By Andrew Oziemblo, Founder & CEO of Chicago SEO Geeks, the digital marketing & SEO agency helping businesses achieve long-term growth goals.
There is no denying that search engine optimization is critical for all businesses today. However, you also need to recognize that the world of SEO is changing all the time. One of the latest trends in SEO is voice search. It is estimated that there are one billion voice searches carried out on a monthly basis. Moreover, mobile voice searches are three times more likely to have a local focus. In this blog post, we are going to take a look at the different reasons why you should optimize your campaign for voice search now.
What is Voice Search?
There is only one place to begin, and this is by revealing what voice search actually is. This happens when you speak to your device, be it a computer or smartphone, in order to conduct a search for a particular business or topic. For example, if you are driving home and you want to find a gas station, you don’t want to start typing on your phone. Instead, all you do is instruct your phone to open a voice search and then you can ask it where the nearest station is.
When we use voice search, it is likely that we are going to have a conversational tone, as opposed to stating a short phrase in the manner we would if we were typing out our search. This is important because it makes a huge change in terms of how we optimize for voice search.
Why should you optimize for voice search?
Now that you know what voice search is, it is important to understand why you should be concerned with this. You only need to look at the popularity of voice search to see why this is the case. It is extremely popular at the moment, and it is something that is only going to get more and more popular, especially with the younger crowd. It is a lot easier to use voice search simply because you don’t need to type. You will also usually receive one answer for your search, depending on the device you are using. This means you do not have to comb through the search results. And, despite the fact that mobile search has taken over, voice search is not only suitable for mobile devices like smartphones. Consumers are able to use voice search on their PCs, tablets, and laptops as well. That means that voice search can be used pretty much irrespective of the device.
Moreover, the research shows that everyone is using voice search! Here are some statistics that back this up…
- Did you know that global voice commerce is expected to be worth $40 billion by 2022?
- Almost 20 percent of all voice search queries are triggered by just 25 queries
- Playing music is the most popular use of smart speakers at the moment
- 55 percent of households are expected to own smar speaker devices by 2022
- 30 percent of all web browsing sessions will be done without a screen by 2020
- 50 per cent of all online searches are going to be voice-based by 2020
- 31 per cent of smartphone users around the world use voice tech at least once per week
- 20 percent of all Google searches are now voice
When you take these statistics into consideration, it is not hard to see why voice search is so important today and why it needs to be part of your search engine optimization strategy if you want to attract nearby customers, on-the-go, who are searching for your service or product on their smartphones.
As you are making improvements, you ought to ensure that the structured data / schema, is also optimized. Structured data is information about your company that is hidden in the source code of your website. Although website visitors cannot see this data, it is vital in terms of optimization for voice search.
Long-tail keyword research
As we mentioned earlier, when it comes to voice search, searches are likely to be longer because they involve conversational spoken phases. When we type something online, we often use shorter phases, however, we use longer phases when it comes to voice search. For example, we may type ‘gas station’ but when we use a voice search we may say something like ‘where is the nearest gas station?’
Why does this matter? Well, it has an impact on the sort of keywords you are going to be using when targeting voice searches. These are known as long-tail keywords. In order to optimize for voice search, you are going to need to do some research into the long-tail keywords that are linked to your location and industry. There are a number of different keyword tools out there that can assist you. Tools like this will help you to figure out what terms your consumers are using when they are trying to find companies like yours.
However, you always need to remember that more natural language is used with voice search when compared with text searches. Because of this, while you need to use long-tail keywords, it is also imperative that you use them in a natural language. One common tactic is to use natural language and long-tail keywords in order to answer the queries that your consumers and target consumer base may typically pose.
As you can see, there is no denying that voice search is the latest trend in the world of search engine optimization. If you want to get ahead of your competition, then you are going to need to ensure that your online presence is optimized for voice search. Hopefully, this article helped you realize just why that is so critical for companies to employ regardless of their size or industry.
