The digital world is transforming at a fast pace and technology is making our lives convenient. You might have used Alexa and other voice assistants to make your work more convenient and fast. Let’s imagine you’re getting ready and forgot to book a table at a restaurant, so you can tell Alexa to make a reservation for you at your favorite restaurant or cafe. 

4.2 billion voice assistants are currently being used; this number is assumed to double. Voice search and conversational AI are reshaping the digital landscape and consumer behavior. According to Think with Google, one-third of people use voice searches on their mobile devices. 

Some of the popular voice assistants Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are gaining popularity and people use them in their everyday lives to make day-to-day searches. 

Thus brands need to integrate their marketing strategies with Voice Search Optimization. In this article, we’ll explore strategies to optimize voice searches, their benefits, and the future of voice search. 

What is Voice Search Optimisation?

Voice search optimization is a process of optimizing your website and its content to improve its ranking in voice search results. Text-based searches focus more on keywords while voice searches are longer and conversational. 

Voice search optimization optimizes the content so that you address or answer those questions more effectively and relevantly. 

By optimizing the content for voice searches, your chances of attracting new customers who use voice searches to make queries about products, services, etc increase. It improves your ranking on voice search results and eventually increases your traffic, conversion, and sales. 

Benefits of VSO

Here are some of the benefits of voice search Optimization 

• Increase traffic: Voice search optimization can increase traffic to your website. It improves your ranking on voice search results. Thus increasing your visibility and organic traffic. 
• Improve customer experience: An enhanced customer experience is essential for every digital marketing strategy. Responding effectively and innovatively to these voice searches can improve your customer experience. 
• Trust: when you respond to these voice searches relevantly, honestly, and effectively you build trust in your customers. Voice search optimization ensures that relevant solutions are provided to customer’s queries and enhance their user experience. This whole process builds trust and credibility around your brand. 
• Boost Local SEO: Local SEO is extremely important for local businesses. Many voice searches are location-oriented and optimizing your content for that increases your chances of being visible. Local SEO is important for creating a strong brand identity and a loyal local customer base.  
• Voice commerce: Voice searches play a crucial role in e-commerce websites. Customers make voice searches for products and services. Optimizing that will boost your e-commerce sales. It is important to understand the user intent to address those queries more effectively. 
• Improve customer service: Voice search optimization improves customer service. When your content is optimized for voice search queries, you provide effective solutions to those queries. This process improves your customer service and experience. 
• Competitive Advantage: Voice search optimization gives you an edge over competitors. If your marketing strategy is optimized for voice searches then your visibility increases as compared to your competitors. You not only have a competitive edge but also establish a name for your business in the market.

Voice Search Strategies

Here are some of the voice search optimization strategies

• Focus on conversational keywords: Focus on long-tail conversational keywords that consumers use while searching.  
• Focus on user behavior and intent: Try to understand the user behavior and search intent. Voice search algorithms use data, location, and other metrics to understand user intent. Similarly, marketers should focus on user search intent. Real-time data on consumer insights can help you understand consumer behavior how they use voice searches and what voice assistants they use.. Analyzing this data can help you in understanding the user intent. 
• Context with schema markup: Use a schema markup if you don’t. Use schema to markup your content so that search engines can understand what your content and website are about. These HTML add-ons help in making you rank higher in voice search results. According to Milestone Marketing based on 9,400 schema deployments, they had a 20-30% gain. 
• Personalized content: Create high-quality content that answers customer’s questions or queries adequately and in simple language. Create engaging content that addresses consumer’s interests. Use appropriate headlines, subheadlines, and content for a better understanding of consumers. Create a relevant featured snippet for better ranking. 
• Focus on local SEO: Most importantly optimize your local SEO. Use Google My Business and provide correct and relevant information. Optimize for the near-me type of searches. 
• Create a FAQ page: Consumers mostly start their voice searches with why, when, what, who, how, etc. Create a FAQ page that addresses such questions and gives an approach response to them. Start your questions with the adverbs given above. Try to answer these questions conversationally. To enhance the performance of the website, ensure your website speed is good, make sure your navigation is simple and easy to use, include schema markup, and optimize your content with relevant keywords. 
• Mobile friendliness: Make sure your website is accessible on all devices and screen sizes. Make sure that the website loading speed is fast on mobile devices. Try to optimize for the “near me” type of searches as well. 

Future of Voice Search Strategy

Voice searches are becoming more popular as new devices and technologies are being developed. It is assumed that in the future voice searches will be more conversational, integrated with other technologies, and will spread to multiple industries. They will provide a more personalized experience with a special focus on local searches. Brands need to prepare a strategy so that they can adapt to these changes. Here are some of the strategies you can use so that you can adapt to the changes of the future smoothly 

• Mobile Optimization: Make sure the website’s page load speed is good and optimized for mobile phones. It should be accessible on all screen sizes. 
• Focusing more on local: You should use Google My Business and provide accurate information about your business and location. 
• Quality content: Create engaging content that attracts new customers and provides sufficient information to them in response to their queries. Consider the user intent while creating the content. 
• Voice search testing: Experiment with voice search assistants to see how your brand is performing and how you can improve it. 
• Keyword research: Dwell time and resources to find adequate keywords. Try to use more conversational and long-tail keywords of your niche. 
• Structured data: Implement a structured data markup or schema markup so that search engines can understand the content of your website more efficiently. 
• Provide clear answers: Provide a short and simple informative answer to the question or queries. 
• Focus on easy language: Consider the language that is most spoken locally or an easy conversational language. 
• Optimize for snippets: Featured snippets are snippets of text that appear above the search results. It is sometimes used as an answer to search queries so make sure you optimize content for featured snippets so that your chances of getting a rank higher increases in the voice search result. 

Conclusion

Voice searches are not a temporary trend, they are expected to grow in the future and integrate in other industries as well. It will offer new opportunities in the digital marketing world. While you can benefit from these changes only if you adapt to them on time. 

To stay relevant in the future as well you must optimize your content, SEO, and website for voice searches. To help you with this, we at Lumia 360 are here to help you. We are experienced in catering to the special needs of small and medium businesses. Our digital marketing strategy is well-designed guarantees lead generation and makes a business rank higher in Google. Our review management software will manage your reviews including Google My Business, effectively to make you rank higher and improve your online reputation. Likely our web designing strategy is aimed at creating responsive and up-to-date websites. To know more about our services and special offers email us at info@lumia360.com or call us at 514-668-5599. To know more about the latest industry trends,  check our blogs!

Read Also: Understanding the Impact of AI and Machine Learning on Digital Marketing

Read Also: Web Accessibility: Ensuring Inclusivity in Design for All Users

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