Voice Search: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

If you’ve been famil­iar with dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing, then you’ve prob­a­bly heard about voice search as well. Still, you may won­der what voice search is and how voice search­es are conducted. 

As a mat­ter of fact, voice search as a fea­ture has been around for a long time now, and we here at Rosy Strate­gies have always advo­cat­ed for voice search opti­miza­tion, as those online busi­ness­es that don’t put in the time and effort to opti­mize their sites for voice search are miss­ing out on poten­tial sales.

Why? Because the slow­ly but steadi­ly ris­ing dom­i­nance of voice search­es in the world of search engines can’t real­ly be ignored anymore. 

Smart speak­ers, cars, smart wear­ables, smart appli­ances, smart TVs, and last but not least, smart­phones con­nect us to the vir­tu­al world more than ever, pro­vid­ing a high lev­el of con­ve­nience and sim­plic­i­ty that was unheard of 20 years ago. 

With just a sim­ple but­ton switch, you only need to recite a phrase ver­bal­ly to get the best-match­ing results.

About Voice Search

Voice search­es speed up the tra­di­tion­al search process, lever­ag­ing the lat­est tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ments and enabling con­sumers to get answers to their ques­tions even faster. 

The fea­ture works via an ASR (auto­mat­ic speech recog­ni­tion) sys­tem that trans­forms voice sig­nals into text, enabling users to search the inter­net through their devices by sim­ply speaking. 

After the spo­ken words are trans­formed into text, the search engine uses it like a typed search query, show­ing the most rel­e­vant results only. 

As machine learn­ing has come a long way since its hum­ble begin­nings, machines are get­ting bet­ter at under­stand­ing lan­guage and search intent to show only the best results in the SERPs.

This fea­ture becomes more sophis­ti­cat­ed as more and more users are catch­ing on to it. Some expert fore­casts sug­gest that by next year, dig­i­tal voice assis­tants will reach a record num­ber of 8.4 bil­lion units, out­num­ber­ing the human pop­u­la­tion on the plan­et. Also, near­ly one-third of U.S. users have a device that sup­ports this technology. 

With such num­bers, it makes sense to spend more time on voice search opti­miza­tion, and in this arti­cle, we’ll talk about just that. 

The Process Behind Voice Search

Voice search is a rather com­plex process, but know­ing the fun­da­men­tals can be enough to help the aver­age site own­er nav­i­gate their voice search opti­miza­tion endeavors. 

When voice search­es are con­duct­ed, the search assis­tant will do the following:

• Fil­ter the audio sep­a­rat­ing the back­ground nois­es and the video query
• Dig­i­tize the voice search, turn­ing the sound into dig­i­tal data
• Con­duct the analy­sis of the voice, i.e., pro­cess­ing the data
• Con­nect that data to exter­nal sources, such as Google
• Trans­late the info
• Rec­og­nize already exist­ing pat­terns and query com­par­i­son using exist­ing sam­ples in the database

Voice Search vs. Traditional Search: the Differences

Undoubt­ed­ly, voice search can deliv­er results faster than typ­ing a query tra­di­tion­al­ly through a lap­top, desk­top, or phone. 

Fur­ther­more, experts argue that voice search­es are con­duct­ed dif­fer­ent­ly, as the user will give dif­fer­ent voice com­mands to get the same infor­ma­tion­al need as typing. 

For starters, voice search­es are pri­mar­i­ly more con­ver­sa­tion­al and nat­ur­al, like when talk­ing to friends, full of long-tail key­words in the query.

For exam­ple, when search­ing for a restau­rant, the poten­tial cus­tomer may say, “what’s the best restau­rant in Brick­ell?” while those who type might only enter “best restau­rant Brickell.”

While both of these loca­tion-based search­es will be able to pro­duce rel­e­vant results, the first one is more elab­o­rate and longer than the tra­di­tion­al “type search” method.

