By now we all probably know who Siri, Google, Alexa, and Cortana are. Not only are they present in a majority of our lives, but they are starting to take the lead in search. Voice search (also known as A.I.) is one of the most popular methods used in search today and is predicted to completely dominate how people search on the web as early as 2020. The real question, however, is whether your website is equipped to take on voice search. Here are some tips that can help benefit your website in voice search.
Specific and Long-tailed Keywords
Now that voice search has entered the game, short, specific keywords are starting to fall by the wayside. With people now vocalizing their keywords, searches are becoming significantly longer than their text search predecessors. This has made the keyword game turn more conversational-based than text-based.
The key is to now be as specific as possible, and using long-tailed keywords allows you to do just that. “Near me” keywords have been influential as well, because if you are in a bind and need to find something right away, you are mostly going to associate it with the “near me” term. For example, if you were to type out a search you would most likely use only, “Coffee Eatontown,” but when doing a voice search you would more specifically ask, “Where is the best mocha latte in Eatontown?”, or “Best Mocha Latte Near Eatontown.” This now means that any content you are creating has to relate to the questions consumers will be asking.
Ask Questions Someone Buying Your Product Would Ask
One of the biggest changes to content you write should come from a consumer prospective. You want to gear your content towards answering the questions your consumers will be asking. For instance, if I was in the supermarket and wanted to know the nutritional value of apples, I could ask, “What vitamins are in apples?” rather than typing, “Apples Vitamins.” A great website to find out what questions people are asking is https://answerthepublic.com/. It allows you to enter keywords or ideas and comes up with what questions people are asking in search based on these keyword and ideas.
Creating FAQ Pages
One of the biggest things people are going to want to see when they perform a voice search is short, concise responses. Creating FAQ pages can benefit your website by including simply-asked questions and answering them in about 30 words. For example; if I asked Google Home, “How long does it take to cook a pork loin?” I am not going to want to skim through a whole page to get the answer. Google will instead most likely pull the answer for you from an FAQ page that reads, “It takes 25 minutes per pound of meat cooking the meat at 350 degrees. The internal temperature should be 145 degrees when the pork is no longer pink.” This gives you not only the answer to your question, but even additional information to another question you may have. Creating FAQ pages will help keep your site relevant in voice search by answering the questions that are asked.
Right now, we do not have enough data to prove what achieves the best results for voice search, but with these tips your website can benefit and excel in use of it.