Voice Search Optimization: 7 Key Strategies For Mobile

While there are many things that go into making a website voice search friendly, nearly all of them can be summarized into 7 key strategies. We shall give you a brief (but not too brief) overview of all those 7 strategies here, so you have a solid foundation in place for voice search optimization. Here we go:

#1. Understand Your Customer and Their Behavior

All marketing starts with understanding your customers, and this is even more true when it comes to voice search optimization. You need to understand your customers better than ever if you have to optimize your website and your content for these types of queries.

You should know what type of device your customers are using, from where they are searching, their age group, gender, purpose, and intent behind the search, voice assistant they use (i.e. Alexa, Google voice assistant, Siri, Cortana, etc.), and the most important factor in their purchase decisions. All these things can be learned by doing the following:

• Performing in-depth market research by interviewing your customers in-person
• Analyzing the customer profiles and marketing campaigns of your competitors
• Looking into your own marketing statistics and data
• Analyzing Google search trends for your industry
• Conducting targeted surveys and research using social media, etc.

Once you’ve done your research and collected a significant amount of data about your customers, you should create detailed personas of their profiles to get a solid idea of who your customer is. Only then you can try to optimize your website and content for their voice search queries.

#2. Focus on Long-tail and Conversational Keywords

As we explained above, voice search queries are not like regular search queries. They tend to be more long-term, and much more conversational in nature than a regular Google search query. So in order to optimize your content for such queries, you need to focus on long-tail keywords and conversational keywords while creating your content. Here’s how to do that:

• Invest in a good keyword research tool (i.e. Ubersuggest, Semrush, SimilarWeb, etc.)
• Using the tool that you purchased, extract all of the highly searched but low competition long-tail keywords as possible that are related to your content or business.
• Try to incorporate multiple long-tail keywords in your content. But don’t do keyword stuffing either – the keywords should appear on the page normally.
• As you gain traffic and backlinks using highly-searched, low-competition keywords, eventually you can try targeting some high-competition long-tail keywords too (once your domain authority has increased).

#3. Create More User-specific Content

One of the key differentiators between normal search and voice search is personalization.

Not only do the searchers ask their queries in a more personal manner, but the search engine (or voice assistant) also tries to answer them on the basis of their preferences and personal needs. Google has invested tons of resources in learning as much as possible about its users, and therefore it can identify which search results are more personalized to the searcher and, therefore more likely to resonate with him/her.

In such a situation, if you want to succeed with voice search, then you need to create more and more personalized and user-specific content. This means:

• Content that answers frequently asked questions (FAQs) of your customers in a clear and concise manner
• Content that addresses them personally/individually
• Content that allows them to figure out things based on their own individual preferences (i.e. online calculators, product suggestion tools, product comparison tools, etc.)
• Content that uses conversational language (i.e. uses words like “I”, “we”, “you”, “me”, etc.) and a friendly tone.

These are just a few of the many ideas that you can follow to create user-specific and more personalized content. If you can create some more unique types of content that are highly personalized in nature, then you can take your voice search optimization to the next level.

#4. Claim Your Google My Business Listing

Since a lot of questions asked in voice search tend to be of local nature, you need to work on your local SEO in order to optimize for it. And claiming your Google My Business listing is the first step towards local SEO. There are a number of things that Google learns about your business from this step, which include:

• Where is your business physically located
• What are your operating hours
• Your website
• Your contact number and email address
• Your products and services (you can even sell your products through your Google My Business listing in Google Maps and Google Search)
• And much more.

All these things are precisely what people ask for in Google searches, and when Google knows them through your Google My Business listing, it can provide the answer to your searchers, thus boosting your business in the process.