The Basics of Voice Search Optimization

How to opti­mize for voice search? Here are the basics you need to keep an eye on:

Keep Up With Regular SEO Best Practices

Ensure you fol­low all the stan­dard best prac­tices for SEO when cre­at­ing web page con­tent. Remem­ber to use schema markup to tar­get rich results, opti­mize title tags, use rel­e­vant key­words, and be infor­ma­tion­al, pre­cise, and use­ful to the reader. 

Remem­ber, your audi­ence wants answers imme­di­ate­ly; if they can’t find what they’re look­ing for with­in a few sec­onds, they will aban­don your page. 

Before start­ing with con­tent writ­ing, write down a list of read­er-rel­e­vant ques­tions and answer them all — avoid fluff and be straightforward. 

Make sure to high­light the infor­ma­tion around the top of your arti­cles to avoid hav­ing the read­er scroll through the site because you risk los­ing their interest. 

Ensure That Your Site Is Responsive

Not hav­ing a mobile-friend­ly site in 2023 is a mas­sive prob­lem for those site own­ers who want to improve their dig­i­tal metrics. 

If you want to cre­ate a pleas­ant cus­tomer jour­ney (may that be via tra­di­tion­al or voice search­es), you need a web­site that’s com­pat­i­ble with all screens and devices. 

When cre­at­ing a mobile-friend­ly site, it’s imper­a­tive that you keep the basics in mind:

• All pages should be responsive.
• Con­tent should be read­able on all devices, with short­er text blocks and subheadings.
• The design should be intu­itive and clean.
• CTAs should be at opti­mal places.
• All images should load on mobile devices.
• Ensure fast load­ing times.
• Your con­tact info should be visible.
• Test the web­site on every plat­form and sys­tem before going live to catch any bugs.

Be Visible Where It Matters

Remem­ber to index your con­tent where cus­tomers may be look­ing, such as Apple Maps, Google Search, and Google Maps.

Voice search­es usu­al­ly have a local intent, so don’t for­get about local busi­ness list­ings. Hav­ing a Google Busi­ness Pro­file is a mas­sive advan­tage, but make sure that all the info there is accu­rate and up-to-date. Ensure that your busi­ness name, address, con­tact info, work­ing hours, attrib­ut­es, and busi­ness descrip­tion are fresh and accurate. 

Create a Comprehensive FAQ Page

Hav­ing a FAQ page is an excel­lent idea to give your users quick answers to the most com­mon questions. 

A large chunk of voice search queries are basic ques­tions, and a sol­id FAQ page can give instant answers. 

Based on your indus­try, you can always start with com­mon cus­tomer sup­port ques­tions and go from there to more elab­o­rate top­ics that might inter­est your audiences. 

Also, using an FAQ Schema markup can help you appear in fea­tured snippets. 

Be Consistent With Your Keyword Research

If you’ve spent any time with SEO, you know that key­word research is an ongo­ing process in which you con­sis­tent­ly need to refine and revise your con­tent to reach the best results. 

When it comes to voice search­es and key­word research, you need to remem­ber the dif­fer­ences between tra­di­tion­al search and voice. Here, you must con­sid­er how the end user will con­duct the search query. For the most part, they will ask a ques­tion, and you should research how con­sumers are ask­ing about your core keywords. 

Addressing SEO and Voice Search

You prob­a­bly know that search engine opti­miza­tion is a com­plex process that ties into dif­fer­ent mar­ket­ing strate­gies, web devel­op­ment, con­tent writ­ing, web design, and a myr­i­ad of oth­er dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing areas. As such, opti­miz­ing for voice search should be some­thing that site own­ers leave to the pro­fes­sion­als, as a few mis­takes can cost them dear­ly and leave their web­sites some­where in the lat­ter pages of the SERPs.

Because of that, con­sid­er team­ing up with a group of sea­soned experts who can help you opti­mize your site for voice search. On that note, feel free to reach out to us today.