Voice Search: 8 changes you can make to your Website today for Success

Do you want your content suggested by Voice assistants or Voice bot when your user asks about your product or service? Then, read on…

The days where Voice Search is a new norm is not far away. The Voice search arrived at the wake of Siri. However, with the conception of electronic voice assistants or voice bots or smart speakers like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortona, Siri and others smart speakers, voice search has indeed become a norm to many searchers. By the year 2020, 50% of searches will be voice searches, as more people are using voice search to find answers to their questions; your websites must have a purpose and your products solve the problems.

Here are eight things your website must cater to leverage the new of searching for information; it does not matter your website is just an information or e-commerce website.

1. Go beyond Mobile-first to Voice-first

To have a mobile-first website means your website must be fast, technically sound, and all your media are optimized so that they can load more quickly. So, what is involved in designing a voice-first website? Along with everything a mobile-first website must have; every page or post must be able to answer a specific problem or question. Your website copy must follow a conversation your potential customer is trying to ask when solving a problem. There is also another aspect you could think of which is AMP, accelerated mobile pages. That is for another article.

2. Create a Frequently Asked Question page or section

We don’t think from a paragraph when solving a problem; we ask questions. So, the more questions you can answer for your users. The voice bots or assistants will pick those questions when reading your website and can answer for their clients. So, make a list of questions relevant to your products or services that your users might ask or have them in the form your FAQ. Make sure the questions are the titles that are providing the answers.

3. Use Schema Markup or Structured Data Markup

So, what is schema markup? It is a code which clarifies the data for search engines so that search engines can serve the search results fasters when the users ask for the information using voice search. If your website is a WordPress website, then there are few plugins you can use to achieve this lot quicker and easier. I would suggest this plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/schema-and-structured-data-for-wp/

4. Use Featured Snippets or Highlighted Snippets

The featured snippet tells the search engines that the information is essential and arranged for its effectiveness. It will help the search results look better and be more informative to the users. Again if your website is WordPress based, then you can use plugin All in One Schema Rich Snippets which will ensure that you are providing information in a form that the voice bots and assistants can understand and readout to their clients.

5. Your content must follow the voice-first principle “Conversation.”

I touched about this in the voice-first. The most remarkable thing about voice search is that the search is more conversational and in natural language that your customers would use when searching for the information they need. Just imagine, you are speaking to a friend or an associate and asking a question. Or customer asking for something to your shop assistant.

So, it means your keywords are long-tail keywords. That means you need to use more long-tail keywords; your questions are titles which answers your users’ questions within the description which you are sharing. You can also use local-focused language (no slangs), and the content will also help your content to appear in more voice search results.

6. Your focus must be on your users’ intention

There are four types of intents, informational, specific, transactional and navigational. So, when you are creating the content fit your content to one of the user intents. That way, you will be able to develop the FAQ list or blog or product outcome. So, base your titles based on the user intent.

The user intents follow a sales pipeline almost to the “T” or AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). Informational intent is map directly to attention, specific intent maps to interest, navigation maps to desired results intent and transactional maps to action. About 20% of voice searches are about local information or intention to buy or gather information; you can focus on these user intents and create content for the same.

7. Page Loading speed is a key

We all have heard about the KISS principle when someone speaks about simplicity. This principle applies to your website, even though we have high-speed internet connections and increasing reach, we have some technical difficulties when it comes to smaller devices. They cannot deal with the heavy lifting of media files on your websites such as images, videos etc.

So, optimize and compress your page assets so that your page loads faster on smaller devices, especially when it comes to voice searches. If your site loads more quickly, then your content will be picked by the algorithm and presented. So, pay attention to page loading speed. One of the key out with images and media is your hosting provider so pay attention when choosing them.

8. Search engine algorithms change frequently

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is work in progress, as search engine changes your content must adapt to the algorithm changes. One of the aims for search engines is to serve their searchers. However, your responsibility is two prongs users (searchers) and search engine themselves. If you are not keeping up to the changes, then your once ranked site can become defunct site as well. I know this can be challenging so do work with professionals who deal with SEO daily.
When providing the information and content to your audience when they need it, in the way they need it, and the search engines or voice bots can understand will make your content efforts and your time worthwhile.

If you want your website content, products and services to be one of the answers voice assistants are putting forward; then you have to be proactive about optimizing your content or website for voice search. These eight changes will bring massive impact and a big difference in voice search efforts to the new generation of the searchers.  Lastly, before I go, would like to plant a seed about Local SEO as it plays a vital role in the success of Voice Search.  This is a video where I speak about Local SEO, watch and take action to rock like a star when it comes to putting your website forward to your users.