Changing as quickly as the weather in New England, SEO and technology seem like they have something new going on every week. With the introduction of voice controlled personal assistants and voice search mediums, people have been searching the web differently. Of course this will effect the SEO industry in more than a few ways.
Searching by voice controlled means is becoming extremely popular among users as it’s easy, convenient, and reliable. Believe it or not voice search technology has only been improving year after year, in 2013 the voice search error rate hung around 25% while in 2016 it went down as low as 8%. Don’t believe us? Give it a try on your smart phone right now!
From here on out, voice controlled search will only get better, thus, increasing the amount of people that use the feature. This means it’s important for SEO’s to think about how their business can optimize for voice search- sooner rather than later.
While it may seem tough to optimize something that doesn’t necessarily use keywords, or is utilized the same way a more orthodox search would be (your good ol’ fashioned keyboard) SEO’s will have to think outside of the box in order to optimize their sites for voice search.
How You Can Optimize Your Website for Voice Searches
Here you can see a few options to get you stared before the voice-search takeover:
- Start thinking more about long tail searches– On average, humans speak much faster than they type, so most voice search queries will be much longer than your average typed out search. When targeting keywords, think about how you personally would search for your business or something when speaking to a voice controlled product rather than a normal search.
- Conversational content is key- When writing content it is important to deliver relevant answers to your customers questions without adding fluff and useless content. Think that your user is always searching for quick answers, but still want their whole question answered. It’s important to find that happy place between giving all the relevant content your customer may want and not dragging on and boring them to death. It’s also important to optimize content so it makes it easy for search engines to digest. Using bullets, tabs & other methods to better organize content can prove useful when google is scouring the web for an answer.
- Location, location, location- Although it should already be a priority for most local businesses, local SEO will be more important than ever, especially with all voice search queries rising at a rapid rate. Recent studies have shown the voice searches are three times more likely to be more localized in search terms than a traditional search. The best way to do this is to make sure that business addresses, phone numbers, and emails are all easily accessed across the web. If you have yet to to boost your companies local presence, there has never been a better time.