Voice search is becoming increasingly popular, with more people using it to search for nearby businesses and information quickly. Companies can use several strategies to optimize local voice search, from leveraging Google Business Profile listings to improving website structure and content.
To optimize for local voice search in 2023, you must understand how this search works and what ranking factors should be considered when setting up your strategy. In this article, we’ll discuss some key points on how to get started optimizing your business for local voice searches in the year 2023.
Here’s How You Can Optimize for Local Voice Search
The strategy for voice searches may be the most transformative invention since the early days of Google. By leveraging this technology, businesses can reach potential customers looking for specific services within their area.
Know Your Customer
Being voice search friendly is hot right now: 41 percent of adults and 55 percent of teens use voice search daily. Businesses must be aware of how their customers use different devices to provide them with the best possible user experience. Businesses can create a website tailored to each user’s needs by understanding customer device behavior. This could include optimizing content for online search or creating an app specifically designed for mobile users, all utilizing voice searches. In addition, by taking the time to understand customer device behavior, businesses can ensure they are providing the best possible user experience for all users regardless of what voice search devices they may be using.
Take Advantage of AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) in search engine optimization (SEO) is becoming increasingly popular among businesses. Applying AI techniques allows businesses to customize content to fit each customer’s interests, helping ensure it has maximum impact.
This can increase engagement and conversions and improve rankings in the SERPs. Additionally, AI can optimize the content structure by analyzing relevant keywords and phrases to determine which will lead to higher rankings.
Use Conversational Language
Using more conversational words like “I,” “me,” “you,” and “we” in blog posts can help give your content a more natural feel. You should also avoid jargon and overly technical language as much as possible. Adding touches of humor can also help make your points more engaging. For those with an established brand that must be followed, aim to make the content reflect a more informal tone without compromising quality.
Focus on Local SEO
Optimizing for local search is important in improving your website’s visibility and ranking. It involves optimizing your content to make it more relevant to local audiences and ensuring that you target the right keywords and phrases. To do this effectively, you must include location-specific target keywords in your content and translate them into local languages. This will ensure that your content is accessible to a wider range of people and can be found by voice searches.
Prioritize for Google Featured Snippets
Google Featured Snippets is an incredibly powerful tool for businesses looking to increase their visibility in search engine results pages. They appear at the top of the page, above organic search results, and can offer a major traffic boost if captured. Featured Snippets come in various formats, including paragraphs, numbered or bulleted lists, and more. This makes Featured Snippets particularly pertinent for voice searches, as virtual assistants usually give the Featured Snippet as the response.
Use Schema
Schema markup is an important tool for optimizing your website for voice search. It is a type of structured data markup that you add to the HTML code of your website, helping search engines provide more detailed results. This includes key information about your business, such as hours, addresses, contact info, pricing info, reviews, and more.
Schema markup is invisible to human visitors but helps indexing bots better understand your content, improving visibility in search results and getting you more clicks. In addition, utilizing search engine optimization techniques raises the odds of your website being included in business search results because it marks your site as more relevant.
Be Multilingual
Tailoring your SEO for different languages is important to be successful in voice search. With Google recognizing over 120 languages, it’s essential to ensure your website is optimized for multiple languages to rank highly and reach a wider audience. In addition, people tend to use voice search in their native language, so if you don’t enhance for multiple languages, visitors searching in their native tongue won’t be able to access your website.
In addition to optimizing for multiple languages, it is important to pay attention to how people use voice search. People tend to use their native language in their voice searches, so if your website does not have content optimized for those languages, you may miss out on potential customers. By focusing on multilingual SEO and paying special attention to voice search, you can ensure that your website is accessible and visible no matter what natural language someone speaks or searches in.
Use Question Keywords
Voice commands are becoming increasingly popular for finding information on the internet. As a result, businesses and marketers need to optimize their content for voice search queries. To do this effectively, they need to target long-tail conversational keywords, especially question keywords.
We use shorter, more generic words or phrases to type out a query. But when we speak our queries aloud, we’re more likely to use full sentences with more detail. This makes sense when you consider that speaking is less physically and cognitively demanding than typing. Therefore, mobile searches are longer and more specific than text searches. To maximize the effectiveness of your content in voice search results, targeting long-tail keywords related to common questions people might ask about your product or service is important. This will help ensure that your content appears in relevant search results and increase potential customers’ chances of finding you online.
Have an FAQ Page
Having an FAQ section on your website is essential for voice search optimization. It allows you to provide quick answers to the questions that people are likely to ask when using a voice search. By providing detailed answers in a conversational tone, you can ensure that your website appeals to the voice searcher and provides them with the necessary information.
For your website and web page to be optimized for voice search, it must be technically sound and include schema markup so that search engines can better understand the content.
Ensure that your website’s navigation and information structure can be easily accessed and loaded expeditiously. This will help users get the information they need as quickly as possible.
Improve Your Website for Mobile Devices
Optimizing your website for smart devices is essential in today’s digital world. Making sure your website works well on mobile phones is essential for successful voice searches.
To begin with, you should check your website on different screen sizes to ensure it appears and functions properly. If not, then work on making your website mobile-responsive. You can also use Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool to test the page load speed of your site on mobile devices and improve it if necessary by following the suggestions given by the tool.
Evaluate Your Website Speed
People are increasingly turning to voice-search to access information quickly and conveniently. With the rise of the voice search user, ensuring that your website is optimized for speed is important. For example, the loading speed of a voice search result is 3.8x faster than an average website, taking only .54 seconds compared to 2.10 seconds for a webpage result. This quick load time can improve your conversion rate, build trust, and create brand loyalty with tech-savvy users using voice search.
Unfortunately, websites that take more than 3 seconds to load can cause a reduction in users of up to 53%. Analyzing the loading speed of your website can be done with Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool can help you assess your current page speed. Considering these points of view, you can ensure that your website is optimized for voice search technology and provide users with the speedy results they expect from their voice search queries.
Improve Social Media Engagement
To ensure your business is found through voice search, you need to have active pages on these social networks and give them lots of attention. Posting regularly, responding to comments and messages quickly, and engaging in conversations are great ways to show potential customers that you care about their needs.
The more you engage with users on social media, the more likely they will find your business when they use a voice assistant for their search. By taking the time to interact with customers on social media platforms, you can ensure that your business will be seen by those who are looking for what you have to offer.
Understand the Types of Voice Searches
The local voice search ecosystem is an ever-evolving landscape that has become increasingly important for businesses to understand and leverage. With the rise of smart speakers, voice assistants, and other voice-enabled devices, people are now using their voices more than ever to search for information online.
Voice search queries have become increasingly popular in recent years and can be broken into three distinct types. Discovery searches are when people ask for information about a type of local business, such as “What are the best breweries near me?” In this case, they are looking for general information about a certain type of business. Direct searches are when people ask for specific information about a local business, such as “Call Hanna, Warner, and Associates” or “Make a reservation at Hearth Restaurant.”
Finally, knowledge searches are when people ask questions that require an answer from an expert source, such as “Has emerald ash bore been seen in Northern Colorado?” All three types of voice search queries can be used to find local businesses and services. By understanding the different types of voice search queries, businesses can better optimize their websites and content to ensure they appear in relevant search results.
To End
Voice search strategy is an important part of digital marketing and will become even more so in the future. ITD Web Design has experienced professionals who understand how to create effective local SEO strategies to help your business grow. We ensure that your website is optimized for local searches and that your business listings and social media pages are up-to-date with relevant information. Connect with us now.