Website optimization for voice search

Voice search (from English “Voice search”) and website optimization for its specifics is one of the leading SEO trends over the past few years. Nowadays, it has become an important part of search engines. Users are increasingly using virtual assistants and voice search in their daily lives (on smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, speakers and TVs). The most famous voice assistants include: Cortana from Microsoft, Google Assistant, Siri from Apple, Alexa from Amazon. Voice search is very important and here are some statistics to prove it:

• According to Google statistics for 2023, half of users prefer to use voice search on their mobile devices.
• 35% of users use voice assistants to check the weather and news.
• There are a billion or more voice requests made every day.
• 25% of users search for necessary goods to buy online using their voice.
• Google algorithms recognize speech in more than 100 languages.

In the image, we can see which voice search tools are used by people of different age groups.

3 main characteristics of voice search:

1. Voice queries can be quite different from the usual search phrases that websites target. It is extremely important for you to find the key phrases that users will use for such searches. For example, people might type “hospital near me,” but when doing a voice search, they might also say “what is the closest hospital near me.”
2. 22% of voice queries are for local content. 22% of people use them to search for places. This is due to the fact that users often use voice search when they are on the road or in a hurry.
3. Users want quick results. The primary use of voice queries continues to be for personal assistance. Let’s say a person wants to get a haircut, does a voice search for hair salons, Google returns the nearest beauty salons with their addresses, distance from the user’s location, time and reviews.

There are several types of sites that benefit most from voice search optimization, let’s look at them:

• Online stores. In this case, voice search makes it possible to receive highly converting traffic. Especially if you work on low-frequency queries.
• Local companies. This can include almost any business. Most often people look for places nearby: hotels, cafes, beauty salons, pharmacies, service stations.
• Delivery resources. Delivery of food or goods is required to save time. Voice search is for the same thing. Therefore, he simply has to be here.
• Information portals. Various instructions or current news are also quite in demand in voice search.

Benefits of optimizing your website for voice search

There are a number of benefits that any business receives from optimizing a website for voice search:

1. Traffic growth.

Search using voice assistants is constantly increasing, which means the volume of this traffic channel will also increase. In addition, with such a search you receive one answer, and not many links (as with a regular search), and therefore you will bypass all competitors if you manage to break into the top 1 voice search.

2. Increased conversions.

Voice queries often require a solution to the issue right now. Therefore, the probability of a conversion action is quite high (ordering a product or personally contacting a service station or hairdresser).

3. Improvement of behavioral factors.

Optimizing a resource for voice requests has a positive effect on website promotion in general (especially behavioral factors). The platform will receive fewer bounces and more conversions.

4. Promotion in local search.

Users typically search for local businesses using voice search.

5. Improved usability.

It improves when visitors view the site from mobile devices.

What difficulties may arise when working with voice search?

• Low download speed. Due to the fact that the site is systematically filled with media materials, after some time it begins to slow down (even if it was well optimized). Therefore, it is important to constantly monitor this moment.
• Limited use. There are people of a conservative mindset who simply do not want to try something new, even if it turns out to be more convenient than familiar things. Plus, voice search is almost never used on the desktop.
• It is difficult to get into the search results, since the virtual assistant only gives one answer option.

Recommendations for optimizing your website for voice search

1. Use Micro Markups.
   Many types micro markup help search engines organize and categorize your content, not to mention the visual part, which can significantly expand your snippet in search results and increase click-through rates. Setting up a FAQ block and FaqPage micro-markup on it should be a priority for you if you want to be successful in voice search, since with proper optimization they can attract a large amount of traffic to the resource.
2. Work on optimizing your site for Local SEO.
   We create and fill out a card in Google My Business. As we wrote earlier, voice search predominantly involves local queries. The easiest way to help customers find you is to include your business information in the footer of your website in a plain text format. There are two ways a user can search for local businesses:
        – “Pizza delivery in Dnepr.” In such cases, if you have optimized your site for local keywords, you stand a chance of ranking higher in search results.
        – “Pizza delivery near me.” For these types of issues, Google relies on the user’s location and refers to listings in Google My Business.
3. Optimizing the resource for mobile devices.
   Voice search mainly happens on mobile devices. Obviously, your site should be optimized for them. We recommend responsive web design. If you want to check if your website is optimized for mobile devices, you can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. You need to check there: the main page, articles, categories, product cards and filter pages.
4. Increase the loading speed of your website.
   Page load time is officially important ranking factor on Google. This means it’s important that your pages load quickly so that voice search engines can parse the information on the page more efficiently and answer user questions faster.
5. Optimize your content.
   For voice search, when writing, use words that are as close as possible to colloquial speech, avoiding complex sentences and phrases. Lyrics must be long enough (preferably at least 2000 characters). But at the same time, write to the point and organically include keywords throughout the text.

To summarize

Voice search is gaining more and more popularity. And if you own a company that provides services only in its local area or is more focused on this, then your site simply must be optimized for voice search, otherwise you are losing your potential customers. In the article we explained how to do this and what benefits it will bring to your business.

Olha Tyshchenko

Editor

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