How will your clients find your website in the voice search era? They ask questions and digital assistants embedded in smartphones, wearables and home devices. This means that you have to optimise your website for these digital assistants. Thus, they will be able to match the question with the content and the keywords in your website.
How Do Voice Search Assistants Work?
Digital assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Assistant are artificial intelligence entities trained with natural language programming. They are capable of learning from every interaction with humans and expand their vocabulary.
The purpose of these assistants is to offer the most relevant answer to the question the user asked. Therefore, you have to make sure that your website is the go-to source of information in your niche – the information that prospects need to make a buying decision.
What Do You Need to Do to Optimise Your Website for Voice Search?
We have already hinted at various best practices for adapting your marketing strategy for voice search. Today we will deal specifically with your website. Do not worry, you don’t have to completely overhaul the design and structure, or anything equally drastic.
These are our tips and tricks that you should start implementing right now:
1. Increase Your Page Load Speed
If people are not patient waiting for a website to load, digital assistants do not know what patience is at all. They will wait less than 2 seconds when accessing a website that matches the search query. If they cannot retrieve the content, they will move on to the next website.
Here are a few solutions to speed up your website:
- Reduce the size of the images on the site;
- Use a minifier to reduce the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the webpage;
- Use a content delivery network – a service that uses several servers to make sure that all the users accessing the site enjoy the same high speed.
2. User Experience Is Everything
User experience is very different from user interface. User interface is like a solid and reliable car. User experience represents the details: heated chairs, leather steering wheel and surround sound system.
Translating this to your website, it should be easy to browse both by people and voice search assistants. Every person should be able to find the information they need quickly – from product data sheets to the terms and conditions for returns and refunds.
3. Create Local Content
Localisation is one of the key features of voice search trends. People use digital assistants to look for products and services in their area. They will not buy something from another city or country, having to wait for delivery and pay for shipment. They want the product now and you are in a position to satisfy their need.
With one condition: voice search assistants must be able to identify you as a reliable company in the user’s local area. Thus, you must focus on creating content that showcases your expertise and the fact that you operate in a specific area. Local content also ranks highly, because people are generally more interested in things happening close to them, that they can relate to.
4. Keep Adding Fresh Content on the FAQ Page
The FAQ page is the most voice search friendly portion of your website. The reason for this is that it consists of questions and answers. That is exactly how people interact with digital assistants – through questions.
For this reason, you should constantly add new questions and answers. You can find these questions through Google searches or by using Quora – a social media platform dedicated to answering questions.
5. Stay On Top of Your SEO Game
Last, but not least, working on your SEO strategy becomes more important than ever in the voice search era. You should constantly monitor your keywords and research for new ones.
People have a very varied vocabulary when they seek information through voice assistants. They use full sentences, many synonyms and derivative words. As the digital assistants learn more new words, they use them as keywords to search for answers. In this context, keyword research and proper onsite implementation become crucial actions to optimise your website for voice search.