Voice Search Optimization: Tips for Your Creative Content Marketing Plan

The field of information technology is a fast-evolving one. What was lauded as the emerging technology last week, may go obsolete in the next.

The Internet has unveiled a world of knowledge for all of us. Today, we are at a point where a day does not go by without doing a quick search on Google or other search engines.

What used to be a typed-in search in the web browser earlier, has now evolved into a more simplified voice search, thanks to the massive adoption of smartphone usage in our day to day lives. The widespread usage of voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Cortana are changing the landscape of voice-activated searches. Research says that approximately 55% of the teens and 41% of the adults use a voice-based search at least once a day in their daily lives.

You may have a Search Engine Optimization-rich content on your website, but this may not be enough. The current situation calls for a Voice Search Optimization of your website content to make it to the top of voice-activated searches on various search engines.

What is Voice Search Optimization?

When we use voice assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa, or Siri to conduct a voice-based search on a particular topic, it is called a voice search. Used on smartphones and mostly on portable smart devices like tablets, voice searches have made our interactions with our digital devices as natural and effortless as if we are talking to a friend or just another human being.

Compared to the online searches typed in a web browser, voice searches are a tad bit different and therefore requires specific strategies for optimization.

While traditional SEO involve short and precise keywords, voice SEO or VEO uses more of long-tail keywords as they are more conversational in nature.

While a regular SEO content throws up a set of results that rank high in the keywords, voice SEO will produce one result that is short and precise which will be read out to the user.

Therefore, it becomes essential to do voice search optimization of your website content, if you want the voice assistants to present it to the users whenever a relevant query is being made.

Tips to Integrate Voice Search Optimization in Your Content Marketing Plan

Here are a few tips that you can use to incorporate voice search optimization in your website content strategy,

1. Create Content in the Form of an FAQ Page

Creating content in the form of FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions is a simple and great way of incorporating voice search optimization in the content, as the content can be written in a conversational style. A study by Search Engine Land states that the queries using “Who” phrases have gone up by 134% and “How” phrases by 81% compared to 2017.

Unlike a typed search where the query is brief using few keywords, in voice search, the question is asked by the user in a question-answer style, featuring long tail keywords.

FAQ pages present a perfect solution for voice search marketing as the content is already in the preferred format – a conversational type question that is followed by a short and precise answer.

FAQs also are great as they contain long tail keywords and queries in the formats as required by voice searches. They are designed and optimized with an intent to present the information to the user in the way they want.

Getting your sales and marketing team involved while creating an FAQ page may be a good idea so that you can find queries that your target customers are most likely to ask. You can then optimize your content in such a way that it offers the best solutions during a voice search.

2. Publish Relevant Blog Posts

Similar to FAQs, publishing relevant blog posts are also a terrific way of integrating voice search optimization in your content. However, while creating content for blogs, ensure they are long-form blogs as Google voice search results mostly come from pages that have a high word count in the region of 2300 plus words. The reason being, long-form content automatically presents more chances for a match to take place between the user’s voice search query and your blog content.

3. Create Conversational Content

Content created in a conversational tone works best when it comes to voice searches. Users prefer talking to their voice assistants like they would to a friend, which makes conversational content rank high in voice search results.

4. Get Your SEO Basics Right

While voice SEO might be different from the traditional SEO, the fundamentals are almost the same.

Ensure that the content is written in a simple language without unnecessary jargons and is kept concise. Google’s voice search rating guidelines state that the voice search results which are brief and to the point with a typical length of only 29 words work best for the search engine.

The simpler the language used, the easier it is to feature on top of the voice searches results. The average voice search result in Google was written at a 9th-grade reading level for easy and effortless comprehension by the users.

Studies also indicate that content that rates high on SEO are highly likely to top voice SEO as well, so much so that almost 75% of voice search results come in the top 3 for the same query in a typed search.

Make sure to optimize your content to appear in the Featured Snippet in a Google search, as 40.7% of voice search results come from a featured snippet.

5. Incorporate Long Tail Keywords Focusing More on Intent

One of the critical steps of voice search optimization of your content is to switch from short keywords to long tail keywords as they tend to be extended and more specific. On an average, 76.1% of the voice searches are longer than text-based searches. Long tail keyword phrases also help you to answer the user’s natural human language format better.

In Conclusion

While voice-based searches may appear to be in the infant stages, the future growth possibilities are vast and endless. With the prediction of around 33 million voice-first mobile devices to be in circulation across the world, the leap from typed searches to voice-based searches is going to be an effortless one.

Comscore forecasts that 50% of all searches will be voice-based by the year 2020, which is not too far away.

Voice searches for voice assistants are fast becoming a significant force to be reckoned with. Therefore, voice search optimization could well be the one that can change the direction of your business.

So, if you are yet to incorporate voice search optimization in your content, now would be the best time to do so, else you may risk missing all the traffic that could come your way from voice-based searches.