Website Optimization for Voice Search in 2021

The Voice Search Revolution

Backlinko.com analyzed 10,000 Google Home search results to answer the following question: What are the factors that impact voice SEO and how can you optimize your site accordingly? At a time when 1 third of smartphone owners worldwide use voice search daily, optimizing your site accordingly becomes a necessity for better conversions from users. From the loading speed of your site to your content and the choice of your keywords, voice search optimization is a considerable asset in 2020.

DEFINITION OF VOICE SEARCH

Voice search, or Voice Search, refers to requests made orally by Internet users to a voice assistant to obtain a response to a specific request or order. Voice assistants have grown greatly in recent years. These voice recognition assistants are everywhere: they can be fixed (connected speakers, Smart TV, etc.) or mobile (smartphones, connected watches, tablets, etc.).

Among the best known, there are assistants from Google (Google Assistant), Amazon (Alexa), Apple (Siri), Microsoft (Cortana), and more recently Samsung (Bixby). They answer your questions and carry out your orders: start the music, turn on your heating, turn on your coffee machine or place an order on the internet.

WHY OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE FOR VOICE SEARCH?

One may wonder what is the advantage of appearing in the answers proposed by the voice assistants. Indeed, by default, these tools only draw on your content to orally reproduce a precise and relevant response. Be aware that optimizations related to voice search can have another very significant advantage in your traffic acquisition strategy: the zero position. The zero position corresponds to the result displayed on Google in a box above the 1st organic results.

By optimizing your website through voice search, you have definitely taken a higher step in providing an excellent user experience. Voice search ensures accessibility, and including this in your web design is extremely beneficial to some of your users.

WHAT KEY OPTIMIZATIONS FOR VOICE SEARCH?

Some adjustments are necessary to hope to be taken into account by the voice assistants. To improve your chances, you must:

  • Have a mobile-friendly site. Opt for responsive design to improve the user experience of mobile users.
  • Having a fast site (optimized images, compressed files, fast server, cache management, etc.)
  • Use interrogative sentences that correspond to the research intention of Internet users. Requests can be informational, transactional, decision-making, or navigational.
  • Use structured data to facilitate the recovery of your content by Google. Consider in particular the tagging of FAQs.
  • Do not hesitate to use a conversational tone in your responses.
  • Exploit long-tail keywords in your SEO strategy. The searches carried out by voice are generally longer and more detailed than those written on search engines.
  • Well structure the content of its pages
  • Develop awareness of its site and its strategic pages.
  • Optimize your Local SEO and your Google My Business listing

FIND THE QUESTIONS ASKED OF GOOGLE TO OPTIMIZE VOICE SEARCH?

Depending on your sector of activity, your offer of goods or services, Internet users are increasingly asking a question via a search engine. Research is thus more natural and often longer.

There are several online tools that can help you find these questions so that you can use them in your content. On these tools, you just have to integrate a generic keyword and they deliver you  questions to exploit. Using Google Keyword tool and also Answer The Public are two great ways to find queries that are likely being used for voice search. Remember that the longer more conversational the query, the more likely it is being used in voice search. Including these conversational queries in your content is a great way to rank higher for the actual voice searches.

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