Optimise Your Website For Voice Search

With Voice-activated assistants becoming more ubiquitous in everyday life and with nearly 55% of users using voice recognition on their devices, it brings with it a whole new type of search system. Voice-Based Search.

The main differences between how one types a search query and how one says it can be very different. You’re not likely to type a full sentence such as “Where might I find good Chinese restaurants in the local area?” and far more likely to type “Local Chinese restaurant”. The opposite is true for voice search. We don’t normally talk to each other in short statements and this is true for talking to a machine too. You’ll likely voice a whole sentence to a machine and hope it gets a correct result since you’re used to talking in that manner.

At Yellow Cherry, we are researching ways into optimizing our client’s websites to take advantage of this new dynamic feature. We have come up with a couple of points that should help a business interested in attracting traffic from voice searches.

1. Know your audience – according to Salesforce, younger people use voice search a lot more than the older generations. So if your business is aiming for a younger audience, then it would be more effective for traffic if your content is optimized for voice search than if you were targeting the older generations. Of course, as time goes on, this will slowly change as the younger become older.
2. Add Conversational Elements/Persona Blogs – As most searches will likely begin with a question, you will need to work out what someone is most likely to ask before they need your services. It could be like “Are there any plumbers in Inverness?”  “Where is the best place to buy windows in the Highlands”. Then you’ll need to go about adding these questions into your content so it’s picked up by search engines. And of course, it’s important to provide answers to these questions as a voice assistant may pick up on those and repeat them outloud to the person making the query. Having a series of blog posts with these questions as titles and the answer in the content would be an ideal strategy.
3. FAQ pages – In a similar vein to the above point, by creating a list of common questions and providing answers in a conversational way (speaking in a natural but concise way instead of providing a short curt answer), this will help build more SEO for a voice-based search.
4. Hyper-Local – As most voice assistants are on mobile devices, a user could ask it a question about what is around them. By making sure your address and location are clearly labelled on Search Engines, you could take advantage of this. So when a user walking a couple of streets away asks “Where is the nearest takeaway to me?” your store may come up first even if there is a closer store.

If you are looking to integrate this tool into your marketing strategy then why not contact us today to find out how we can help optimise your website through the power of voice search.