Voice search is becoming increasingly popular in the digital world. Although it has been around for almost a decade now, it has gained tremendous popularity in the last few years. According to an estimate by comScore, nearly 50 percent of online searches will be conducted through voice search by the end of 2020. Reasons for this might include the increase in smartphone usage and the changes in how people are searching online.

As we transition to a voice-first world, businesses need to optimize their website and content accordingly. An essential step in this regard is optimizing your website to include voice search. This helps you gain a competitive edge in the online market.

In this article, we discuss — in detail — what exactly is voice search and why it matters. We’ve included voice search engine optimization techniques to help you prepare your website and your digital business for this future tech.

What is Voice Search?

In simple words, voice search is a voice recognition technology that helps people in performing searches by speaking into the device. The devices can range from computers and smartphones to other home assistant devices.

Voice searches through Google and other search engines have increased exponentially in the last few years, hence it is essential to understand voice search SEO and how to incorporate it in your digital marketing agency. Optimizing for voice search has become a key component to many SEO Service offerings.

The Importance of Voice Search

Voice search has grown tremendously over the last few years among smartphone users. It’s much easier to command a search through voice than to type it out on a tiny screen. Consequently, all the major producers of mobile devices and software developers are investing in the development of sophisticated voice-activated personal assistants and tools. The most popular ones are Cortana, Siri, Google Voice Search and Amazon Alexa.

Additionally, it is also expected there will be more than one billion devices featuring voice assistants by the end of 2020. This shows the relevance of voice search and how important it is that online businesses optimize for voice.

7 Easy Steps to Optimize Your Website for Voice Search

Create FAQs Pages

To optimize the website for voice search, you must provide answers related to your website to the visitors and users. It is a good idea to create a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section, which answers the most popular questions asked by the visitors and users related to your niche. Be sure to include questions that can easily be asked verbally.

Optimize Your Website to Load Quickly

The loading speed of a web page is one of the most important ranking factors for a website. This is also a crucial factor that impacts your ranking on search engines. A website that loads fast, contains content that is quickly processed and has an efficient web hosting server will rank higher on search engines.

Users may find your website through voice search, but if your page load time takes longer than a few seconds to load your visitors will look for alternate options. You can optimize your website to load quickly by installing a few plugins to quicken page loading time.

Optimize Your Website for Local SEO

As a local company, it’s beneficial to have it listed in local online business directories. A lot of times, voice searches are performed to source information about products and services that are found locally. Creating relevant content for your local audience helps your business get better responses to voice searches. The idea is to create and publish content that helps you get more traffic to your site. Your strategy for optimizing for local search should include optimizing for voice search when building your local search marketing strategy.

Use Schema Markup

It is vital to deliver quick results to your voice search customers. The Schema markup works along similar lines for providing rich and accurate data to the customers about a business or a website.

Schema markup, or structured data markup, helps in getting more information about a business related to its events, price, menus and so on. This information is fetched directly on the search engines which allows them to display the data whenever a user looks for it. It also helps in reading and presenting information about the website quickly and efficiently.

Use Long-Tail Keywords

Voice search makes use of voice commands by the users so make sure to include long-tail keywords in your optimization strategy as these keyword sets are close to the natural search language of your users. Since voice searches are made from long strings of text, the voice assistants in the smartphones should be developed to deliver answer-like results for different user queries. This will also help you optimize your website for featured snippets. It is advisable to narrow down the keywords that might be used for voice search.

Secure Your Website with SSL

Besides the page load time of a website, search engines also favor websites that are secure and certified. Search engines regard sites that can be trusted, irrespective of which industry it belongs to or the type of content it provides.

Securing your website with SSC is a great way to win trust. The HTTPS protocol makes sure that visitors and the search engines can identify your site as secure and trust it completely. It indicates that your website adheres to all the rules of good online practices.

Use Simple Words and Short Sentences

In voice searches, people generally tend to ask simple questions to ensure the personal voice assistant understands it easily and can convert it into search results. Typically, a short answer is displayed first when doing a voice search. If this answer is relevant for the user, he/she can go ahead and click on the link to visit the particular website. Therefore if your content is succinct and the voice search assistant can easily find the answer in your content, you stand a better chance of your site being displayed in the results. This will result in increased traffic to your website.

The answer the voice assistant is seeking should be useful for the user, easily framed and written in words that are listed in organic search results (according to your keyword research).

Conclusion
Voice search is one of the important trends today and ensuring that your website is optimized for it is a great way to gain a competitive edge for your business.