Voice Search SEO Guide: Optimize Your Site
For Voice Search (2023)

The world today is driven by smart solutions. From smartphones and smart TVs to virtual assistants, smarter solutions are transitioning our very normal thing. And voice searches are making them faster, more convenient, and easier than typing.

But, here’s the catch. A typical voice search is not the same as a text search. When we give commands to our devices, we phrase the queries in a different form, closer to the way we communicate in real life. This is why you’ll need guidance from an experienced voice search SEO strategist to implement and execute a highly conversion voice SEO campaign.

And ranking for voice search is not easy. Devices that allow voice search list only the top three results for a given query. For businesses to land in that spot, they require to enrich their website with authority content and implement voice search optimization.

A. What Is Voice Search Optimization?

Voice search optimization uses several SEO strategies to increase the visibility of your content on voice search results. Voice search optimization aims to incorporate frequently asked questions and phrases into the content, making it easier for virtual assistants and voice search technologies to retrieve and present relevant pages to users in the voice search results.

In a standard voice search, the user first initiates a search with a phrase like:

 “Alexa” or “Hey Siri” or “Okay Google.”

This is then followed by a question or statement that includes the actual query like:

“What are some good restaurants near me?” or “When is the music festival?”.

The user then receives a spoken answer or the device displays the top results from a search engine results page on a screen.

B. Why Optimize For Voice Search?

Many businesses believe that voice search is just a craze. But in reality, it is slowly becoming the norm to attract more traffic to businesses. Today, 40% of U.S. internet users use a voice assistant once a month, through smartphones or smart speakers. The number in the U.S. is estimated to surpass 200 million by the year 2023.

Voice search presents a great opportunity for businesses to capture organic search traffic, irrespective of the industry they are in.

• By integrating voice search into their SEO marketing strategy, businesses can access a new affiliate of users who rely on smartphones and smart speakers to locate businesses and purchase products.
• With targeted voice search, businesses can integrate measures to enhance the overall SEO and ranking of their website.
• By optimizing for voice search, businesses can give their site more authority and thereby secure higher spots on the results pages of search engines.

C. Ways to Optimize the Site for Voice Search (How To Optimize For Voice Searches)

1. Find Conversational Keywords:

Short and vague keywords are not ideal for voice search optimization. In many cases, mid-tail and long-tail keywords work better, however, they should be more specific, as they are likely to attract the customer.

Voice search takes this process a step further as just long-tail keywords are not enough. Instead, the user has to use full phrases or even questions that are used in conversations.

One such example is: What is the best baking oven? We ran a voice search on Google for this query.

It provides us the below search results:

With keyword-finding tools, users can pick such phrases and questions. You can use Google’s autocomplete feature for voice search SEO keyword research. You can also scour through online forums as websites frequented by the target audience to identify keywords.

2. Optimize The Featured Snippet:

Voice search picks the top search result, which could be an advertisement or organic results. Due to this reason, being number one in organic search is not enough. As a business, you need to aim even higher. Today, almost 40.7% of voice search results are due to featured snippets. If your website includes an FAQ page, then half the job is already done. Featured snippets and voice searches prefer short and concise to answer users’ queries. Simple language works best for featured snippets.

We used voice search to look up the query: Tips for making fluffy a cake

It provided us with the following featured snippet:

Most search genie users are going to rely on this first result to guide them in baking a fluffy cake. Which is why it is necessary that you optimise your website for voice search SEO.

3. Build An FAQ Section/ Questionnaire:

The list of FAQs in the above image were the second search result for our voice search query: Tips for making fluffy a cake. Apart from relying on the top search results, some users may decide to quickly get their answer from these questions, which are also a form of featured snippets.

SEO experts advise on creating content that fulfills the requirements of the user and there is no better example than an FAQ. Having an FAQ section or webpage on the site is great practice for SEO. Users often visit a website with questions, and if you have the answers ready, then it will help in engaging with the incoming traffic.

However, the important terms here are “questions” and “answers.” These elements form the essence of voice search. The FAQs act as drivers of conversational language.

How to conduct research for an FAQ section?

• First, research should be conducted to identify common questions about the site’s product or service.
• Then, these questions should be listed on the FAQ page, along with relevant answers.
• The answers should be detailed enough to be helpful, but not overly long. This is important because users tend to prefer quick answers, especially for voice search results that are typically brief.

