Voice Search and SEO

With the rise of personal virtual assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, more people are using voice search to find the information that they need. Because of that, it will behoove you to take that into consideration as you work on your search engine optimization.

Semantics Matter

When you are creating content for voice search engine optimization, you must remember that people talk differently than they write. Try writing more like you speak to account for this fact. That way, when people use voice to search, they will be more likely to find you.

Answer Questions throughout the Customer’s Journey

The basic customer journey is awareness, interest, evaluation, purchase, and loyalty. What are the questions your audience asks during each phase of their buying journey that you can answer? Formulate as many questions as you can for each stage in the buying journey, to help guide your audience and improve the voice search return results.

Create FAQs for Every Part of Your Website

An FAQ is just the frequently asked questions that you answer. Since most voice search is phrased in the form of a question, the more places you have questions and answers on your site, the more times you can show up in voice search. Remember that voice search only returns one answer to the searcher, so you may want to ask and answer the same question in different ways.

Identify Information for Voice Search

When you create your content, think about the types of information your audience is looking for and try to create a voice search component to that. For example, if you have 100 products, there should be at least 100 questions and answers on your site that voice search can locate for your audience. Using schema markup will identify this information for you too.

Build Custom Skills in Alexa (or Other Products)

This is one of the ways you can optimize voice search. It’s a little more tricky than other methods, but it does work. You can build skills in Alexa, and you can also create tasks for Google Assistant and other virtual assistants depending on their set-up. This works great for podcasts, recipes, news publications and areas in which you already use structured data markup.

Mobile First – More Than Friendly

You probably used to read about how your websites need to be “mobile-friendly,” but now you really need to go beyond that and create your website with a mobile-first strategy. Search algorithms already give more credence to websites that have a mobile-first approach. Thankfully, when you optimize for mobile it makes your site better in every way on every platform. The same can be said for optimizing for voice search by using more questions and answers on your website. It just makes it better for SEO in every way.

Finally, as voice SEO takes over regular SEO, it becomes clear that voice search engine optimization is just SEO. SEO, while about getting more traffic from search is also really about creating content that your audience can find and use, and that is valuable to them.