With the growing possibilities of search options, you might find your website performing otherwise and it's not mostly because of your content because they might be optimized for a text search. Are they optimized for a voice search??
What Is voice search?
Voice search is a way of searching the internet through speech, using a bridge between artificial intelligence and a search engine. A common way to use voice search is through your handheld device - Siri, Cortana, Google assist, Alexa, etc. This is becoming the third most popular way to search for any information, the first being text search and the second being video search.
Some of the popular voice search devices and their default search engines they use:
Amazon Echo/Alexa: Bing
Android phones and devices: Google
Google Home: Google
Microsoft Cortana: Bing
The voice search empowers your phone, TV, portable speaker, or any other device to search the internet through speech.
Voice search and your website
The questions you should ask yourself is - what is the difference between voice search and text search? When you type in any phrase or word in Google, or any other search engine what goes behind the scene? Let's try to answer this one by one.
What is the difference between voice search and text search? Any search engine works on queries sent to them in form of text or speech and displays the best results that match your search query. When you are looking for a product online, there are different ways one approaches text search and speech. Let's understand this with an example:
Suppose you are searching for "Cakes" you may type in search terms related to cakes on a search engine such as - "cake shop near me", "Pastry shop in locality XYZ", etc. but while using voice assistant (Siri, Cortana, Alexa, etc.) you would provide instructions such as - "find a cake shop nearby", "Which is the best-rated bakery in my locality", etc. it is more conversational approach while using voice search.
When you type in any phrase or word in Google, or any other search engine what goes behind the scene? To address the preference change from text to voice search, the search engines have to become very good at semantics: understanding not only the search terms but also the meaning behind words. The introduction of voice search has been challenging for the search engines to integrate as it increases the complexity of the algorithm. understanding languages, dictions, and pronunciations is a complex process for the AI, and converting it to a meaningful search term to provide optimum results is a fairly difficult task for the machines. Search engines are working constantly towards addressing this issue by updating their algorithms.
Ways to Optimize your website for voice search
Voice search will evolve over the period of time and with the introduction of smart devices, it is going to stay for long. Hence, the earlier you add voice search in your SEO strategy the better results you can expect. Let's look at some of the tactics you can embed in your SEO strategy.
- Structured data on a web pages
- Make a mobile-friendly website
- Capable to address local and global searches
- Verifying locations and claiming Google My Business
- Create conversational content
Structured data on a web pages:
Search engines follow sophisticated algorithms to crawl websites and look for relevant information. There are a number of parameters apart from content that affects the page relevance and therefore its ranking on search engines. To leverage these parameters one needs to deep dive into the structures of data used in web pages.
Schema markup is one such parameter. This doesn't affect page ranking directly but is a crucial factor when it comes to voice search. Search engines quickly retrieved the information because of a markup.
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Metadata, it is an essential parameter, which holds information about the web page. The information classified under this becomes part of the source code of the web page. The description under this tag will not be visible to visitors but it helps search engines to organize and classify your content.
Another part of structured data is Microdata. It is used to nest metadata within existing content on web pages. The search engines extract and process microdata to provide a richer browsing experience for users. This can have information relevant to items, businesses, operational hours, contact information, address, directions from highways, etc. which is crucial for a search.
Make a mobile-friendly website
With the increasing penetration of smartphones in households, it is imperative to have a mobile-friendly website, a responsive design of webpages helps to shift between devices. It plays a vital role in search engine optimization, but in most cases this is ignored by organizations. This results in a higher bounce rate as users tend to exit the page if it is not optimized for their handheld devices. This signals search engines and affects your search ranking as your website is not relevant to the users.
Today SEO is not limited to page ranking only but also helps in improving user experience, ultimately affecting the voice and text searches. There are plenty of tools available to analyze and make your website mobile-friendly. Do make sure that your website provides the correct user experience for users who land through voice searches.
Capable to address local and global searches
The introduction of the internet opened a gateway to global content. Hence it was important to focus on developing a professional website capable to appear on global searches. Over the period of time search engines and user, searches have gone through tremendous changes. Local searches have become predominant across the devices. Especially if it comes to voice searches, they are three times more related to local searches compared to text searches.
Today, local searches dominate over 40% of all searches. It is important that your website is local search compatible, especially for a brick-and-mortar business. Creating locally relevant content and adding local search keywords to the text are the first steps for local SEO.
Verifying locations and claiming Google My Business
Claiming Google My Business may sound like adding a business listing, but it's much more than adding an address to your business. A Google My Business account is associated with a business's local listing, map location, reviews, ratings, and authenticity.
Create conversational content
Conversational content development is a good practice not only to improve SEO performance but also to engage users with on-page content. A human touch on the content brings you closer to the user. Must-haves in content development are: be authentic, use simple language, add value to users, provide engaging content.
Another benefit of such conversational content is that voice recognition uses conversational search terms during voice search. This happens as people tend to relay directions to search engines in conversation while using voice search. The better/more relevant answer your website provides, the higher your ranking will be. This also improves the user experience and positions the brand.
Conclusion
Growing organic traffic is a challenging task, improving SEO performance is an ongoing process, and making your content voice search compatible adds another layer of effort. But once you complete all of the above checklists, you can watch your ranking rise. As the volume of voice searches increases, so do search engine algorithms. Voice search is changing the way people search for information online, and it will change the way we find information online in the future. Now it's time to understand your customer's intent, it's no longer about speaking the customer's language, it's time to think about how your customers interact with machines (search engine) and the user experience during their Improve travel to/on your website.
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