Creating Voice-Search Friendly Content in a Nutshell

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“Touch controls aren’t the future. Voice activation is!” ~YouTuber CaptainSauce

Remember when voice-enabled technology was fiction? Well, it’s no longer a work of the overactive imagination.

Voice-enabled searches are all the rage in SEO circles. In fact, voice-search is the future of content marketing by 2022.

With the emergence of AI voices like Google Home, Siri by Apple, Cortana by Microsoft, and Alexa by Amazon, voice-search share in the SERP (search engine results pages) pie is growing.

Britney Muller of Moz says: “Usage rates are likely to grow as more consumers buy virtual assistants, and as the natural language processing and machine learning behind these engines become more accurate and useful.”

Given your mobile devices’ hands-free capabilities, it stands to reason that voice would eventually take precedence over text-based searches. Vast improvements have been – and are being ,made to digital voice assistants. Now more and more people are turning to the convenience of voice search and relying on it for their queries.

So, as a content marketer, how will you quickly adapt to this rapidly growing trend?

Here’s how:

1. Conversational keywords

As a content marketer, you need to know that search focus has shifted from short, awkward keywords to longer phrases, or, in some cases, full-length sentences. This is because voice searches use conversational language.

You don’t say, “weather Florida,” when you’re asking for Florida’s weather in real-life conversations, do you?

No. Normal people usually ask, “What’s the weather like in Florida?”

By this logic, it stands to reason that we would input search queries differently when we speak to digital assistants. The way we talk is completely different from the way we type.

Content optimized for voice SEO needs to pay extra attention to the keywords it uses.

2. Anticipate queries with FAQs and Google Suggest

Voice searches are conversational and specific . People who already make use of digital assistants like Siri don’t intend to ramble on and on. They use voice assistants to get accurate answers to specific questions.

Queries like “A government university near me,” along with the user’s location, will return precise results for the user. For this reason, you, as a content marketer, should optimize your content for specific queries.

How will you do this?

Research the kinds of questions your target audience is likely to ask when they look for the services you offer. You can do this with a detailed FAQ page or through Google Suggest.

Google Suggest is a quick way of getting question data. It occurs when you start typing keywords into Google without hitting Enter or Search. It provides a drop-down of popular questions. You can use that information to build an FAQ page.

Produce content around your target audience’s questions. Take each query and flesh out the answers in quality blog posts.

3. More readable content

It’s basic advice, but it’s more important now as searches shift to voice. Google’s John Mueller suggests that it’s more useful to give direct answers to questions. Make it very obvious that your content exists to answer that specific question.

“I know for some other kinds of voice assistance they try to match the question more directly… so they’re looking for maybe web pages that say… …what is the tallest mountain as a title and then they read the first paragraph.” ~ John Mueller

4. Make sure your website is ready for voice-search

According to Google, micro-moments (moments when users need immediate, relevant, ready-to-use information) are key to capitalizing on any kind of search, especially voice search.

Think about it. Every day, we rely on our smartphones for a multitude of functions. For this reason, our phones are our constant companions and first sources of information. With the internet practically anywhere, this isn’t surprising.

Google encourages site owners to recognize the increasing use of mobile internet searches and optimize their websites for mobile accordingly.

The takeaway:

Technology and the internet continue to advance. People’s inquiries are no longer limited to text-only searches. Now we have to pay attention to voice search. And it wouldn’t do any of us any good to fall behind the competition.