In the wake of the changes that will unfold in 2019, Among the SEO trends that are predicted;
was the dominance of voice search—the growing tendency for users to rely on vocal commands
and personal digital assistants to handle their searches. 2018 has seen an incremental increase
in this trend. We’re on the verge of full-scale search revolution in the next few years.
This implies that if we want traffic and our customers intact, we need to start optimizing our
website for voice search as soon as possible through a dedicated SEO company.
It’s not that hard to make the transition. We just need an understanding of people, that how they
behave and what they are looking for. So what steps should you be taking now?
1. Understand the language: Add Conversational Text
There’s a huge difference in how people do voice searches versus how they construct text-
based search queries. When you’re typing something into a search engine, you’re most likely to
stringing keywords together and most sites are optimized for that type of search. Think
“Mediterranean cuisine, Albany.”
But when you’re talking to a human-sounding machine, like Alexa or Siri, you’re likely to address
it the way you would to a human being… in complete sentences. For example, you might enter
a query, “Where can I find the best ‘Spaghetti alle vongole’ near me?”
The main thing to note is that the language used in voice search is different from the language
used in a regular desktop search.
This means Mediterranean restaurants (and every other sort of exotic business out there) need
to optimize their content for this novelty by adding more long-tail keywords and include phrases
that answer specific questions.
According to a study, most voice searches have longer tails, which implies that you need to
focus on long-tail keywords that best give an impression of a conversational human speech.
2. Be conversational: Target Question Phrases
It’s not simply a case of seizing long tail keywords just for sake of their existence. You need to
target question phrases that contain longer tails instead. Piggybacking on the use of the
complete expression is the growing need for casual language. The person asking their virtual
assistant a question is likely to use a fairly chatty tone, and your website needs to respond in
the same way.
As, Google tells its raters to rate voice search results by how well the spoken response caters a
person’s query, and how it sounds. And honestly, you never want your content to sound like a machine created it! There are other elements involved in the rating, including grammar and length, but these are the two most important things to keep in mind while optimizing for voice search.
3. Aim for Featured Snippets: Optimize content for answering questions
Now that you’ve absorbed the need for conversational text and long tail keywords clearly, you
can aim for featured snippets.
So, what’s your common reason for using the internet — aside from killing free time looking up
memes and cat videos? But most of the time, you’re probably looking up information. As
mentioned above, the people who use voice search are most likely to say some form of a long-
tail keyword sentence.
You’ll need to collect a number of questions about your industry to capitalize on this growing
trend, then try your best to answer those queries across all your brands’ online presence. The
more voice-optimized content you have on online outlets, the more likely they are to get picked
up by search engines and fed through virtual assistants and devices.
4. Work on Titles and Descriptions: Optimize your content layout
When it comes to search results, what’s the best place to go if you’re optimizing for voice? Of
course, the Google Answer Box! And how to get there? By organizing your content so that
Google can effortlessly identify it and let it into said Answer Box.
Create paragraphs, key points or enumerated lists, FAQs or comparisons. According to a recent
Backlinko study; 40% of voice search results draw answers to the user query from the Answer
Box (featured snippet), you definitely want your site’s content there.
You can take your long tail keywords and add them to your main content, along with your title
tags, and page descriptions, to help you rank better and drive more high-quality traffic to your
website.
We only had 60 characters to fill, as Google restricted us with title lengths in the past. Page
descriptions, meanwhile, had their lines shortened at 80. But now, Google has extended title
tags to 70 characters, while you can fit 100 characters into a line for your page description. This
signifies you need to optimize both! with those long-tail question phrases.
5. Focus on Local SEO: Technical SEO still matters!
All your great content is trash if your site is unnavigable by people and search engines alike. If
you’re doing good, technical search engine optimization (SEO), then you’re already a step
ahead of the game. Many voice assistants get their answers from the top search engine results,
and technical SEO is the key to optimize your content for those top-ranking spots.
There are numerous SEO strategies you can target, including an efficient user experience, a fantastic organizational hierarchy with appropriate HTML headings and structured schema
markup to let search engines cover all your content.
If you are reluctant to focus on local SEO, now is the high time to do it. 58% of us are already
using voice search to spot local businesses. Concentrate on adding keywords related to your
business, service, and location.
For example, I might use “Where can I find an affordable eye doctor in Upstate, New York” if I
was running an eyewear business in that area. It’s also a good idea to include “Near me” in your
keywords, but for this, you need to add your business to Google My Business first.
Conclusion
In the age of voice search, content, search, creative and technology teams will all have
significant jobs to do. Get ahead of this rising trend by having the right people in your
organization to start developing the optimized content and storytelling experiences that will fuel
your voice search scheme in the years to come. After all, the voice search revolution is anything
but challenging. It’s here and it’s effortless to adapt to. Get inside the heads of your potential
customers, understand the language they use and aim at question phrases with smart and
detailed answers.
Author Bio:
This guest post was written by Hassan Khan Yousafzai, he is passionate about Digital
marketing. Along with educational background in Software Engineering he is bridging gap
between marketing and development department. At Techvando , he has been consulting
brands all over Pakistan to gain online traffic and profitable leads.
