Today, virtually anyone can search the internet using their voice. Voice search is built into popular browsers like Chrome and Edge, and it’s available via chatbots, virtual assistants and AI-powered co-pilots. While still not as popular as using a keyboard, its hands-free convenience means more people are beginning to make use of it. As people use language differently when they speak, compared to how they write, voice search has implications for website owners. In this post, we take a detailed look at how voice search affects SEO and website content strategies.
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What is voice search?
Thanks to advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), computers are now better able to understand human language – both spoken and written. When it comes to finding information online, these advanced algorithms can interpret the context of what we are saying, helping them provide highly accurate and relevant search results. Additionally, with AI, they can provide that information verbally and do so in a conversational way – even clarifying our search intent if they are not sure.
The most basic forms of voice search are those embedded into search engines. Simply state what you are searching for, and the results will appear on your screen just as if you’d typed in the query. Virtual assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, meanwhile, will provide results on devices with screens or provide verbal answers on smart speakers. The newly evolving co-pilots, such as Microsoft’s Copilot, go even further, combining search results with other AI-generated content, and can deliver this using both speech, text and images.
As voice search technology evolves, more people are likely to make use of it. According to Synup, over a quarter of searches on the Google app are already conducted by voice and three-quarters of these are used for local searches . Moreover, it is expected that in 2024, shoppers using voice search will spend $30 billion, globally – a rise of 54% on 2023 .
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Optimising your site for voice search
With more people using voice search, adapting your website’s SEO and content strategies for it can improve your online visibility and increase the number of visitors your site receives.
The first thing to understand about voice searches is that they tend to use language in a different way to traditional typed searches. Instead of short queries that are often nothing but keywords and not always written grammatically, e.g., ‘electrician Bristol’, ‘lasagne recipe’ or ‘laptops cheap’, voice searches are generally longer, grammatically correct and phrased in full, e.g., ‘Find me an electrician in Bristol’, ‘What’s the best recipe for lasagne?’ and ‘Where can I find cheap laptops?’
If people are using more natural and conversational search terms for voice searches, then it means your content will need to follow suit if it is to be matched to the search terms by search engine algorithms. In particular, this means making use of long-tail keywords that match the way we phrase these types of queries. One way to achieve this is to create question-and-answer content. This can be implemented in a number of ways, such as creating FAQ pages, adding FAQ sections to existing pages or changing headings that look like titles into questions. For instance, if we were to modify this section of the article for voice search we could change the title from ‘Optimising your site for voice search’ to ‘How do you optimise a website for voice search?’
Additionally, you need to consider how voice search results are provided to users. In searches where results are displayed on the screen, they are often shown as short snippets, while verbal responses are also given concisely as users generally want quick, easy-to-understand answers. The implication here is that besides including questions in your content, the answers you give must be relevant, clear and to the point.
Furthermore, it can be beneficial to break longer sections up into smaller chunks, each with its own subheading or question, as this enables search engines to find the most relevant information from your site.
Optimising technical SEO for voice search
As more people use mobile phones for searching the internet and as voice search is enabled on these devices, websites need to be mobile-friendly to take advantage. Mobile friendliness is an important ranking factor for search engines, so this needs to be achieved if you want to perform well in any mobile search – voice or typed. As a result, your site should have a responsive theme that adapts to different screen sizes and should be easy to use on smaller screens. Even if you already have a responsive theme, check that the text is readable; that buttons and links are far enough away from each other that tapping on the right one isn’t a challenge; and that text boxes and forms are easy to fill in. Also, make sure that pop-ups and advertisements don’t get in the way of the content.
Site speed is another important factor for voice search optimisation. Not only do fast-loading sites rank better; your users will expect to get quick answers to their voice queries. You can check your site speed using the free PageSpeed Insights tool, which will give detailed information about any loading issues your site has and how to rectify them. You can also boost loading speed by implementing caching, minification, compression and image optimisation, as well as using a content delivery network. If speed is a significant issue, then upgrading to a more powerful hosting solution, like VPS, can massively cut loading times.
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Local SEO and voice search
As we previously mentioned, 76% of voice searchers use this functionality to look for local businesses. With the number of local voice searches set to triple , local businesses should optimise their site not just for voice search but for local SEO. To do this effectively, you should optimise your keywords for voice, as discussed above, and then incorporate your location into those keywords. For instance, where you would use ‘cheap laptops’ for standard SEO and ‘Where can I find cheap laptops?’ for voice, for local voice SEO, you would use ‘Where could I find cheap laptops in Nottingham?’ You would then use these voice-optimised, long-tail keywords in your page titles, headings, content and meta descriptions. This will improve your website’s chances of appearing in relevant local searches.
For more information, read: 5 Top Local SEO Ranking Factors
Conclusion
With voice search set to become far more common in the next few years, websites will need to adapt to this change in behaviour to take advantage of its opportunities and avoid missing out as fewer typed queries are made. This means adapting content for voice search so that it has a greater chance of ranking for voice searches on search engines or being found by virtual assistants, co-pilots and other AI solutions. Hopefully, from reading this article, you’ll understand the impact voice search is having and how this affects SEO and content strategies.
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