#5. Optimize for Local Search

After claiming your Google My Business listing, the next step you need to take is to work even more on your local SEO. And local doesn’t just mean based on location – you also need to optimize your content based on local languages. Here are a few steps that you can follow to optimize your content for voice-based local searches:

• Include more location-specific keywords in your content.
• Translate your content in all local languages – when it comes to voice search, English is not enough.
• Include directions to your office/physical address on your website, and make sure it’s understandable for visitors and Google both. The best way to do that is by embedding a Google map.
• This one is not related to SEO, but it can definitely help you with voice search optimization, too – invest in local search engine ads. When more and more people visit your website from a particular location, and you’ve Google ads running in that particular location, it’s the best way to tell Google’s algorithms that your business is a local business.

All these steps can boost your local SEO significantly, thus boosting your voice search optimization too and making your business more visible to local voice searchers.

#6. Use Schema Markup

We told you how to tell Google everything about your business through a Google My Business listing and local SEO. But those are not the only things that Google uses to learn about your business – structured data, also known as schema markup, is also used by Google’s algorithms to understand the content of your website in a better way.

Schema markup goes into the source code of your website. It doesn’t show up to the visitors of your website, but it’s highly important to Google and its crawlers as it helps them identify the nature of the content. A lot of featured snippets – blocks of information that appear on search pages to directly answer a question asked by the searchers – are generated on the basis of schema markup alone.

Therefore, if you want to optimize for voice search… it’s imperative to use structured data carefully on all your web pages. Now, if you need help with using schema markup in your web pages, you can head over to Schema.org to take a look at all the available schema types and how they can be embedded into webpages.

#7. Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Finally, optimize your website for mobile devices. Almost all of the voice searches are done on mobile devices, so if your website is not optimized for them, then you don’t stand a chance of appearing in the voice search results. Here are a few steps that you can take to optimize your website and content for mobile devices:

Test your website in multiple screen sizes to ensure that it looks good and works fine. If not, then work on making your website mobile-responsive.
• Test the page load speed of your site on mobile devices using Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool, and improve it if it’s less by following the suggestions given by the tool.
• Use Google’s Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) technology to optimize your pages.
• Compress your images and include Alt-text in all of them.
• Avoid overuse of graphics and animations on your pages.

There are many other steps too that go into making a website mobile-responsive, but these are the most important ones among them. For more details, follow Google’s mobile optimization guidelines.

How To Rank Higher Online Organically:

Voice search has become increasingly popular. People who are on-the-move or have difficulty in typing by hand often find Voice option to search as a great differentiator in their communication ease. Indeed, optimizing your website for voice search can help you rank higher in search results and reach a wider audience.

Use natural language: When people use voice search, they tend to use natural language instead of short and precise keywords. So, it's important to include long-tail keywords and phrases that match the way people speak.

Focus on featured snippets: When users search for something using voice search, they're usually looking for a quick answer. By optimizing your content to appear in featured snippets, you'll increase your chances of being chosen by voice search assistants as the best answer.

Optimize for local searches: Many voice searches are done for local queries such as ‘near me’. So, it's important to optimize your website for local SEO. This includes adding your business name, address, and phone number to your website, as well as creating local listings on Google My Business and other directories.

Improve site speed: Site speed is crucial for voice search SEO since users are looking for quick answers. Optimize your site by compressing images, reducing server response time, and minifying code.

Make your website mobile-friendly: Many voice searches are done on mobile devices, so it's important to make your website mobile-friendly. This includes using a responsive design, optimizing images for mobile devices, and making sure your website is easy to navigate on a small screen.

Conclusion: Voice Search Optimization (2023)

Voice search is not just an important aspect of today’s digital marketing landscape – it’s the future. As search engines (mainly Google) and voice assistants get better and better at understanding the queries of their searchers, they will provide more and more accurate results to the searchers. That accuracy, in turn, can make more and more people use voice search instead of the time-consuming traditional search process.

Therefore, if you want to have the edge over your competitors, you should work on the optimization of your website and content for voice searches. We hope the steps outlined above will put you on the right track for that. Now, if you still have any questions, feel free to share them in the comments, and we shall try to answer them at the earliest. Otherwise, kickstart your voice search optimization today. All the best!