How to Optimize Content for Voice Search
Voice search is one of the fastest growing trends in digital marketing. According to eMarketer, voice search is expected to grow to more than 50% of all searches by 2020.
If you’re not optimizing your content for voice search, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity to reach your audience. In this article, we’ll show you how to optimize your content so that it’s easier for people to find and engage with it when they use voice search.
What is Voice Search?
When you search for something on Google, you type in the keywords you want to find. For example, if you wanted to find a recipe for chicken parmesan, you might type in “chicken parm” or “parmesan chicken.”
However, when you use a voice search like “Hey Google,” you don’t have to type in your keywords. Instead, you can simply speak them out loud, and Google will understand what you want and provide you with a list of results. For instance, if someone were to say, “I’m looking for a chicken parm recipe”, Google would understand what they meant and provide them with the results they were looking for:
This is a great example of how voice search can be a great tool for people who are on the go and want to get things done quickly. However, it can also be a challenge for marketers who want to reach their audience. If you want your content to be found by voice search users, you need to make sure that it is optimized for this type of search. Otherwise, your content could be lost in a sea of other results that are more relevant to what people are actually looking for.
How Voice Search Works
There are two types of voice search:
1. Speech-to-text
2. Speech recognition
Speech to text is the process of converting spoken words into text. This is how Google understands what you are saying and provides you with the search results that you are looking for, as shown in the example above. This process is also known as “automatic speech recognition” (ASR).
On the other hand, speech recognition is a process that allows you to speak out loud and have your voice recognized by a computer. This means that your voice can be converted into text, which can then be used to search for content on the internet.
For example, when someone says “What is the weather like today?” a computer would be able to convert their voice into text and then search for the weather forecast on Google.
This process is called “conversational search” because it is similar to how people interact with each other when they are having a conversation. For this reason, conversational search is becoming more and more popular as people become more comfortable using voice search on their smartphones.
The good news for marketers is that both of these types of search are becoming more common. In fact, according to a recent survey by Google, more than half of smartphone owners have used voice search at least once in the past month.
So, if your content is not optimized for both types of searches, it could be getting lost in the sea of results that other people are getting when they search for things on their phones.
In the next section, we will show you what you can do to make your content easier to find when people are using voice searches.
How to Make Your Content Easier to Find on Voice Searches
The first step to making your content easy to find on voice searches is to optimize it for both speech to text and speech recognition. You can do this by making sure that your keywords are included in your title, description, and URL. This will make it easier for Google and other search engines to understand what your page is about.
You can also make sure to include your keywords in the first few sentences of your content. This way, people will be more likely to click on your page and read the rest of the content.
Another way to make voice search easier for your audience is to use conversational language. People who use voice searches are more comfortable speaking out loud than typing in their keywords, so you should try to use language that is more conversational. This can be done by using the words “you” and “your” instead of the word “we” when you are referring to yourself.
Also, try to keep your content short and to the point. People are busy, and they want to quickly get the information they need without having to read a lot of text. So, you should keep your paragraphs short and use bullet points to break up your text.
Finally, make sure you have a clear call to action (CTA) at the end of your page. This could be a button that people can click on to learn more about your product or service, or it could simply be a link to another page on your website.
Now that you have optimized your content, it is time to test it out and see how well it performs on both voice search and text search. To do this, you will need to use a tool called Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog is a free tool that you can use to crawl your website and find all of the pages on your site. Once you have crawled all of your pages, it will give you a report that shows you which pages are getting the most traffic and which ones are not performing as well.
Once you have this report, you want to focus on the pages that are performing the worst. These are the ones that are most likely to get lost when people use voice search, so it is important that you make changes to these pages to make them more search-friendly.
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