The Future is Now
For decades science fiction touted the futuristic concept of being able to speak to your computer and have it obey your orders. Now it’s so commonplace that we have household devices made specifically with that in mind. It’s an appealing transition into tomorrow, isn’t it? Hands-free communication allows us to organize, search, and interact with the world at our leisure. The voice recognition method of navigating the internet has quickly gained in popularity with 55% of users utilizing voice search on a smartphone.
As voice recognition software improves its audience grows, and so does the necessity of including voice recognition considerations in your SEO strategy.
Know Your Customer
Different people utilize the voice recognition option in different ways. It’s important that you, as a company, know your customer base and how they view this technology. Don’t underestimate your clientele or make assumptions about who finds you through voice search. Market research can provide you with real-time statistics that give you a more detailed understanding of who is out there looking for you.
From Keywords to Conversation
As voice recognition technology expands, its ability to discern common phrases and even full sentences continues to grow. While relevant keywords are still a significant factor in how we search the internet, learning more about semantic searches and question-based inquiries can go a long way toward optimizing your appearance on search engines.
Semantic Search – search engines attempt to generate the most accurate results possible based on the user’s intent, context, and the relationship between words.
Question-Based Queries – search engines attempt to find a reliable source that answers the user’s question with the greatest accuracy possible based on varying factors.
How to Have Your Content Show Up In Voice Search
- Keep it Conversational and Use Long Tail Keywords
- Provide a F.A.Q
- Leverage Schema
- Be Local
- Have a Website That is Fast and Works Well on Mobile
Keep it Conversational and Use Long Tail Keywords
The days of filling your content with short keywords being enough to qualify as a good SEO strategy are over. This form of content often resulted in a rather cold and robotic tone where having the right words was more important than how those words came together.
Voice search is a uniquely human way of interacting with technology. Users speak to their voice recognition service or device like a person, and answers that sound like they come from a human should be prioritized. Focus on content that is simple, conversational, and natural.
Use long tail keywords (longer relevant phrases rather than a bunch of short repetitive keywords) and make sure they make sense in context.
Provide a F.A.Q
Nobody clicks the second page on Google. If you can’t find the answer within the initial results, you will likely go back to the search bar and rephrase your search in a way that turns up the results you want. As a business, your goal is the provide answers or content your user is in search of. This is best accomplished by making those answers easy to locate and comprehend through voice recognition. Short-and-sweet trumps extensive detail, although you may want that to be available by letting your customer click an accordion to provide more info.
Example: Consider what questions you would ask if you were trying to locate a business through voice search. How would you phrase these questions and would they connect with your website’s SEO?
Leverage Schema
Schemas are a type of code that is not visible to users but is picked up by search engine bots when they crawl your page. Schema provides a breakdown of the page that is relevant to search engine algorithms, giving you greater control over what search engines think about your content. It’s like having invisible keywords and information that help inform a search engine exactly what is available on your page. This can result in making your website easier for potential customers to find when they utilize voice recognition searches.
Be Local
If your company relies on local business, making sure your content shows up in common location-based voice searches such as “…near me” or “…in my area” is crucial. An easy way to do this is to incorporate simple location details such as town, city, or neighborhood names and mention landmarks around your business.
Have a Website That is Fast and Works Well on Mobile
The best part about having smartphones with 5G coverage is that you can look up just about anything, anywhere, at any time. With the potential of 6G coverage coming within a decade, the ability to locate and share through the internet will become exponential, as will your customer base. Make the time to optimize your website for both mobile and desktop users so that you can be found as voice recognition and AI technology increase in capability over the coming years.
Conclusion
Voice search is an important new addition to your SEO strategy. Methods of incorporating it are often easy to talk about, but difficult to implement consistently and effectively. Content is king, that is why it is important to choose a web developer and SEO strategy partner that can help optimize your content for voice search and beyond.
Lion & Panda is a Cincinnati-based web development company that can help you with your online presence goals. Our team has experienced SEO specialists and content writers who can help you develop, track, and maintain an effective content strategy.
Reach out to us so we can explore your options for furthering your online marketing accessibility and customer base.
