Why Businesses Need to Start Optimising Content For Voice Search

With over 40 million voice-first devices in homes across the US, it’s clear to see that voice search is well on its way to ruling search engine optimisation. With thanks to Google Home, Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, asking a question and receiving an answer through this mode of search is far easier than typing it out on a device or computer into a search engine.

Stamford University recently discovered that speech recognition technology is, on average, 3x faster than typing – and users of the technology are catching on to this. As a result, many businesses are now finding that their site copy needs to be optimised correctly to accommodate voice searches.

It’s imperative that businesses take voice search into consideration whilst preparing content for their brand, but how exactly is this done? And what do you need to ensure in order for your content to meet voice search requirements?

Create Question and Answer Based Content

In order for your business to rank higher in Google search results for highly specific voice search questions and queries, you must make sure that your content follows a Question-Answer and includes a variety of long-tail keywords.

Adopting a Question-Answer approach in writing is about turning your site content into an easy and direct solution for a specific issue or problem. Within the content, try to use a similar approach for the subheadings. The key to this is making sure you are directly answering the question in the post.

Create Snippet Rich Content

Featured Snippets are what is selected for boxed search results which rank at the top in Google organic searches. If you want to increase your chances of getting this top spot, and rank higher in general, try to space your content out into snippets and include more paragraphs, bullets and lists.

If, for example, you were writing an article which was over 2,000 words, try to make sure the content features enough paragraphs (around six or seven), with different subheadings outlining the themes of each paragraph.

Use Conversational Tone

The method of keyword stuffing is now no longer a good way to correctly optimise content for SEO. Instead, aim for natural language and long tail keywords to help your site rank higher with easier to read posts. If your writing your content on a specific keyword, then best practice recommends making the keyword visible in the page headline and title, URL slug, article subheadings and in the first paragraph of the article. 

In order to keep the article more conversational, try to use words and phrases which are more colloquial, such as “at the same time” instead of the word “simultaneously”. When writing the content, try to imagine that you are saying the content out loud. This will help you to produce a more conversational flow and make you more aware if you are using the keyword too often.

Prioritise Mobile-Friendly Content

With more and more consumers using voice search on their devices, this means that Google now chooses to show sites which follow the best practices for mobile-first indexing. It is now imperative that businesses make their content mobile-friendly by taking the smaller screen size into consideration.

In your content, try to use shorter headlines which feature less than seven words, smart formatting with bullet points and subheadings and one to three sentence paragraphs. These steps will help your audience to digest your content faster, even more so when they’re on the go.

Leverage Long-Tail Keywords

As voice search questions and queries tend to be typically longer than text searches, it’s best to utilise long-tail keywords within your content. Tools, such as Google Auto Complete and Serpstat can help you to find the correct keywords for your content.

For example, if you are writing about smart home technology, then your article would instantly be more voice-search friendly if you were to use long-tail keywords, such as “best smart home technology”, instead of a simpler term such as “smart home tech”. This will then help your content to rank higher thanks to the long-tail keyword, whilst still benefiting from the relevant shorter keywords.

It can be tricky keeping up to date with all the changes that happen in the SEO landscape and the growth of voice search is no exception. If you want some assistance in the SEO optimisation of your website, then get into contact with one of the award-winning digital marketing agency Manchester based companies.