How to optimise your SEO for voice search

Image Credit: Erik

With improvements to AI, smartphone features like Siri and Google Voice, and new devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple Homecare, digital assistants are growing in popularity (Tenfold). With this increasing popularity, voice search is fast becoming the standard to search the internet.

"Voice search is very different from traditional search and requires a different approach to SEO." 

Here are some tips on how you can incorporate voice search into your content strategy: 

How voice search is different

When people type search queries, they are usually focused on single words and short phrasing. Targeting these keywords has been the default SEO strategy. However, when people use voice search, they are more likely to simply ask a question. Meaning the search queries are now longer than they were in the past.

SEO tips for voice search

Understanding that the new queries are longer one of the best ways is to optimise your content with long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases. Long-tail keywords are not as broad so they do not get as much traditional traffic but are essential to voice search. Also, when planning your SEO strategy for voice, you need to consider the conversational tone. Think about how you would talk and ask questions and develop from there.

Content optimisation strategies for voice search

There are some effective ways to incorporate your new SEO strategy into your content. The best is by creating an FAQ webpage. Try to make your questions as natural and specific as possible. Then answer these questions succinctly. You can also incorporate questions and answers into your blog and social media posts. Voice search will crawl the internet until it finds an exact match to the user’s question. If you are that exact match, they will pull directly from your content.

Add structured data markup

From a technical perspective, another piece to optimising your SEO strategy for voice search is to create structured data markup. This helps pair your content with topic categories and create an index to tell search engines what your content really is about. To learn more about structured data markup and voice commands, check out Schema. 

Incorporating voice search into your SEO strategy is important with the growing popularity. The content management experts at ALHAUS can help. We understand how to incorporate these strategies will still producing high-quality, reader-friendly content. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help!