How Does Google Voice Work for Business?

If one thing is for certain, it’s that voice search is here to stay — for a long time.

Thanks to its quick response and user-friendliness, voice search has been taking over online browsing. This means that a voice search optimization strategy is an absolute must for your advertising campaign.

In this article, we’ll outline everything you need to know about optimizing your campaigns for voice search.

Become Listed Online

If you have a local business, the #1 thing you should focus on is becoming listed online. Your site may not show up in search results, particularly if it’s a local business.

This is because:

• Most voice search enabled devices have limited display sizes
• Voice assistants like Google’s Assistant and Siri don’t display as many results as text search

While this step doesn’t focus on website parameters, it’s still a vital step that will give you a running start ahead of your competition.

Mobile Optimization

There’s little doubt that voice search popularity is linked to the improvements in mobile device productivity.

Most voice searches are done through mobile devices, which is why you need to optimize your site accordingly. If Google is gearing itself towards mobile-first indexing, your business should follow suit.

Here are a few quick tips:

• Optimize your webpages so that they’re indexed at the top of mobile devices.
• Make sure your webpages are mobile-responsive.
• Keep your text at a readable size for mobile displays.

Another crucial aspect of optimization for voice search is the speed of your website.

Let’s look at it in detail.

How to Boost Landing Page Speed for Voice Searches

Websites with user-friendly, easy-to-read content always rank better in Google searches.

Along with content, Google looks for webpage loading times on different devices. Google’s mobile-first indexing approach gives preference to websites that have faster loading mobile pages.

Nowadays, your site must be fast – or it risks being last.

Not sure your site pages are loading fast enough? To make sure, follow these steps:

1. Avoid uploading larger-sized images on webpages.
2. Add fast, executable queries to boost the servicer response time.
3. Avoid adding too much content on a single page
4. Reduce HTML, JavaScript, and CSS sizes on your pages. Reduce the amount of written code to speed up page reading.
5. Distribute your content throughout your web pages instead of loading up one single page.
6. Avoid adding many navigation buttons or redirects on the landing page(s).
7. Use Google’s “PageSpeed Insights” tool to help you measure your site loading time, then reduce the time accordingly.

Learn More: 11 Tricks for Landing Page Optimization

The Importance of Long-Tail Keywords

One of the best ways to implement voice search optimization in your ad campaign strategy is to focus on long-tail SEO phrases.

The reason why?

A lot of searches made via voice assistants are a lot longer than text-based searches. So, by focusing on long-tail keywords, you’ll be able to match these phrases more closely.

As of now, the most basic and availed use of smart assistants is delivering answer-like responses for any search queries. Long-tail keywords help optimize your campaign for featured snippets, bringing you to the top of Google searches.

Intent-based Content Generation

You should always take the audience’s intent into consideration when creating website content. You can use voice search assistants for a better understanding of how the results will be shown.

We recommend creating an overview of how the top Google results are aligned. Also, you may consider how the landing pages of each of these results, and study their layouts and content arrangement. You can use similar formatting on your landing page to get a head-start.

It helps to understand the intent of your audience. Knowing how they use voice assistants, and how Google prefers landing page layouts to look like to accommodate voice search functions will help you optimize your campaign and business for the voice search revolution.

Target Locally — As Much as Possible

Locally-relevant content is the way to go. So, just as you would optimize for long-tail keywords, make sure a significant amount of your content is local-based.

This is because the vast majority of voice search questions are based on local businesses. For instance, “the best restaurants in *local town*” or “cheapest hotels in New Jersey.”

And just in case you were wondering, your business doesn’t need to be local itself to produce local content. It’s encouraged to write tons of local content to drive relevant traffic to your site, as always, depending on your business’ specific niche or industry.

Develop an FAQ Page

A significant difference between voice and text-based search is the purpose of the search query.

Think about it:

The majority of voice searches are created to receive an answer to a specific query. For instance, “what’s the best quality of Google Dots?”, “what are the best deals for smartphones in 2019?” etc.

For full voice search optimization, you should offer your audience answers to what you do, and how and why you do it. That being said, make sure to include commonly asked questions that are related to not only your business but your industry. These questions should be ones you imagine your users would ask verbally.

Use Structured Data Markup

At this point, you’ve probably figured out that results from voice search stresses more on business listings and snippets to provide customers with quick responses.

This is because, as obvious as it sounds, this specific type of data offers direct responses based on customer’s voice search questions.

To provide rich and accurate data to customers, based on your business or website, you should be using structured data markup. This type of data was a joint initiative of the major search engines to aid website in offering more relevant results and more in-depth information for their audience’s searches.

The Structured Data Markup Helper was designed to help you markup some aspects within your webpages, so Google understands the data on each page a bit better.

This structured data also allows marketers to gain more information on a specific business directly through search engines. This data also helps search engines read and present important information about your site in a faster, more efficient way. That’s a win-win for both the business and the user.

By using the Structured Data Markup Helper Tool, you’ll be able to get this work done easier, and with a lot less hassle.

Write the Way You Speak

Your voice search-optimized content should be as engaging as possible. As we mentioned earlier, users tend to write in long-tail keyword-form when searching for content on mobile or desktop.

For instance, if a user was eager to find a great graphic designer, they could type into the search bar, “best graphic design companies or freelancers”.

However, if they decided to use voice search, the user may ask, “best graphic design companies or freelancers in North America?”

Understanding how users speak to voice search assistants can help you plan how you to write compelling content.

Testing Voice Search Functions

Since voice search is still relatively new to the game, it’s recommended you test the voice search functions regularly.

Testing will help you understand the inner workings of voice search at a deeper level, giving you more insight into how you should be optimizing your campaign accordingly.

Here are some tips on how to test voice search functions:

How to Test:

• How are the results generated?: By using voice assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa, you’ll get a better sense of the search query results you should target. Play around with these assistants and take note of what answers they provide, how many listings they offer, and what they answer to most accurately.
• Single vs. Multiple Listings: Ask yourself, “how many listings does each assistant or device offer you?” By analyzing the number of listings each assistant provides, and which listings they choose, you’ll be creating an at-home testing system that gives you a clear picture of how you should be optimizing your campaign.
• Rankings: Where are you ranking for the majority of your questions? What about your competitors — where are they ranking? If your rankings are low, look into why they may be like that. Compare your layout and approach with a competitor who is ranking higher than you.

Prepare Yourself for The Revolution

Investing in voice search optimization will, without a doubt, offer a progressive and safe investment for your ad campaign and marketing strategy or business.

A recent study found that choice search in eCommerce results in $1.8 billion in Amazon revenue. And researchers predict that this number will increase by up to $40 billion by 2022.

For now, the best thing to do is to prepare yourself and your business for the revolution. You should look to adapt to this new online direction by implementing voice search-based strategies into your content.

By optimizing your site for voice search today, you’ll stay ahead of your competition and may even gain a new burst of traffic – and followers – through voice search rankings.

And, as technology evolves, embracing this innovative channel will help build your brand as the digital landscape continues to shift.