How to optimise for voice search

Voice search didn’t quite take off as much as everyone first thought, but it still contributes to a large percentage of all internet searches. With more than 50% of adults using voice search daily and Google’s statement that 20% of all searches within the Google app are voice, it’s absolutely worth implementing some minor website changes that could result in increased visibility and site traffic.

Voice search has been a feature of popular culture since at least the 1950s – the science-fiction golden age – with authors such as Isaac Asimov, P.K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and many others writing about spoken interaction with computers (though maybe not the type of computer we know today).

While the 20% figure may not seem that large – considering that mobile search was at a similar level as recently as 2011 – it is still a significant percentage when you consider just how many Google searches are made every day (around 8.5 billion per day).

Add into the mix the fact that voice search technology is always improving, too. It’s thought to be around 3.7 times faster than text searches, and the accuracy of the results is now at around 90%. It is easier and more accurate than ever to search on mobile thanks to the number of options available.

In terms of search marketing, this has a number of possible implications. Not only does it further reinforce the position of mobile as the go-to platform for search, it also adds weight to the importance of latent semantic indexing (LSI) and natural language search. With all of this considered, it’s important that you begin to implement voice search optimisation.

How to rank for voice search

Structured data

Structured data, or markup, is the key to succeeding not only in voice search, but also in local and mobile search. If you haven’t implemented it early on in your site build, it can be difficult and time consuming to do so at a later stage, but better late than never. With markup acting as an essential sign post for search engines, it’s worth the time it could take.

There are a few tools online that can help you to write and implement structured data, with JSON-LD generators available or through the use of Google’s own assistance tool. These tools can create bespoke annotations for certain types of pages that tells a search engine what the page is about, as well as pinpointing specific important information. It may help Google to better categorise a page and its content, with a reduced chance it could misidentify a page.

Just as you want your brand’s phone number and address to be easily accessible to search engines for inclusion in local search, so too do you want Google to be easily able to recognise when you are answering a question or communicating a particular piece of information to your consumers.

While it can take a long time to implement this on an item by item basis, one of the best tools to take some of the sting out of this process is again provided by Google. Google Tag Manager is able to dynamically generate schema/JSON-LD tags and, while it is less than perfect, there is a fantastic post on the Moz blog which goes through the implementation process and common teething problems.

Website page speed

Many business owners neglect their site’s speed, believing it’s not particularly important. But actually, especially when it comes to voice search, it’s essential that your site runs quickly. Page load time is a ranking factor, and therefore a slow site may not perform as well for either voice or text searches.

The best place to start is to run your site URL through PageSpeed Insights to determine the fastest and slowest areas of your site. Then, implement some of their recommended changes to try and improve the speed at which your site loads for users.

As voice assistants, like Siri and Alexa, need to access your site in order to read out the information to voice users, the slower your site, the slower they will be able to provide an answer to the user, which could cause frustration.

How to optimise content for voice search

While we’ve looked at some more technical ways you can try to rank for voice queries, it’s also important to consider exactly how you can optimise your website’s content for voice search. These include using conversational language in the copy, incorporating long-tail keywords and optimising for local SEO.

Conversational language

It’s unlikely that a spoken search would use the same wording and language as a text search. When a user talks to their device to ask a question, they are more likely to use a conversational tone that they would probably use in real life, instead of shortened or standalone phrases such as “baby won’t stop crying” or “new Google core update”.

Any website copy should try to reflect this. It’s been the case for many years that website owners should primarily focus on user experience as a way of optimising for search engines. We know that Google wants us to put the user first and create a site that is easy to use, helpful, quick, and trustworthy (simply look at the EEAT framework). One of the ways you can do this is to provide the user with easily digestible content that uses simple language and answers their questions or provides them with a useful product.

Thanks to Google’s increased understanding of the written word, we no longer have to work quite as hard to make the content easy for search engines to understand. Latent semantic indexing (LSI) allows Google to understand the relationship between words so forcing in keywords is a thing of the past.

Instead, work on providing the user with the answer they’re looking for in as clear and concise a way as you can.

Long-tail keywords

As we’ve already mentioned, voice searches are likely to use a different tone of voice and be longer or more specific than text searches. This is because we naturally speak to our devices as we would to another person, talking in a full sentence with more words than when we type on an electronic device.

Therefore, when optimising for voice search, you can use longer, more specific keywords than you might otherwise. These are known as long-tail keywords. Instead of searching for ‘petrol stations near me’, as you might with a text search, a user is more likely to ask your electronic device ‘where is my nearest petrol station?’. The first difference to note is it’s a question instead of a statement, but it also contains two more words than the text search.

If you’re amending your existing content, take this into consideration and be sure to include such long-tail questions on the page to improve the chance of ranking for voice queries.

Local SEO

Local SEO is hugely relevant for voice search results because, like in our example above, many users are out and about and searching for places, businesses and attractions near to them. According to Google data from 2016, around 76% of people who do a local search on their phone visit a physical location within 24 hours. So if your business relies on footfall, then local SEO is absolutely essential.

You can improve your local SEO by adding location pages to your website or creating a Google Business profile. Voice searches will often provide information based on Google Business profiles, so you should aim to create as rounded a profile as you can, with customer reviews, contact information, opening and closing times, phone number and website URL.