If you follow us you’ll know that recently we welcomed a new member to the office, in the form of Alexa 😊!

It made us think of the way people search for information online and increasingly that more and more people are using voice search on their devices to search for information online!

With all the new voice devices and technology on the market, it is becoming easier and easier for users to ask their device a question and get information back e.g. using your voice you can search for local business’/services, order products, get information on products/services, play music, the list goes on.

It is predicted that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 and furthermore that 30% of searches will be done without a screen by 2020 (comScore) and with Google already reporting that over 50% of online searches are now made through mobile devices, and often people find it more convenient to use voice search than typing on these devices, it is becoming increasingly more important to think about content and SEO for voice search!

How to optimise for voice search

Think about conversational keywords. Unlike search keywords that you type into a device, voice search queries are more conversational, and usually longer than typical text keyword search queries. It is important to think how your audience speaks about your business/service/product.

Answer The Public is a great tool for returning a lot of questions people might ask for a keyword:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Start thinking about the types of questions you get when customers ask questions about your business and you can then start to create content that focus on those longer, more conversational search terms. For example, create FAQ pages that focus on those long tailed conversational keyword phrases, and include more natural sounding questions and phrases rather than the old keyword phrases, and try grouping common questions on the same page.

Use structured data. Search engines look at many various factors, not just content, to determine the relevance and position in their search results and structured data is one of these factors.

Your website visitors can’t see the data (it goes into the source code of the site), but it defines more specific information on your site and therefore helps search engines to accurately analyse your content and understand its context.

Claim your Google My Business Listing. Why? Because it’s not only a great way for Google to find out more information e.g. address, phone number, opening hours etc of your business, but also because most voice queries are for local content, so claiming your Google My Business can help increase the chance of your business showing up when a voice search is carried out relating to your location business/location

Our final simple tip in optimising for SEO is to make sure your website is mobile friendly! We’ve already established that over 50% of online searches is via mobile, and voice search more commonly happens on mobile devices so it is crucial that your website is optimised for mobiles.

You can use Google’s Mobile-Friendly test to check the friendliness of your site, Google gives you indications of what you need to fix if your site isn’t mobile friendly and also a speed test on Page Speed Insights to get insights on how to improve website performance. Once your site is optimised to mobile you can focus more on the content!

It’s clear that voice search isn’t disappearing anytime soon, in fact quite the opposite, so it’s crucial that SEOs start optimising their sites for this change or risk getting left behind! These are just a few simple tips on how you can start optimising for voice search, however this is an area of huge growth so expect to see a few more detailed blogs from us in the future!