Voice Search Optimization - What You Need to Know

There’s no question that the prevalence of voice search through devices such as the Google Home and the Alexa. Sources predict that by 2020, 50% of searches will be voice searches and about 30% of searches will be screen-less. How do you get your business to show up in those search results? These are some general guidelines for optimizing your results in voice searches. Featured Snippets. First, you must understand where voice search devices get their results from. These hands-free devices only pull from results formatted into rich snippets, which show up when you ask a digital assistant a question. This means if your site is not thoroughly optimized with the code to enable these rich snippets, you may not show up in the results. What’s more is that completely hands-free devices only read the featured snippet from the top of the search results, so if you aren’t at the top, you’re out of luck.

Local Search. So, with this in mind, you will want to optimize your local search. This means optimizing search results from searches ending in “near me.” You want your business to show up at the top, of course, so you’ll need to ensure your Google MyBusiness page is up to date at all times. Incorrect or misleading information may lead to the loss of a potential sale. Another thing that can boost your local search is building online reviews. Offering a discount or reward for leaving a review is a good way to do this. For more information on building a local search strategy, click here.

Site Speed & Mobility. The next voice search optimization tip deals with your business’ website design. A faster website speed and a mobile-friendly site is key to getting, and keeping, you at the top. Google analyzes these things and considers them when ranking your website in search results. Voice searches are also almost exclusive to mobile devices, so ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is very important. The good news is that Google has a tool for analyzing how mobile-friendly your website is. It’s simply called the Mobile-Friendly Test. After entering your website URL, the tool tests your website and gives additional resources for improving your website’s mobile appearance, as you can see below.

Make Predictions. Google is considering including voice search information in its Search Console. This is a tool that website marketing services use to analyze search data from the different websites they manage. It gives invaluable information such as click rates, sitemaps, and what people type in to get to your website. However, there are issues surrounding this movement such as the search inquiry length. Most voice searches are longer than what people normally type in due to the natural flow of speech, which means there will be many more variations on keywords with less volume on each of them. This means that you must make predictions on what specific questions people will type in, and place them in your search optimization.

You can’t afford to ignore the growing power of the voice search. It is predicted that by 2019, the voice search market will be worth $601 million. So start your preparations now so you don’t lose traffic in the coming months and years. CyberSpyder can help with this! Give us a call at 479-782-0005 or email us at [email protected] to make sure your voice search is ready for the future!