Last Updated 4 weeks by Emily Standley-Allard
It’s estimated that as many as 111.8 million people in the US are using voice search features today. According to Emarketer, one-third of the United States population is using voice to conduct searches. Therefore, it’s necessary to optimize your website for voice search. Let’s learn how!
71% of consumers prefer to conduct queries by voice instead of typing
With cars and trucks already driving themselves these days, it’s not a stretch of the imagination by any means that not too far off in the distant future, keyboards will become nearly obsolete. In fact, Samsung already made an invisible AI keyboard for your phone. Everyone around you will be speaking into their phones instead of typing using voice search.
The ability to send commands by voice through our smartphones and voice search enabled devices has grown in popularity. Voice search apps, software, and devices like Alexa, Google Home, Cortana, Siri, and Amazon Echo continue to sell in record numbers to people everywhere. In 2022, this is motivating some massive changes in search engine optimization (SEO) and how websites are optimized for voice-enabled interactions.
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The future is a blink away. George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 is here my friends.
If you aren’t optimizing for voice search you are hurting your SEO.
Consider these stats:
- More than 66 million Americans own a smart speaker (about 25% of the adult population!).
- Content that ranks high in desktop search is also very likely to appear as a voice search answer: about 75% of voice search results rank in the top 3 for that query.
- 31% of smartphone users worldwide use voice technology at least once a week.
Three-quarters of all US households are expected to own at least one smart speaker.
(Microsoft)
According to Microsoft, nearly three-quarters of all US households are expected to own at least one smart speaker. TURN IT OFF ALEXA!!
As many as 14 million people have become smart speakers for the first time, with the average home having 2.3 speakers. More and more people are expected to purchase smart speakers over 2021, with ownership forecast to nearly double to 45 percent in 2022.
More than half of all owners of smart speakers use their devices daily.
(NPR)
Ownership of smart speakers is on the rise, with more than half of all owners of intelligent speakers use their device daily. Furthermore, over a third use it to carry out voice searches. This trend can only continue to grow as more and more people become aware of smart devices and voice search.
Making Voice Search Work for You
According to some leading business strategy sites, brands that redesign their websites to support visual and voice search by early 2021 will increase their revenue by 30%.
Voice optimization plays a major role in a blog’s digital media strategy. Your business needs to stay ahead of the curve to keep up with these trends that are happening as you read this.
After learning about voice optimization and doing further research here are five simple ways that anyone can use to optimize their blog or website for voice.
#1 Implement long-tail keyword phrases
Someone who is speaking into their phone is likely going to search for more than one or two words. This is great for you as a small business or blog owner because it means less competition if you start using long-tail keyword phrases in your content.
Voice queries are conversational, which means you have to optimize for those searches. In other words, you have to hit those long-tail queries and, most importantly, ensure that your content is ranked in the top three spots for those queries.
For instance, if you are selling vegan beauty or fashion items in your ecommerce store then accept that you may never rank first in Google for “Fashion for women”. That short keyword produces millions of results!
And that’s way too much competition!
You need to specify throughout your product description that you are selling for example “handcrafted vegan purses”, which produces significantly lower numbers.
Someone voice searching for handcrafted vegan purses (for example) is more likely to garner specific visits your site from people truly interested in purchasing.
These prospects know exactly what they are looking for and are prepared to pay.
With so little competition, it now costs less to target that long-tail keyword phrase in paid search campaigns through Google.
The benefits of voice optimization are starting to pay off quite nicely.
When you speak, you are likely to use sensory language more often than if you were to simply type. People speak faster than they type so will not omit how they are viewing the world or what’s in their head.
Optimize your website for voice search correctly and get ranked high in the SERPs by getting this course!
#2 Visually construct your text
A very important sense that you probably speak about quite often is what you visually see.
Therefore, it is smart to use visual cues throughout your content. Try to paint an accurate picture in other words. This is why Instagram is so very popular for brands and making sales.
10 Secrets to Drastically Improve Your Instagram Traffic
With voice search, the keyword doesn’t need to be in the title tag but in the content itself. Your entire body of text in your article or product description is game.
You would not simply write “Website Help”, when “top expert website wordpress design help” provides such better assistance to voice-searchers.
#3 Write in a conversational tone
In case you haven’t noticed, I have been typing this article exactly how I would talk to you in person. My typing is in a conversational tone, which is important for voice optimization.
Avoid using acronyms unless you are spelling them out in parenthesis and of course, do not use anything like “LOL”. After all do you know anyone who actually says that in person?
Someone using their Google Home might talk to the device as if it were a person sitting next to them:
Use lots of questions in your article that explain who, what, when, where, how, and why to optimize for voice. This brings us to the next item on our list that provides you a better way to answer questions that your customers have.
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#4 Create an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page for your site
An FAQ page answers questions that your visitors ask you in email, but it could also be used as a sitemap of sorts.
See the statement above linking to a post about how to get more blog traffic? You could answer it on your FAQ page with a brief snippet of your article about increasing blog traffic and a “read more” button below.
This could bring your page to the forefront of Google whenever someone asks their device how to get more blog traffic. “According to -your site here-, a way to get more blog traffic is by promoting to Pinterest on a regular basis”.
Once you have provided value to your visitor, they are more likely to go to your site and learn more ways to bring traffic to their blog. They may even totally convert and subscribe to your mailing list or purchase a product from you.
Where should you place your FAQ page? I see that most sites place it either in the footer or the header menu under the “About Us” category.
It may seem old-fashioned, as FAQ pages originated in the early days of the web, but they are highly recommended to increase search optimization. The best practice for an FAQ page would be to use bullets in a list, which may grant you a featured snippet at the top of someone’s Google search.
Natural language understanding has been a tough nut to crack, but thanks to Google’s continued investment in AI, it has reached a whole new level. At I/O 2021, Google introduced MUM — Multitask United Model.
According to Google, this new language model is 1000x more powerful than BERT, released in 2019. MUM is coming to Google products sometime in the future.
Read the whole post here:
Google’s MUM Understands What You Need
#5 Bank on featured snippets from Google
I’m sure you have seen a paragraph of text or a bulleted list at the top of a Google search. These are called featured snippets, which Google had created for their Google Home products and to provide users with faster answers. Example:
The featured snippet provided on how to make money online starts with bolded text and is usually accompanied by an image next to it. This snippet really stands out to someone who searched for “how to make money online” and is more likely to click on the link below to get more information.
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It is relatively easy to create your own featured snippets on your site or blog by baiting Google with the following table of content display ideas:
- keyword-rich paragraphs of up to two sentences with an image aligned beside it
- ordered or unordered list
- table of information
- valuable video
- infographic
Any one of those ideas will give you a higher chance of landing a featured snippet in a Google search. Imagine the thousands or millions of amount of views your blog or site will receive when you are chosen for this selection.
You can use this as snippet bait!
Conclusion
Optimize your site for voice by implementing any or all of those strategies listed above. It is highly important for you to start thinking of ways to attract potential visitors who are using voice. Get busy and get creative!
Comment below on your best traffic strategies I’d love to hear them and don’t forget to share on social:)
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