How to Optimize Your Website Content for Voice Search

Optimizing your business for voice search, an increasingly popular means of accessing local information, means updating your website content with long-tail keywords and investing in local SEO. With more than half of consumers now using voice to find local business information, and more than 200 million smart speakers sold, voice has become an important interface for search. Traditional search results pages show the top 10 organic listings for any query. With voice search, there’s only one chance to rank. When a consumer asks Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri for a nearby coffee shop or bookstore, they’re only going to get one response. Business owners need to make sure their businesses are the first one named. How do you make that happen? It starts by optimizing your website content for voice search. Voice search optimization relies primarily on four data sources:

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business)
Apple Maps
Yelp
Bing

Each voice assistant relies on its own set of data sources for local search queries, so it’s important to take an active role in managing your data on all of these platforms. Another way to optimize your website content for voice search is by integrating more long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are specific keyphrases that people are likely to use when they are close to a point-of-purchase or when they are relying on voice search. Long-tail keywords help voice assistants answer specific questions that people are asking, like “What is the best spa in Austin?” or “What is the most popular sports bar in Potomac?” As a best practice when optimizing your website for voice search, it’s a good idea to incorporate long-tail keywords into your website content. If you’re not sure which keywords are best, search marketing tools like AnswerThePublic can provide a number of ideas for search engine queries that come through for specific keywords. Optimizing website content for voice search also involves using more conversational language. From your About page to product descriptions, every part of your website should be reviewed and edited to incorporate more conversational language for voice search. Local search is another focus area for any business that’s interested in ranking in voice search. Voice search and local search go hand in hand. Since most locally-oriented voice searches are for local businesses, it’s important to have an updated, accurate Google Business Profile with all relevant information filled out, as well as updated profiles on Yelp and Apple Maps. These three are the primary sources for business listing information on Google Assistant (GMB), Siri (Apple Maps and Yelp), Microsoft’s Cortana (Yelp), and Samsung’s Bixby (Yelp). To learn even more about ranking in voice search, read Preparing For The Voice Search Era.