Its estimated that by 2022 over 55% of households worldwide will own some sort of smart speaker device in their home and currently over 20% of google searches are conducted by voice. With this in mind if you’re not optimising your content for voice search you are missing out on a ridiculous opportunity!!! In todays video we give you five simple voice search SEO hints and tips to get you thinking about how you can optimise your website for voice.
It may sound a little daunting but actually optimising your website for voice search really isn’t as difficult you might think and lets face it, if you’re using best practice to optimise your site for mobile then you’re half way there!
As with most things we talk about here at Yellow Tuxedo, the key to nailing voice search is starting with nailing your keyword strategy and understanding how your audience is searching out your content. With voice search this might vary slightly from how someone would type into the google search bar. Usually if someone is asking Alexa or Siri something its for a quick answer to a relevant question rather than to trawl pages of content for inspiration. With voice search there are three defined keyword intentions…
1) Informational intent- The user is looking to LEARN something from the search to solve a specific problem.
2) Directional intent- The user is looking to GO somewhere or find out a geographic location.
3) Transactional intent- The user intends to DO something, often with regards to a purchase or activity.
By curating your content to ensure that these intentions are met in everything you put out to the world you will really start to improve your chances of being pulled up in the voice search…
Once you have spent time researching your audiences search intention a good piece of advice would be to create a really juicy and informative FAQ’s page on your website. Use those high volume, long tail search terms as your question base and answer them in a short and concise response. Not only is this good for voice search SEO but this will also improve your chances of being featured as a snippet on the SERPS.
A high percentage of voice search commands are local search based. With this in mind it will serve you well if you stay up to date with optimising your website for local SEO. Ensure that any relevant data like address, phone number, opening hours and such like are visible to be crawled on your site. Even more importantly make sure that this data is mirrored EXACTLY on your Google My Business page.
Schema markup is a type of structured data that lets Google know exactly what your content is about. If you are not sure how to implement this we will be doing a video on this soon. Schema is code that you can put on your website that informs the search engines about your content. It could be a recipe, a review, a product line you are promoting, information about your shop front…this is a powerful tool that will improve your chances of getting your content shown as a snippet or as a voice response.
A really good voice search SEO hint is to make sure that you work on your website page load speed to get it as fast as possible. Research has found that on average a voice search will try and pull up data in around 0.54 seconds as opposed to a desktop load time of 2.1 seconds. Time is money [ well your money!] and Alexa just hasn’t got the time to hang around and wait for your website to load! If your site is running slow, Google is just going to favour another piece of content over yours! Work on getting your pages to load as fast as possible without compromising the quality of your website.
Do be sure to watch the full video below where I talk about our 5 voice search SEO hints and tips in more detail and don’t forget if you want to stay up to date with our content do subscribe to our YouTube channel as each week we bring you a fresh new video all about digital skills and online presence!
Of course if you have any questions do be sure to chat to a member of our team, we’re always happy to talk things through with you!
Emily x