Voice Search SEO: How to Optimize your Website on Local Search in 2023

Nowadays, whenever I watch TV, I get to see plenty of ads for Google Home and Amazon’s Echo. Have you wondered why they telecast so many ads of these smart speakers?

Because Voice Search is revolutionizing our searching process and of course, it’s gonna be the dawn for tomorrow’s digital world. It’s damn easy, 3.7 times faster than traditional search, and more conversational.

However, you’ll need a well-optimized content to rank on top in voice search. And you don’t need to hire a special team or invest huge capital to do that. You just need to tweak your SEO strategy and focus a bit more on voice search SEO.

But it’s better to clear a few of the concepts regarding voice search SEO before moving on to the optimizing tips.

So if you’re familiar with voice search SEO, you can use this jump to section to navigate.

What Is Voice Search SEO?

Voice Search SEO is a technique to optimize the content, keywords, phrases, metadata, etc so that it can rank on top whenever a user asks a question. This technique primarily focuses on the natural language of people to provide them results (or answers) according to that.

 

How Voice Search Works?

Voice Search is based on speech recognition technology. It combines the letters and sound blocks to convert our speech into a group of words and search it over the internet to provide you suitable results.

Voice Search has grown by 35 times since 2008 and it’s not gonna stop. It’s not only changing the way we search for content, but also the SEO. This moves us to the next points which is…

How Voice Search Is Changing SEO?

Currently, SEO is being done on typing oriented keywords. Simply, we create or optimize our content on behalf of keywords people type. These searches are short whereas voice searches are wordier and are significantly longer.

You would ask Siri “Hey Siri, show me some medium-sized blue denim jackets” instead of “Blue denim jackets medium”.

Voice Search would change the traditional SEO and content marketing technique in a few of these ways:

• Target Keywords would be longer.
• Keywords would be more certain and detailed.
• Content will have a conversational language.
• Content will be written more in answer form.
• Content will satisfy user intent more.

As a content strategist, you should optimize your content for voice search from now. But why should you do that? This brings us to our next point…

Why Voice Search SEO Is Important?

Voice Search SEO is important because users will search more and more via voice in the future. If your content isn’t optimized for voice search, it’ll rank nowhere.

If you think the future of voice search is far away, you should think again:

• 25 percent of searches on Windows 10 desktop are done with voice.
• 50 percent of the searches will be done via voice by 2020.
• 20 percent of all mobile queries on Google are voice search.
• 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search daily.

This number will only increase as voice search enhances the customer experience and reduces the efforts we make while searching.

Tips To Do Voice Search SEO To Rank First On Google

1. Use Schema Markup

Schema Markup also known as Structured Data is a code that is added to your website. This code helps search engine platforms to understand your site’s content, what that content means and why it is there. It also assists search engines to crawl and display your content accordingly.

Schema markup can also be used to get improved and comprehensive search results that enhance the user experience. Have a look at this example:

 

The reviews, preparation time, and ratings are displayed here with the help of this schema markup:

Google fetched the data added in the above schema markup to display it with the video. If a user gets to see this much information, he’ll be more convinced to click on the video.

Remember one thing, schema markup won’t improve your voice search ranking results. However, it displays more illustrated search results that describe the relevance of the content to the user’s query. The more your content is relevant to the voice search query, the better it’ll satisfy the user intent.

Leveraging Schema Markup best practices for SEO will provide more information to the search engines about your website, which helps them rank it easily on SERPs.

This drives us to the next point.

2. Satisfy User Intent

Hummingbird, an algorithm released by Google in 2013, thoroughly changed the way content was being written on the websites. Content creators started avoiding keyword stuffing which was being done to get a higher rank on search results.

Nowadays, the content is all about user intent. If your content doesn’t pacify the user intent, Google will automatically index it down on SERPs(and it’s really smart in doing this).

User Intent is the purpose of a user behind any search. If your content doesn’t contain what a user came for, they’ll exit your page. This will increase your bounce rate and it’s really hard to rank on top for a page with a high bounce rate.

Mobile SEO plays a major role in improving the bounce rate. Read the next point to learn how…

3. Be Mobile-optimized

You won’t carry your laptop or desktop in the bathroom, would you? Mobile devices are compact and portable and you can carry them anywhere. And since every smartphone now comes with a built-in virtual assistant, we use voice search almost everywhere.

Here’s research from Perficientdigital that shows the places where we use voice search:

You can see in the above graph that people are using voice search in different places. And in 2019 the use of voice search is also increased. This can be because of the access to smartphones that have personal assistants. And almost all of the voice searches are done with a mobile phone, mobile-optimization should be your priority.

