Voice Search Strategies for Your Business
Posted: April 17, 2019 - By Kalena McElroyThe way customers obtain business information is evolving and the rise of voice search is hard to ignore. Of the 3.5 billion Google searches conducted each day, nearly one third are done via voice, so if optimizing voice search isn’t already on your radar — it should be. In order to be found, businesses need to optimize and structure their online data. Digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa take various online factors into account when deciding which businesses to mention when responding to a query. Implement these simple voice search strategies to get your business found.
Conversational keywords
First, identify what questions users are asking about your business and if you are answering them online. People tend to ask voice assistants questions that are much longer than those typed into a search engine. The questions typically start with who, what, when, where, why, or how. For example, someone may ask “Google, where is the closest hair salon that specializes in color?” Be sure that your business shows up by targeting popular conversational keywords everywhere your business is mentioned online.
Mobile-optimized website
Most voice searches are made on mobile phones while the user is on the go, so it’s essential for businesses to have a mobile-optimized website. Pages that aren’t mobile responsive or take too long to load will cause visitors to abandon your page and damage your rankings. Since many searches are done via smartphone, these factors are important not only for voice search, but also for customer experience and general SEO. In addition to an optimized website, marking up content with Schema helps search engines easily read and categorize your content to give your voice search rankings a little boost.
High-quality business listings
Your website shouldn’t be the only place customers can find your business online. Getting listed on multiple business directories is one of the first steps to building up an online presence. Optimizing your listings will help your business to rank higher in voice searches and gain more visibility overall. Consistent and robust information across all business listings is favored by search engines and customers. Our listing management tool can help you easily update over 50 business listings at once and will make sure the information is up to date with no inconsistencies.
76% of smart speaker users perform local searches at least weekly with 46% using it to find local business information daily. Voice search will soon affect your business whether you’re prepared for it or not. Updating your marketing strategy to include voice search is a great way to give you an edge over your competitors.
