals that do this work on a daily basis! If you need a comprehensive marketing strategy for leveraging new technology such as voice search SEO and ChatGPT, drop an email to info@fuze7.com or give us a call at (503) 830-0355. You can also connect with us on our website.