With the ever growing popularity of digital personal assistants like Siri and Alexa people have become more inclined to search the internet using voice commands. It’s quick, easy and much more convenient than typing.

As a blog or website owner having more of your potential readers or customers moving toward voice search options, you can’t afford to miss out on the opportunity to be featured on this platform.

What IS Voice Search?

Voice search is a form of speech recognition technology that allows people to access internet search results with just their voice and a smart device that’s connected to the internet.

Optimizing For Voice Search

Just like SEO, voice search is an important part of the digital marketing process. They both aim to improve your search engine ranking and increase website traffic. 

But while SEO focuses on targeted keywords, voice search needs to incorporate these words into more conversational phrases. This is because people tend to use full sentences or phrases when using their voice as the search tool,rather than using keywords alone.

With that in mind here are a few tips to help you effectively structure your blog for voice searches.

Create content in a conversational tone

Creating unique, useful and engaging content gives you the ability to stand out from a thousand other websites and will have a positive effect on your SEO. For voice search optimization, make sure your content is written in a light, conversational tone.

Place your keywords into phrases

When people use voice search tools they tend to speak to their devices like they’re talking to a friend. For this reason keywords need to be placed into conversational phrases within your content. 

Focus on user intent

User intent refers to the reason someone typed their question into a search engine. Are they just looking for information or do they want to buy something?Sometimes their intent is clear and obvious like, “Where is the nearest comic book store?” And sometimes the query is vague like, “Comic book stores.”

Fortunately search engines like Google are able to delve deeper into the context of each search query by showing results for the most likely sought after answers. This is why you should consider the intent of users when creating content for your blog. This way the relevance of your content will be enhanced with regard to specific searches. 

Improve your page speed

Page speed refers to the time it takes for your page to load. If a person is using voice search, they are probably in a hurry to get results. Page loading speed also has a direct effect whether or not your page will appear in voice search results.

Create a FAQ page

Voice searches are mostly driven by question and answer queries. So it would be very advantageous to create a FAQ page on your blog. Add simple questions with short, informative answers that are written in a conversational tone. This can lead to the identification of key phrases when search engines crawl your site which will give your site a higher voice search ranking.

Make use of structured data

Structured data refers to code that is added to HTML markup and used by search engines in order to understand your blog’s content better. By using this type of structured data search engines are able to crawl and read your content more efficiently.

This will lead to an increase in click-through rates which will drive traffic and give you a competitive advantage over your peers.

Remember to keep things in context

Optimizing your blog may seem a little daunting at first. While you may want to use as many keywords and phrases as possible, the trick is not to make things too complicated. Remember that your keywords and phrases need to makes sense within the context of your posts.

Conclusion

Over the last few years voice search has grown in popularity among all internet users. People use it for basic tasks from making phone calls and managing their music playlists, to more involved stuff like getting directions and online shopping. In order to compete effectively in the digital landscape bloggers need to ensure that their blogs or websites are optimized for voice search. Because voice search is the way of the future and isn’t going away any time soon.