4. Prioritize Local SEO:

Local SEO helps in improving search engine visibility for local businesses. Local SEO is critical for businesses, as it helps them in targeting their potential customers in close proximity who are likely to buy. And it is one of the significant ways to optimize for voice search. There are several ways to improve local SEO, but the most influential one is creating and maintaining a Google Business Profile. The Google Business profile is relevant as it tells the visitors where the business is located along with contact info, hours, directions, and other information. And with voice search, the user can often pull all this relevant information from these profiles.

Here’s an example local voice seo results for the query: Heart Hospital in Pune

Shared below are the results for this voice search query. So, if a cardiac hospital wants to rank for this keyword on top, they’ll need to optimize their GMB for voice search.

5. Use Schema Markup:

While a markup schema doesn’t affect voice search SEO by much, it is still it is recommended to integrate Schema anyway. Structured data assists search engines to understand the purpose of every element on a page. It also helps in selecting which information is relevant to the user’s question.

With Google developing a speakable Schema property, it will enable the users to mark up the text on their site that they want to be read by the smart assistant. Schema plays a larger role in voice search SEO.

Read our ultimate schema markup guide to learn more about different types of schema and how to implement them.

6. Go Mobile-Friendly:

According to Google’s findings, approximately 27% of people worldwide are utilizing voice search on their mobile devices. So, if you want your business to shop up in top results through mobile devices, you need to offer a good mobile experience. This means, it is time to integrate a voice search strategy. A key part of Google’s algorithms is having a mobile-friendly web presence. However, there are still websites that are not optimized for mobile.

If this is the case with your brand’s website, then your audience will click on the site and leave immediately as the webpage may not work properly on their device. This is a sign for Google that the webpage is not worthy of ranking.

This will hurt your voice search and traditional queries. The essential elements of mobile SEO include:

• Responsive page design.
• Zero intrusive interstitials.
• Short webpage loading time.
• Easy readability.

Modern SEO is all about user experience and attracting a majority of traffic coming from mobile devices. It is therefore important to offer the right experience for the user who uses voice search for locating your brand on search engines.

D. Keyword Research As A Part Of Voice Search Optimization

This evolution of SEO voice search is leading to much-needed revisions to existing SEO strategies that are targeted at users who search with a keyboard. The significant part of these revisions is that they are not only manageable but also do not require complete overhauls of current SEO strategies that are in work, you can build on text strategies and fine-tune them for voice search SEO. This can be accomplished in just four steps.

Step 1: The first step involves creating a list of voice search keywords by including the keywords used in the past.

Step 2: With the foundation of the new strategy, the second step involves expanding the existing list of keywords and fleshing new ones out.

Step 3: Create a list of negative keywords, that are just like regular keyword research. This step involves trimming keywords from the existing list by creating a list of negative keywords that should not be included in the website or advertisements copy.

Step 4: This step involves rounding up the research strategy by reviewing the existing keyword list and repeating it.

E. Advanced Tips and Strategies for voice search

Tip 1: Your content should provide answers to the Five Ws – “who,” “what,” “when,” “where” and “why.”

Tip 2: Embed long-tail keywords in your content.

Tip 3: Optimize the content for local searches by implementing schemas.

Tip 4: When optimizing the content for voice search, inculcating two tones are critical: informal and conversational.

Tip 5: Always ensure that the local business listings are accurate.

Tip 6: Don’t forget to include questions voice searchers for consumers to ask within the website content.

Conclusion

In the last decade, voice search has evolved and become a major player in the SEO world. And the trend is not going away soon. The tech-savvy younger generations are widely using voice search in their everyday operations. With voice search clearly on the rise, it would be foolish of any business to ignore this trend in the SEO industry. So what are you waiting for, it’s time to optimize your website for voice search as it is clearly a winner for the search result.

By following the tips above, you can put your business website in good standing in search engines. This will help in capturing more voice search traffic. If you are searching for Voice Search SEO Services in Mumbai, you have come to the right place. Your quest for local SEO in Mumbai ends with Capsicum MediaWorks. Work with a team of experts who are driven to generate the right results for your brand’s growth.

We also offer a whole host of services including services that have made us well known as both Branding agency in Mumbai or social media agency in Mumbai.

Voice Search SEO FAQs