One of the newest and greatest technological advances of the 21st century is voice search. Most people know voice search as "Siri" on their iPhones (sorry, Android users). No matter what type of smartphone you have, voice search is an option and is greatly utilized. That being said, as a website owner, it's important to know the tips and tricks to optimize your content for voice search.
Why is Voice Search Optimization Important?
Everyday seems to get busier and shorter, making people around the world turn to smartphone use more and more. As calculated in May 2017 by Hitwise, approximately 60% of searches are made on mobile devices. While many of these searches may be just through text, many of them are also through voice search. In fact, Google now has the option to voice search, even from your computer! With this in mind, we must account for the SEO changes that come with voice search.
What's Different About Voice Search?
The one major difference between voice and text search is the word length of the search. Text search peaks at about 2 words, while voice search peaks at about 3. This may not seem like a large difference, but it surprisingly is. Due to the laziness of our society (not counting myself out of this), texting can be quite the chore. With voice text, you don't have to do ANYTHING except speak! That being said, the sentence structure of voice text differs greatly from that of text itself. Voice text, due to being spoken, is more likely full sentence structures, such as "What color is the sky?" rather than, "color of the sky".
What Should I Do to Be Voice Optimized?
In order to voice optimize your website for SEO purposes, try and make headings with questions someone would ask into their phone. For example, just look at this blog post! The heading above each section is a question someone would ask if they are looking into voice optimization for their website. The importance of putting the questions as headings (or h2's for you coding geeks), is that search engines are able to spider (or find) that content easily, therefore pushing you further up into the search engines. This helps people find your website and information much easier, bringing more traffic.
Voice Optimization is Sticking Around
New inventions are coming out every day with voice optimization as their main focus, such as Amazon's "Echo" with the infamous Alexa, Window's "Cortana", Apple's "Homepod" and Google Assistant, to name a few. Optimizing your content for voice optimization for SEO purposes is essential, so next time you call out "Hey Siri!", think about this article and how your website and company could greatly benefit from this wild invention.
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