Search engine optimization (SEO) has become an important part of digital marketing. Companies are now paying close attention to SEO for its impact on their digital growth. It is especially considered a key element in generating organic conversions. This is the major benefit of SEO that gives it a huge edge over other processes.
Now, as per the changing strategies, SEO has not remained stagnant.
In this article, we will look into some useful points that could help you to optimize your website ranking through voice search SEO. But, before going into that, let us first understand what voice search is and why it is increasingly becoming popular in marketing.
What Is Voice Search?
Voice search is a special method that allows you to search or inquire about anything from specialized websites/platforms through verbal command. This is quite an advanced technique that lets you search anything by just saying particular keywords. It takes out the manual hassle of writing words from the keyboard in the search bar. This makes the search highly simplified for those who do not want to manually type anything for searching.
The AI tools implemented in relevant platforms are good enough to understand the keywords said verbally from the mouth. Based on the data available, the platform then provides relevant results that match perfectly with the query. That is how voice search works, enabling people to inquire about anything quite easily.
It could be said that the advancement of technology led to the invention of this great technique. The usage of AI has played a big role in developing the mechanism of voice search. It helps machines to understand the words and then provide solutions according to that. So, it definitely requires skilled expertise to develop a voice search mechanism in different types of websites and apps. Those who have got detailed knowledge of AI and machine learning processes, can precisely work on the development of a voice search feature. Its algorithms are very technical which certainly required good advanced skills.
Why Is Voice Search Feature Becoming Popular?
With the advancement of technology, everything is getting modernized day by day. Search techniques are also one of them, as developers are regularly implementing new things to make searching fast and effective for people. Not just in software applications, but search engine platforms are also subjected to this great advancement. Google is one of the first platforms that introduced a voice search feature to the general public. After that, other platforms also followed the process and invented their own voice search mechanism to facilitate customers.
With the advancement of technology, everything is getting modernized day by day. Search techniques are also one of them, as developers are regularly implementing new things to make searching fast and effective for people. Not just in software applications, but search engine platforms are also subjected to this great advancement. Google is one of the first platforms that introduced a voice search feature to the general public. After that, other platforms also followed the process and invented their own voice search mechanism to facilitate customers.
Today, many specialized softwares have been launched to facilitate people with the voice search feature. Some of the top names among them include Google Cortana, Apple’s Siri and more others. These systems are creatively built to facilitate people in voice search commands. They are built using advanced algorithms of AI, deep learning and others to provide the best voice recognition functionalities to people. Over time, this system will be modernized more to help people search for everything fast and easy.
Considering the SEO perspective, voice search has certainly become an important factor to elevate website rankings. Those sites that will appear quickly on keywords searched through voice search will get better rankings. Furthermore, these sites will get more traffic which will help to increase their engagement on the internet. This is why optimizing SEO strategy for voice search is seemingly becoming important for companies. They know that it will definitely come under the umbrella of evolving SEO trends, hence its strategy should be made quickly to meet the upcoming advanced search demands.
6 Important Tips To Optimize Voice Search SEO
Every SEO marketer must need to understand the rising importance of voice search. It will definitely play an important role in elevating the ranking of any website on search engine platforms. But to achieve that, there are some specific things every SEO marketer must need to remember. These points will help to optimize voice search SEO, allowing websites to score better on Google, Bing and other search engine platforms.
If you do not have much knowledge about voice search and how it can be optimized to increase website rankings, take a look at the points given below. As a beginner, these points will help you to get better results for voice search SEO. Let’s read some of them below.
Understand the Customer Type & Device Behavior
To work on voice search optimization, you have to first understand the technicalities of its algorithms. The voice search process basically uses data, location and several access points to understand the context of the keywords given in the search. Based on that, the AI working behind the process makes certain decisions. These results from voice search are therefore not guaranteed to be perfect, as the machine can make errors sometimes.
Now, SEO professionals have to understand these things quite smartly. They need to dig deep into how voice search algorithms work and what type of keywords can its AI easily understand. It is recommended to do proper research of the market before finalizing any keyword for SEO. This will prompt them to understand the common customer nature and the type of devices they are using for voice search. That is how they can refine some of their work to get better results for voice search SEO.
