Hey Siri, Tell Me About Voice Search Optimization

  4 min read ‘Alexa, play songs by Pink Floyd.’ ‘Siri, which is the best cafe near me?’ ‘OK Google. What is the top news today?’ Conversations with your voice assistants are more common today than just a year ago. There’s no doubt that the use of voice search is rapidly increasing.

More than 50% of teenagers and 41% of adults are already using voice search in their online activities.

The voice search technology was a novelty when Siri was introduced in 2011. It was a cool tool to test, gave valuable information sometimes, and made people laugh with the funny replies to voice queries. However, consumers are now increasingly using voice assistants to find and buy things near them. Therefore, it’s extremely important for the marketers to include voice search and create an optimization strategy for voice search to stay ahead of their competition. Here are a few voice search optimization tips:

Voice Search Optimization Strategies

#1 Researching Keywords for Voice Search

Now keywords are no longer only keywords. Keywords in the voice search world are quite different. People type and speak very differently. While browsing through voice search the user asks their voice device a query in a conversational tone, and your site needs to reply in a similar way. Therefore, turn keywords into a conversational tone. For example,

• Keyword: best cafe nearby
• Conversational Keyword: Hey, where can I find the best cafe near me?

Also, we can’t ignore long-tail keywords as they help answer natural language queries.

#2 Understand Where Voice Search Get Their Information

When a user asks questions to Google Assistant, they may not know where this data is coming from. Mostly they don’t really care as long as the question is answered. However, as a marketer, you do care. So identifying the source and optimizing what it communicates is very important. It’s an obvious guess that Google Assistant is using a Google search engine for queries and Google Maps for local results. But, do you know where Siri or Alexa gets their info? Surprisingly until last year, Siri was using the Bing search engine, but now, Siri uses Google search and Apple Maps for local results. Amazon Alexa runs on her own database and also uses the Bing search engine for answering questions. Keep your business information updated on all these search engines as potential customers are coming from everywhere.

#3 Put Questions in Your Content Strategy

When doing a voice search, users feel like they are talking to a human. Obviously, people communicate in many different ways based on where they live, what they need, their education, their personality, even the weather can affect how they structure sentences and questions. Therefore, voice searches also differ. Users don’t simply say keywords, they ask questions to their device. That smartphone in their hand essentially is a personal assistant that’s expected to interpret what they say and what they mean. To benefit from this growing trend, you’ll need to gather as many questions about your industry as possible. Start thinking about the way people ask questions about your business. How do they phrase questions and how do they talk about the products and features. A perfect way to know how people talk about your industry is through call recordings. When people call, what do they ask?  What do they say? With Convirza, you can listen to call recordings and tag them. You can also include comments and even download the call recordings and share them. The tags could be used to highlight how people ask about your products and services and what they usually need when they call. You could go a step further and use Conversation Analytics^® services with built-in algorithms and metrics. The technology uses artificial intelligence and sophisticated natural-language speech recognition that decipher phone calls. The more voice-optimized content you have, the more likely you are to rank by search engines and supported by voice search devices.

#4 Improve Page Speed

Why is this related to voice search? Because mobile voice search users are looking for immediate results.

Backlinko found that voice search results load 52 percent faster than average pages.

Moreover, Google has officially announced that their “speed update,” which enables page speed in mobile search ranking, is now rolling out for all users worldwide. Hence, improving site and page speed is important. If you aren’t improving, it may affect your voice search opportunities. Also, now, page speed is a ranking factor only for mobile searches.

#5 Test It

Once you have started taking these steps, test your voice search function to see what is working and what requires improvement. Here are a few steps to test voice search:

• Test Multiple Devices: Smart Speakers vs. Mobile, Google Assistant vs. Alexa, and Cortana vs. Siri.
• What Are the Results: Check which device is pulling the answers for the search queries.
• Rankings: See what is your ranking for your most common queries? Also, keep an eye what is your competitors ranking.

Before We Meet Again

Voice search technology is already here, and it’s expected to expand more in the coming years. Therefore, it’s time that businesses start optimizing their websites for this new world of voice search to stay ahead of their competition. Include these voice search optimization strategies and obtain new voice traffic. In the comments section below, let us know which is the weirdest question you ever asked your voice assistant?