How Your Business Can Exploit Voice Search

The main thing to remember when you want to focus on local search, even if you’re not a local company, is that it’s all about appealing to people where they are. If you’re international, you will still want to use a local-first keyword optimization plan for every location where you make sales in order to capitalize on voice search.

Focus on Your Audience Not a Specific Search Engine

Voice search uses many types of data to deliver results. However, a recent study showed that one in four searches used Bing not Google, so it’s best to focus on the concept of being found via keywords and search rather than how just one search engine works. Focus instead on just your audience, no matter which type of voice search device they are using.

Put Mobile First

For any type of website today, mobile is where it’s at. If your site is not mobile-first, it’s not even worth trying to do anything else until it is. Thankfully, you can easily make your website work on mobile-first with the right type of self-hosted WordPress theme installed. Many are created for mobile-first but in any case, you should always check to see how it’s working.

Focus on Creating Content Layers

Essentially, this involves creating content based on your buyer’s journey that will generate more links and gets a lot of views. For example, if you sell jewelry, someone who might want your jewelry might search for something like “How do I choose the right silver necklace?”, “How do I choose a diamond?”, “What are blood diamonds?” and other types of searches that aren’t about a specific product. These questions are ones that your audience might need to ask first in order to move on to the buying process.

Remember That Many Voice Searches Are Screenless Searches

One thing that is really changing the way businesses do things is that many searches, almost half, are now screenless searches. That means that the device is reading to the consumer the information it finds instead of the user looking directly at the page of information. This changes things in terms of how the results appear.

Create Relevant Local Content

Each location should have its very own landing page to take advantage of creating local content. That means if you have 100 locations, you need an individual landing page for each location. Each should use keywords and elements on the page that focus on locally-relevant information that they’re searching.

Optimize the Content You Already Have

Go back to the content that is already getting results and optimize it for voice search by adding the right type of keywords, adding questions within the content, and using rich snippets.

Focus on Long-Tail Keywords

Using long-tail keywords is rather natural for voice searching. That is because most voice searches are complete sentences in the form of a question. When you are researching keywords, start with the long-tail keywords and find the ones that feel most natural and that your audience is using to find information.

Get Listed on Local Directories

Sometimes, what is old becomes new again. Due to local search and voice search, getting listed in directories locally can boost your search results exponentially. For example, being listed on the Chamber of Commerce site or as a local artist or author or expert in whatever you’re an expert in, will boost results substantially.

Get More Business Reviews

Likewise, asking for and getting more reviews for your business can help with voice search if you also focus on getting reviews from local people for each local page that you create. For example, if you own a restaurant that has several locations, reviews from people who ate at that location should be on the page.

Don’t forget to add in the right technology so that you can use schema markup language and rich snippets. This will help you get better voice search results.