About half of Australians use voice assistant technologies to use the internet and interact with the brands they love. That’s a lot of people you could potentially get your business in front of, but how exactly would that be possible?
One strategy you can try is voice search optimisation. If you want to boost your SEO tactics and ultimately provide better value to your audience, read on to learn what voice search optimisation can do and how you can get started.
But first, what exactly is voice search optimisation?
Voice search optimisation is a way for you to make your brand appear more frequently on voice-enabled searches. It’s a strategy that increases your visibility whenever people make online queries relevant to your business whenever they use voice assistants or voice-powered devices.
With voice search optimisation as part of your business strategy, you can make your website and content more findable on the internet. Let’s go over some of the benefits to give you an idea of why this is important.
Voice Search Optimisation Benefits
Compatible with Human Behaviour
Many people prefer using voice search features to typing in their queries, and voice search optimisation lets you meet that trend. It effectively meets people’s varying habits, preferences, and expectations when they make online searches, such as when working in the kitchen where voice search is perfect!
This makes voice-optimised content more compatible with people’s natural tendency to speak in full sentences. It also means a better search and browsing experience when using AI smart assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.
Improved Accessibility for All
Your website should ideally be accessible and usable for all users, and voice search optimisation helps a ton with that.
By making sure that your website is optimised for voice search, you can accommodate people’s varying needs. It makes your content work better with screen readers and text-to-speech applications that many people with disabilities use, giving them a positive experience of your brand.
SEO and Voice Search
The benefits of voice search optimisation don’t end in accessibility and usability. It also boosts a website’s SEO rankings.
Optimising your website for voice search lets you answer people’s verbal queries. Typically, when using voice search, users speak in full sentences. When they want to find something on search engines, they phrase their inquiries as a question as opposed to mere keywords.
Say a person wants to find a Japanese restaurant in Melbourne. In that situation, they would be inclined to phrase their query as a question and ask their AI smart assistant, “What is the best Japanese restaurant in Melbourne?”
So how do you optimise your website for voice search queries like this? The primary method is to use long-tail keywords, but there are others worth mentioning as well.
Voice Search Optimisation Strategies
1. Long-Tail Keywords
Long-tail keywords are keywords that are conversational in tone and structure. They are more specific than short-tail keywords and include additional context to really define the intention behind the phrase. They typically include seven or more words in the phrase.
Ex:
Voice-optimised: “find an seo agency in melbourne”
Non-voice-optimised: “seo agency melbourne”
By integrating conversational long-tail keywords into your SEO, you’ll be able to target specific queries that have well-defined intent, resulting in better search relevance and increased conversions.
2. Schema Markup Data
Another important voice optimisation strategy involves schema metadata. This is structured data that search engines use to contextualise your website and content. Schema markup typically includes important information about your business that people might be searching for, including operating hours, contact information, pricing, and more. Make sure you complete this data so that people can find those details on verbal searches.
3. Responsiveness
It’s also extremely important to make sure your website is responsive on mobile and all other devices. While most voice searches take place on phones, a significant amount also happens on AI smart assistants. As such, one way to optimise for voice search is to ensure that your content works well on these screens and loads quickly on any device.
Optimise Your Website for Voice Search Today
A few other strategies to optimise for voice search include creating FAQs that target conversational questions and local SEO. If you need help keeping up with the changing trends in consumer behaviour with voice search optimisation, we’re happy to make things easy for you.
Here at Digital Animals, we can help you create an SEO strategy that prioritises voice search optimisation to ensure your website’s accessibility and findability.
Let’s talk about your search engine optimisation needs and how we can help you supercharge your visibility in search results.