Voice Search – finally, some of the things we’ve seen in futuristic movies are really happening. Because the wave of the future seems to be moving at light speed – especially in the land of Google – many are not sure how to optimize webpages for voice search. We found a list of two opportunities to help drive traffic to your site utilizing voice search.
The main question is, how do you optimize content for voice search in 2018? That’s the popular SEO question right now as everyone is looking to take advantage of the surge in spoken queries. Google trends imply that queries associated with voice-related commands have increased 35 times since 2008 after the launches of both Google Voice Search and the iPhone. Obviously, you cannot do the exact same things for traditional search engine optimization and think you’ve got it covered – nope.
More specifically, there are a couple of things companies are using to optimize for voice search – and these things will actually help your site in general. Bonus!
There is information out there that guides us on how to optimize for voice search. Several of the articles recommended the identical tactics, which is great… means we are on the right track! From dozens of top-ranking articles, 12 best practices and corresponding tactics stood out as key solutions to optimize for voice search:
- Optimization for conversational keywords – blogs that answer customer questions are a great start. Use your existing FAQ page to create question-and-answer lists. Add questions to your product pages that people will most likely “ask” using their voice search component. You can also use Question Samurai (signup required), Answer the Public (free) and StoryBase (paid) to find popular questions around your space.
- Optimize for local queries – Claim your Google My Business listing. Add “near me” terminology to your pages. Write descriptions to show up in the local knowledge panel.
- Attempt to get your site a featured snippet – Use structured data.
- Make your content mobile-friendly – this should have happened a few years ago. Ensure that you improve your site speed for mobile. You can test this by using Google’s mobile-friendly testing tools.
- Secure your site – Google will begin to mark non-HTTPS sites as non-secure in Chrome browsers starting in July 2018.
- Answers should be short and concise
- Make your domain authoritative
- Share your content on social media frequently – Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube… yes, you should be posting to ALL of them.
- Create simple and easy-to-read content
- Make long-form content – this will make you look like an expert in your field and will increase commitment and sharing.
- Rank high in core search
- Create Actions for Google
Most of the articles discussing voice search only focus on the following four things:
- Optimize for conversational keywords.
- Optimize for local search.
- Optimize for mobile.
- Use structured data.
- Optimize for conversational keywords
- Implement Actions for Google
So, if you’re SEO’ing already, there are only two items you need to optimize for voice search:
If you were feeling overwhelmed about optimizing for voice search, your job just got a lot easier. Futuristic things sometimes take time to come to fruition. Baby steps – for now, you can focus these two key additions to increase traffic from voice search. Next, we can focus in on flying cars.