Voice Search was just a simple idea brought on for improving the search engine options. But it turned out to be one of the most useful and deciding factors for the development of search engines.
Every concept plays its role in bringing value and making it easy for people to use.
Voice search was first implemented on smartphones which later introduced to speakers, audio devices like Alexa, etc.
Now, it has brought on a revolution in search engines and search engine optimization techniques.
What is Voice Search & Why it is Important?
Voice Search is an interesting concept that is implemented to ease the process of searching on search engines for the audience.
When you are in the Google search engine, you will see a Voice/audio icon at the right corner of the search bar.
How to use voice search? Well, it is automated and all you have to do is to click the ‘Voice icon’ and speak/say the search term.
Voice search optimization proves to be important as:
- It is faster and easier
- Generates accurate results
- It is getting bigger and acquiring large audience group
- It is quick to a website or application
- Useful when driving or while you cannot type.
- It is more appropriate and convenient
- It is best used for mobile search
More accurate on listing Local Businesses! Heard that Business owners?
Let's look at the ways to optimize your site for Voice Search:
Optimizing your website speed is an important factor in voice search optimization and it goes unrecognizable. The audience does all the other aspects of optimization and leaves this.
The quicker the website responds, the more useful will be the voice search experience.
There are several factors to determine web page speed and here you could use these tools to check it on:
- Enable compression
- Enable good SEO practices
- Use fewer redirects
- Minify CSS, Javascript, HTML
- Remove render-blocking Javascript
- Leverage browser caching
- Use a CDN
- Optimize and Alt text for images
Search engines favor more for websites that are SSL certified. With it, the search engine recognizes it as a trustworthy and useful content for the audience to be viewed. Because of this, the favored content will be shown to the reader. Change your website status from HTTP to HTTPS now.
Make sure your website follows good online practices and is secured.
Creating a FAQ page promotes the search engine to also show related or rich answers to the audience.
So that the user will be able to stay at your website for a long time which possibly improves your SEO score. Also that your content will be posted as feature snippets on search engines.
Examples of the FAQ are:
- What are the best digital marketing activities?
- Is digital marketing effective in today’s world?
- What is brand awareness?
- How to build a brand on social media?
- Is social media useful in branding?
During the process of voice search, the user will always use simple and understandable words. The best and easiest way to get your content visible to the audience is to use simple keywords in your content.
Use Conventional keyword, 1-2 words that easily describe what the audience is looking for.
As per the study, “near me” term is most widely used on Voice search and this shows that it is necessary to leverage your Google Business Listing.
You have to list your business on Google My Business and optimize your site for search terms like “near me”.
What to do in Google My Business:
- List your business in Google My Business
- Enter the basic details like business name, website and contact details.
- Post content on Google My Business regularly.
- Link your website and follow good SEO practices for the website
Like always, valuable content always brings value to your website.
Make sure you write content with simple, conventional, and long-tail keywords. When you follow this your site will be optimized to the maximum value.
With all these above steps and good SEO practices, your website will be voice optimized, and when anyone searches, this will drive traffic to your website.
I wrote this post thinking of an incident that happened in my real life.
I was having a conversation with my uncle and he was talking about an interesting article which he saw that day before. He said about the article in Tamil (An Indian Language).
As soon he said about that, he wanted to show me that on Google. I don’t know how to type in Tamil nor I had a Tamil keyboard on my phone. I just opened Google chrome and voice searched it.
It came! I searched it by saying it in Tamil and the result popped up! Voice search is going to play an important role in the digital marketing industry.
I hope this proves to be useful and look-on for more updates on Duri Digital.
A Blogger and Digital Marketing Executive. Hamza Shariff started Duri Digital as a passion to empower readers to learn and update their knowledge & skills in the digital marketing field.
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