Voice Search Optimisation: Digital Marketing New Frontier In 2020

By on February 7th, 2020

5min Read

 blog image

Voice search! That’s yet another disruptive wave of technology shaking the digital space to its core. In recent years, the search landscape has witnessed a shift, with more people now using voice search to make queries in place of text and other forms.

Smartphone assistants and smart speakers like Google Home, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa lead the way. Not too long ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in his keynote that voice searches accounted for one-fifth of the queries on the Google app. Branded3 also reports that 25% of searches on Windows 10 desktop are done via voice.

These stats are just a drop in the ocean of reports that continue to note the rise of voice search. For digital marketers and businesses looking to get ahead of the curve, this is the time to start voice search optimisation for your website and all other online platforms.

To get you started, here are some areas you will want to revisit and refine as you update your digital marketing strategy.

 

Website Speed

You are probably wondering how this is connected to voice search. Well, voice search users want quick results. That’s where loading speed comes in. 15 seconds is the average time a landing page takes to load on mobile, but what you should be aiming for is 4 seconds or less.

Backlinko once analysed about 10,000 Google home results just to figure out how to optimise a site for search. They found out that it took an average of 4.6 seconds for a voice search result page to load. One of their conclusions was that faster-loading websites seem to have an edge when it comes to voice search results.

That aside, Google usually takes speed into consideration in mobile search ranking.

 

Revise and Adapt Your Content Strategy

Content that is meant to attract organic voice search traffic tends to be different from that created for typed searches. Figuring out the former begins by knowing what voice search users are looking for and how they are doing it.

Here’s an example. A user curious to learn about this subject will simply type “voice search optimisation” while a voice search user will mostly like say ask the search assistant “What is voice search optimisation?”

Going by this voice search marketing example, you can see that typed searches mostly consist of words and sentence fragments while the latter involves ‘long-tail’ questions.  Your Voice marketing strategy should, therefore, take into consideration these ‘long-tail’ searches.

Here’s how to go about it: Create a FAQs page, answer all the questions on your Google My Business page, and come up with compelling questions and answers about what you offer.

In this article, Googles John Mueller shares more tips on how to optimise your content for voice search.

 

Mobile-Friendly Platforms

Earlier, we saw how the majority of the voice searches on Google are done via mobile. This is because of the convenience smartphones have. Users on the go could utilise the voice assistant while indulging in other activities, say cooking or walking.

Your website and other online platforms should, therefore, be optimised for mobile. Make the interface user-friendly, speed up loading times, make info easier to find, and so on. This way, you stand a chance to gain reasonable voice search traffic.

You can figure out how mobile-friendly your website is by using Google Mobile-Friendly Test Tool.

 

Optimise Local SEO

Of all voice searches, close to 22% are local-based queries – Users asking about restaurants (and other businesses) near them, what to do in X or Y, and so on. If you have a local business, see to it that you have a local SEO digital strategy for voice search. It’s the gap between you and that huge traffic plus those great sales you dream of.

Even though we can’t correctly predict the future of voice search, what’s clear is that this wave is on the rise and there’s no sign of it slowing down anytime soon. We have all seen the power of voice search in digital marketing. So, don’t hesitate to leverage its capabilities. Seek expert help where necessary until you are able to harvest the fruits of voice search optimisation.

 

Share on

More blog posts for you

Let's Increase Your Sales.

Talk with one of our certified web development professionals about how to get online.

    newsletter Join 5,000+ businesses smashing revenue goals with our weekly newsletters.