Few things you can do for mobile-optimization are:

• Optimize your mobile pages using AMP.
• Make your website responsive.
• Check your site’s speed with GTMetrix and improve it.
• Make your content more readable on mobile devices.
• Use Google’s mobile-friendly test tool to test your website.

You can see MakeWebBetter’s mobile-friendly test result here. Mobile optimization is one of the biggest factors that can improve your search ranking and drive traffic to your website. But the next trick can also be a traffic booster for your website.

4. Create Content That Gives Candid Answers

I’ve already told you, people wouldn’t do voice search the same way they do text search. They’ll ask questions that are long and more specific. Research found that there has been a growth of 61 percent in question keyphrases. The stats below shows how people are using question keywords to ask queries via voice:

You’ll have to write content in a way so that it can answer their questions. For instance, if a user asks “Ok Google, tell me the number of calories a tortilla has.” You’ll have to write content that sounds more conversational and gives a candid answer to them.

A direct answer not only satisfies a user but also has a high chance to appear in featured snippets. Read the next point to learn how your content can rank in featured snippets.

5. Target The 0th Spot

I’ve already created a blog where I explained how to create content that can rank for featured snippets. It also contains some other great SEO tips that can boost your organic traffic. Read it if you want to or even if you don’t I’m sharing the tips here.

Featured snippets or rich snippets can also be called the #0 spot on SERPs because it comes above the first search result. You can see the screenshot below as an example of a featured snippet.

You should always try to rank for the featured snippets.

• Use lists to mention the different points in your content.
• Use tools like Answer The Public to find out most asked questions related to your niche and write perfect answers to those questions.
• Try to keep those answers under 50 words. Make it clear so the reader can understand the concept by reading those 50 words.
• Make your question a heading(H2 to H6) and write its answer as a paragraph.

Research by Ahrefs on 2 Million featured snippets found that a featured snippet when appears, gets 6.4% more clicks than the first search result. Another research found that 90.21 percent of the featured snippets come from the URLs rank between 1 to 5.

This can give you the idea that your answer has to be straightforward, easy to understand, and specific. Wanna know how to write specific answers? Read the next point.

6. Use Long-tail Keywords Smartly

This a great voice search SEO technique to enhance your content’s rank. Since voice search queries contain more words, you can target long-tail keywords to rank on top on Google.

You can see that speech searches are longer and if you want to improve your rank on voice search, use long-tail keywords that contain more words.

This doesn’t mean you should start using 9 words long keyword everywhere in your content. You just have to use it smartly in your content so that it contains keywords and makes sense at the same time.

7. Improve Page Speed

Either it’s voice search or text search, if you want to climb on top of SERPs, your site should be THE FLASH of the internet. This can be done by improving page speed.

Page speed was a crucial factor for desktop searches but after Google’s speed update, it has become vital for mobile searches too. Google released an update in 2018 where it said that this update will affect only those pages that deliver the slowest experience to the users.

So if you have such kind of pages on your site, try to optimize them to boost their speed. Even if you don’t have, you should check the speed of your website’s pages just like a regular health checkup.

Tips to improve page speed:

• Use Google’s Page speed testing tool to check page speed.
• Compress images on the page to the optimal size.
• Enable browser caching.
• Use Gzip to compress HTML, CSS and JS files under 150KB.
• Remove unused scripts on the page.
• Reduce server response time to 200ms.

Page speed affects your bounce rate significantly since 40% of the users leave the website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. The worst thing is that 80% of visitors don’t return.

8. Stay Updated On GMB

GMB or Google My Business is a major ranking factor on local searches according to Moz. Leverage it in the best way possible to stay on top of local search rankings.

• Use business.google.com to set up your business account.
• Don’t ignore any review or query asked on GMB.
• Add all the information and always keep it updated just like we did here.

This won’t boost your website’s ranking but it’ll help local searchers a lot to know and connect with your business. If they find more convenient to reach out to you, they’ll more likely to contact you.

Let’s Wrap Up

Voice search is getting more and more prevalent as people who aren’t familiar with the technology can use it too. I’ve seen children searching for videos on YouTube via voice, illiterate people who don’t know how to type, searching for their favorite movies on Google with voice.

Definitely, this’ll be a trend for tomorrow. Who’ll use voice search optimization techniques from now will reach the summit of result pages. Leverage the above SEO tips to improve your rank and stay in the trend.