Voice search – 3 ways to optimise your site.

About to launch your business or want to improve your presence on the web? Implement the following good practices to make sure you show up high in voice search results.

What is voice search?

“Hey Siri, …” or “Alexa, …”

Virtual assistants or devices offering voice searches have become widely embedded in our daily lives. Helping us find answers quickly. Basically the device just translates our question from a spoken request to a web search on a search engine and then shares the relevant results with you.

How widespread is voice search?

In 2019, there were no less than 3.25 million digital voice assistants in use globally. This trend is still growing. According to Google 1 in 5 searches are done via voice search. So it is a good practice to take voice search into account when you create content for our websites.

Best practices to optimise your website for voice search.

1. Website loading time.

Most importantly, to answer a voice search quickly, the virtual assistant will pick the first results that search engines provide. So make sure you rise up in the search rankings by first of all applying the basic rules of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO is a digital technique to improve your score in search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing by using the right keywords. By cleverly weaving strategic search terms into your URLs, meta description, titles and paragraphs you can improve your score in search engines significantly.

Also, sites that load quickly enough rise to the top of search engines rankings. So test your site loading time with the free Google “crawler” tool. It analyses a page and grades it based on how well it performs.

2. Answer common questions in your business sector.

Knowing which are the most frequently asked questions in your business sector or market segment is key. Regardless of whether they’re being asked by voice search or in a web browser.

Most voice searches are question based, so it’s important to rank high in the questions that appear in Google Snippet.

Start by searching the keywords and observe what questions show up on the first page of the search results. When you find the questions that are frequently asked, provide the answers to them in an article or blog.

To guide your analysis, we recommend using the website Answer The Public. It that offers several free searches per day and displays questions in the form of intuitive diagrams.

Stand out by answering questions differently than the questions answered by your competitors. Produce relevant content in which you answer the questions in a short and consistent way.

3. Play the “local” card.

Another useful lever is the local aspect. Results promoted with Google via voice search are often related to searches about products or services geographically nearby. In order to appear in these results, it’s important to have your own Google Business page. Creating your business page is completely free and enables potential customers to find your contact information or website, quickly. Thanks to this page, you will more easily appear in voice search results.

However, you can go further than that by creating content related to your geographic area, if you also have a physical presence either in a storefront or office space. Our advice is to write about your city or neighbourhood so that it will show up in searches made about that area. For example, if you’re a baker, this would mean that when someone does a voice search like “What’s the nearest baker?” you will be more likely to be included in the results provided to that user.

Going further

If you’ve followed the advice above and you want to go even further in terms of your online presence, we recommend to take a look at our article about SEO.