Use Conversational Keywords
Voice searches work differently from conventional SEO. It generally uses long-tail keywords to target any search. This means that instead of short words, natural sentences work more accurately for voice search. These sentences generally consist of those words that are said commonly by the people. This is certainly the main objective of voice search to provide results by understanding natural conversation. The usage of advanced AI algorithms is very important in this regard because it ensures to recognize these long-tail phrases perfectly.
For instance, if you are using an Apple smartphone and want to search about logo design techniques, you will just need to say ‘Siri, how to design a logo for a company’ in the voice search. The process running behind will then execute certain algorithms to find the best results. Once the search is completed, you will be automatically shown the results that fit best with the given query. This is how conversational sentences work in voice search, enabling you to inquire about anything directly from the system.
Build Mobile Friendly Sites
To get the best voice search results on Google, you need to build websites that are mobile-friendly. It is the basic requirement to get good rankings, because Google always pays high attention to those websites that are created with a responsive UI. This is quite understandable because people these days love to surf websites from their smartphones and tablets. It provides them with great convenience to access any website quickly. Furthermore, navigating any website becomes more easier on mobile, as it provides a clear view to look into menus, buttons, banners and other common website elements.
So, when long verbal phrases are given through voice search, websites with better mobile responsiveness appear on the top results. These sites get better traffic and their ranking improves on Google gradually. People also show more trust on these websites, as they become easily accessible for them everywhere. It is therefore recommended to build websites that can be quickly opened on mobile, so that voice search can always bring them on top of the results.
Write FAQs on Your Site
It has been noticed that Google brings those websites on top that define to-the-point answers to the given queries. The new algorithm of Google basically prefers to provide search results that match exactly with the given queries. This technique encourages websites to use quality content that can answer the questions of people easily. The search engine algorithm highly rates this practice, as it provides precise answers to everyone. Those who are looking to inquire about company services, can easily get quick answers through this practice. This will automatically help to increase content quality and thus the ranking of that website.
Keeping this factor in mind, many websites now include a specialized FAQs section on their main page. This section includes some very basic answers of commonly asked questions. The keywords are smartly used in them to increase relevancy in answers. This FAQs section also helps create featured snippets of your website on Google. The voice search algorithm usually pays high attention to featured snippets, as it provides focused answers of the given questions.
Use Schema Markup
It is important for websites to get regularly indexed by web crawlers. This practice helps to scan the pages and update regularly about their status in the algorithms of search engines. Generally, people think that backlinking makes crawling easy for search engines. However, there are some other practices as well that encourage crawlers to look into the pages. The usage of schema markup is one of them, as it allows crawlers to find all the relevant information about the website in one place. It defines the hierarchy of the pages that helps web crawlers to easily understand the website structure.
By using schema markup, you describe the web crawlers where the website really fits. Based on this information, crawlers put the website in the right category. It helps to optimize the site for SEO rankings, making easy for search engines to find every information quickly. If you do not know how schema markup is created, try using the free tools available on the internet. They are pretty efficient in generating schema markup with the exact page data available on the website.
Improve Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) plays an important role to elevate the rankings of any website. Every search engine pays attention to DA, as it describes how qualitative any website is. Those websites that have high DA always get better ranking on search engines. It is therefore important for SEO marketers to work regularly on the improvement of website DA. There are different practices that help to improve domain authority, however, the best among them all is said to be strong link building. This practice is considered a vital part of off-site SEO that helps to build a solid footprint of any website on the internet.
It is recommended to first create a specialized strategy to build quality links for your website. This will include different processes to build links including guest posts, links exchange, forum submissions and others. Besides these link building techniques, you need to also double down on other efforts to improve the domain authority. This will comprise optimization practices including website user experience, local search, internal technical issues and others.
Final Words
That takes us to the end of this article in which we have discussed voice search SEO in detail. It is quite important to understand because voice search will play an important factor for SEO rankings in the future. This blog has defined some useful practices that will help you to optimize the website for voice search. Using them, you can get better results, provided the website content also fulfills the given search requirements.