Article by Katina Jaye Beveridge, ASBAS Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre
Voice search is one of the upcoming digital marketing trends businesses should watch out for this coming 2020. In fact, according to Google, voice search is now the fastest growing form of online search, thanks to the rising popularity of virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Comscore, a media research and analytics company, even predicted that half of the total searches in 2020 will be in the form of voice.
It is quite clear that voice clear has made queries a lot easier. All they have to do is turn on the virtual assistant and speak what they’re looking for. It is more convenient to say “Siri, where’s the nearest steak restaurant here?” than typing the whole sentence out.
As a business, how do you optimize your website for voice search? Here are some tips.
Think of search in terms of questions.
The best way to prepare your site for voice search is to look at your content and come up with questions that you are able to answer. For example, if you’re a restaurant that offers salads and pasta in Sydney, you could edit or create your content to answer the following questions:
- Where is the best salad/pasta place in Sydney (you can be more specific with the location)?
- Where to find the best (type of pasta or salad in your menu)?
Focus on long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords are search terms and phrases that are made of four words or longer. Since users will be searching more in the forms of questions, you need to think of conversational, long-tail keywords to include in your content. For example, instead of using “best pizza,” you should use more specific keywords, like “best pizza place in Sydney.”
Improve page speed.
Google has already verified that page speed is one of its important ranking factors, so you need to make sure that your website loads quickly. People who use voice search want faster results, so Google prioritizes page speed when it comes to voice search.
Summary.
Voice search is going to be a key component of digital marketing in the future. Hence, it is important to incorporate voice search in your marketing strategy as early as now.