We live in an era of mobility and multitasking, where every minute matters. Therefore, it’s not surprising that voice search is gaining popularity as a tool for finding information.
Do you want to hire a car, buy a smartphone, or find a café nearby? Voice search allows you to do this quickly since you speak faster than you type.
According to Perficient, over 50% of Internet customers use voice search today, and it would be a big mistake not to optimize your website for it. So, if you want to make a website voice search-friendly, check out some great tips.
Speech
Conversational speech is more typical for voice search, and you should certainly take this into account when selecting keywords. For example, we usually ask not “hire a car cheap address”, but “where to hire a car for cheap”.
However, this doesn’t mean you should create separate pages for low-frequency queries and a voice search. You need to create content that will combine keywords for both cases.
Key phrase length
Based on the previous point, voice search queries are usually longer than text ones. For example, if a user wants to hire a car, he will ask “where to book self drive minibus hire Manchester, but not just “self drive minibus hire”. So, consider the length of key phrases when creating an SEO strategy.
Speech quality
Google has created a special tutorial on voice search. It says that voice search algorithms evaluate content according to two main indicators:
Answer length. Although the queries themselves can be long, short but accurate answers will be higher in the search results.
Answer correctness. The answer must be grammatically correct and sound as if a person is answering the question. For voice search, accurate response to user queries is important. For example, if you ask “How tall was Charles Darwin?”, then the answer “Charles Darwin was 5 feet 11 inches tall” will fully correspond to the query.
Local search
People often use voice queries to locally search for establishments, services, etc. Therefore, it’s important that everyone can find your office/store by address or geolocation. Users say words like “nearby”, “near me”, or “within walking distance”.
For example, “a seafood café nearby”, or “hire a car near me”. Search engines show the closest points on the map, so it’s important to add your business address to Google My Business and Google Maps.
Website speed
Search engines prioritize websites with high page loading speed. Voice search is no different from the usual search in this regard. So, consider the following ways to speed up your website:
- Remove unnecessary images, use services and plugins to compress images.
- Try the WebP image format instead of PNG and JPEG.
- Use gzip compression in Nginx and Apache to reduce the volume of loaded pages.
- Reduce the number of browser requests. You can use CSS sprites.
- Reduce the size of JavaScript and CSS code by removing unnecessary parts. Use services like CSS Compressor.
- Enable data caching.
- Use a CDN.
- Disable unnecessary plugins.
- Create AMP pages on Google.
- Improve your hosting if it can’t handle the load.
Website design
As you know, most of the traffic for voice requests comes from mobile devices. So, make sure that your website looks great and is easy to use not only on a desktop but also on a smartphone. If not, optimize it for small-screen devices by using dedicated apps.
Featured snippets
An effective way to stand out in search results is to create a rich snippet. In addition to the standard description under the heading, it contains additional data: pictures, prices, quick links. Each snippet must match the information on the page.
Featured snippets are a block of information that occupies position zero in the search results, and tops them. Why is this important for voice search? The answer is simple – the screen of a mobile device shows fewer search results than a computer monitor because of its smaller size. And accordingly, the winners are those who occupy the zero block or the first two positions in the regular search results. Accurately answering a voice search query is the best way to get on Featured Snippets.
Main goal
When creating content, you should consider the purpose of the search on the customers’ part first. This applies not only to voice but also to text search. The purpose of the search is what exactly a person wants to know when writing or saying a certain query.
If you ask ‘’where to buy a smartphone”, then you need an address, but if you ask “how to create a YouTube channel”, you probably need recommendations.
SEO Content Length
As we mentioned above, voice search requires longer keyword phrases. So, we recommend using them in longer SEO articles. You may face keyword stuffing if you try to fit long key phrases into a short text.