Our way of searching for information on Google is no longer even a shadow of what it was 10 years ago. From Google Translate in 2008, through the implementation of Google’s direct answers or Quick Answers in 2012 or the latest trend that continues to grow: voice searches.
With the rise of mobile devices, these voice searches do not stop growing. In fact, in 2016, Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) revealed that in the Google App, 20% of queries from mobile phones were already voice searches. This is how Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana have become part of our lives, as if they were humans.
Voice searches: an opportunity to show yourself to the world
It is clear that consumer needs have changed; New platforms and products have been launched, so our way of marketing must adapt to the times. And most importantly, if you have a business, you should think of advances and changes as new opportunities, and not as a stone in the way that prevents you from growing.
When television and radio were born, innovative forms of mass advertising were born; With the Internet and the rise of smartphones, we have been able to turn that mass advertising into something personalized; So what’s in store for brands in voice search?
How voice searches will affect SEO
For Google, user experience is one of the key factors when it comes to positioning yourself in search results. So, whether in writing or by voice, you must put effort into this if you want to improve, or at the very least, your positioning on Google.
If you have a website or an e-commerce, it is normal that these changes at first scare you a little, but you will see that it is not that bad. Here are some recommendations to stay up to date and prepare your website and SEO for voice searches:
- Use long tail keywords
Until now, many brands, blogs or small businesses wrote their content based on the keywords with which they were interested in positioning themselves on Google. Taken to the extreme, the writing sometimes became unnatural, eliminating prepositions or using unions of words that we do use in writing, but would never use when asking the question out loud.
So that you can get an idea of the difference that exists between the terms we use when performing a written and voice search, we give you the following example:
- Written search: Murcia library schedule
- Voice search: What time does the Murcia library close today?
We could give a lot more examples, but I guess you’re already getting an idea of what we mean. One of the main peculiarities of voice searches is that we use longer strings of words, so it is necessary to adapt our content and respond to the most specific questions of users.
In short, long tail keywords will play an essential role in our SEO strategies. This will also allow us to generate more specific content that is closer to natural language, helping to give users more precise answers about what they are looking for.
- Optimize Local SEO
Taking into account that voice searches use a location-based context, it is necessary to have the SEO of your website optimized locally. Furthermore, on many occasions we use this type of search to respond to our daily needs, such as, for example, “Best Japanese restaurant.” So, if you have a physical business, you will want it to be positioned locally as well.
Therefore, optimize the SEO of your website at a local level, register your business on Google My Business, use keywords that contain our location parameters and base the information architecture with local URLs (for example, mydomain.com/ centers-almería).
- WPO, very important!
Taking into account that the smartphone is the main culprit for the rise of voice searches and that the majority of searches are carried out through these devices, it is necessary that your website is optimized for mobile phones.
An optimized website is essential for a good web user experience, so we remind you of some tips that you can apply to improve the loading times and speed of your website:
- Use a good caching plugin
- Optimize the images on your website
- Minimize resources
- Do not install plugins just to install
- Beware of spam
- Measure and analyze loading times
Don’t forget either the importance of good hosting when optimizing your website. You will achieve much higher performance than a hosting plan with traditional disks and this is reflected in a greater user experience and Google will be delighted with it.
If you want to expand a little more information about WPO, here we leave you a post in which we explain in detail what it is and give you some tips to optimize your website in WordPress.
- Google’s Mobile-first Index
Google’s new Mobile-first Index algorithm also has a lot to say in this. Now Google will index the web versions of mobile devices first, so not having a responsive website is no longer an option.
The mobile or responsive version of your website cannot remain in the background. Create quality content to retain and keep your visitors coming back; Take care of the design and usability of your website (you already know that a 5-inch screen is not the same as a 15-inch one, so be careful with the design or graphic elements you include).
- Work on LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing
It is something that we do not usually find very often when we look for information about SEO so let’s start by defining it.
The process by which Google analyzes one in order to establish semantic relationships within our content is called Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI. That is, the Google robot is trained to detect terms that are semantically close to the keywords we use.
Taking into account that voice searches are much more specific than written searches, it is necessary to create content with keywords from the same semantic field. For example, if we create content with a keyword such as “free Excel courses”, we will also be relevant to “free Excel courses”.
We recommend that you take a look at the Google Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas and improve your web positioning for voice searches.
Recapitulating…
At first it seemed that voice searches were not going to represent a change in our SEO strategy, but taking into account current data it is something that we should not ignore if we want to improve our visibility on Google.
Below, we remind you of some things that you should not forget if you want to start working on voice search SEO:
- Use long tail keywords
- Optimize Local SEO
- WPO, very important!
- Google’s Mobile-first Index
- LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing works
