Voice Search is increasingly becoming one of the most important and powerful technologies in today’s digital age, especially for business. With millions of users searching the web using smart speakers and voice-activated devices like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant, businesses and website owners need to start implementing Voice Search Optimization (VSO) into their digital marketing strategies. In the coming years, voice search is expected to surpass text-based searches, making it crucially important for brands to understand and prepare their website for the rise of voice technology.
Benefits of Voice Search
Voice Search offers numerous benefits for website owners and generates a new channel of customer engagement. It is faster and more convenient for users to search for information using their voice rather than typing, which increases the rate of search queries. Additionally, VSO can also provide a more personalized user experience as users’ voice and the context of their requests can be taken into account when providing search results.
Voice Search also opens up an entirely new channel of commerce and brand awareness. With many voice-activated devices being equipped with incredible retail capabilities, it is now possible for businesses to make sales directly through the user’s smart speaker and even run voice-activated marketing campaigns. With Voice Search, customers can now ask Siri about local businesses nearest and have them appear as the top search result.
As well, with knowledge about the user’s location, businesses can create highly personalized experiences and reach targeted audiences with the information they are looking for. This generates more traffic and ultimately can help increase a website’s visibility and improve performance.
How to Prepare for Voice Search
Optimizing a website for voice search provides a handful of things that need to be focused on:
Mobile-Friendly Websites
Firstly, it is important for website owners to ensure that their website is mobile-friendly if they want to improve their rankings on voice search. No matter where the search is initiated from – a smart device, such as an iPhone or Android, or a voice-activated speaker – the search results will prioritize mobile-friendly websites.
Focus on Local SEO
Having a local SEO strategy in play is also incredibly powerful as voice searches are typically initiated for location-specific tasks, such as finding the nearest restaurant or business location. By optimizing a website for local searches and making sure the website contains all of the important information that its users might request will help it to appear at the top of voice search results.
Long-Tail Keywords
Voice search results typically return answers of around 29 characters in length, so using long-tail keywords, which are phrases of 3-5 words, in content and metadata is important for ranking well on voice search. These phrases should be natural-sounding and conversational rather than written around the typical search-engine keyword strategy.
Structured Data Markup
Search engines need proper data to understand the content on a website for Voice Search, which is why using structured data markup, such as Schema.org, can help make it easier for the search engines to read the website content and provide relevant search results.
The Future of Voice Search
As voice search technology continues to evolve and improve, the way that internet users find, read, and interact with content will change considerably. Websites that do not take advantage of these changes risk falling behind the times and missing out on the potential traffic and sales that can come from Voice Search. Now is the time for website owners to get prepared and implement VSO strategies in order to remain relevant in today’s digital age.
It is important for businesses to keep updated on the latest technology changes in order to attract and provide a personalized user experience with their websites. In the end, voice search is shaping up to be the next major leap in digital marketing and cannot be ignored if a website owner wishes to remain competitive.