These days, when you want to search the internet, is your first instinct to start typing away at a manual keyboard (or tapping away at a digital one) — or to simply state your search after a wake-word command like “Hey Siri,” “Alexa” or “Hey Google”? Research indicates that substantial numbers of Americans are taking the latter, hands-free route regularly. In fact, more than 60% of American adults use voice assistants, and half of America’s consumers use voice search daily.
Of course, for marketers and brands, voice search opens new opportunities to reach more consumers and build more revenues. And here at Brandon, we’ve long recognized these opportunities … and we’ve shared our insights about voice search optimization in the past. (Check out this Brandon blog article for six helpful tips on ways to gain added exposure for your brand via voice search.)
6 (more) ways to boost your brand via voice search
Today, we’ll take another dive into voice search marketing and explore a few more powerful ways you can leverage voice search optimization to boost your brand. If your brand has already taken the six steps suggested in our above-mentioned previous blog article on the topic and is looking for more ways to capture consumers’ voice searches, consider taking these six additional actions:
1. Audit and optimize your brand’s web content
If your brand is looking to capture more voice searches via its content, here’s good news — you don’t necessarily have to start from scratch and create all-new content. In many cases, you can optimize your existing content for voice search by incorporating voice search-friendly keywords. Start by conducting a comprehensive audit of your website’s content and structure. By systematically analyzing and assessing the content you already have in place, you can identify prime opportunities for voice search optimization.
Once you’ve decided on the specific existing articles you’d like to optimize, for each one, create a list of key long-tail conversational phrases and questions that users are likely to include and ask when performing voice searches related to the topic. Next, find ways to incorporate these phrases/questions naturally into your website’s existing content, including in your titles, headings, meta descriptions and throughout your body copy. Such voice search optimization can not only improve your brand’s prominence and accessibility in voice search results, but also enhance the user experience, ultimately driving more organic traffic and conversions.
2. Tackle your site’s technical SEO
Technical SEO focuses on optimizing the backend structure and performance of your brand’s website, helping ensure it is easily accessible, crawlable and understandable by search engines. To enhance your site’s technical SEO for voice search, it’s especially important to prioritize mobile optimization, as the majority of voice searches are conducted on mobile devices. This involves ensuring responsive design, fast loading speeds and mobile-friendly navigation. Other technical SEO best practices include:
- employing an SEO-friendly site architecture that eliminates orphan pages and is structured such that all pages are just a few clicks/steps away from your homepage
- submitting an XML sitemap to Google via the Google Search Console
- employing HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) for added site security
- minimizing/eliminating any duplicate content on your website
- identifying and fixing any broken pages that may exist on your website
Improving your site’s technical SEO can not only enhance its overall performance and visibility in traditional search results, but also make it more likely to appear in voice search results.
3. Seize the schema markup opportunity
Another tactic for improving your site’s technical SEO, optimizing your website’s schema markup can improve your chances of appearing in voice search results by providing clearer context to search engines. Schema markup provides search engines with additional context about the content on a webpage, helping them better understand its relevance to user queries. To enhance schema markup for voice search optimization, your brand should focus on implementing structured data markup for key information such as business details, product information, events, FAQs and other relevant data. This structured data helps virtual assistants interpret and present information accurately in response to voice search queries. Additionally, structured data markup can enhance the overall user experience by enabling virtual assistants to provide more accurate and relevant answers, ultimately leading to increased user satisfaction and engagement.
4. Set your sights on snippets
Google snippets, also known as featured snippets, are concise answers displayed at the top of Google’s search engine results pages, making them prime real estate for voice search responses. To optimize for snippets, your brand should focus on providing clear and concise answers to common questions related to your industry or niche. This involves structuring content in a format that directly addresses commonly asked questions using headers, bullet points and concise paragraphs. Utilizing schema markup can also help signal to search engines the relevance and context of your content, increasing the likelihood of being featured in snippets. Further, optimizing for snippets not only enhances visibility in traditional search results but also increases the chances of being selected as the answer to voice search queries, as virtual assistants often pull responses from featured snippets.
5. Know your customers, and cater to them with your content
By knowing your target audience and customers well, your brand can tailor its content to address their specific needs, preferences and behaviors. This personalized approach enhances the user experience for site visitors and also increases the relevance and effectiveness of your content from an SEO perspective — improving your prominence in both traditional and voice search results.
When virtual assistants like Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa respond to voice search queries, they prioritize delivering relevant and useful information that meets the user’s search intent. Brands that understand their customers’ pain points, interests and preferences can create content that’s better optimized for their own audience’s search queries, increasing the likelihood of their website being surfaced as the answer.
6. Build up your backlinks
Building backlinks is a critical element of both traditional SEO and voice search optimization, as it enhances a brand’s authority and trustworthiness in the eyes of search engines, consequently improving its prominence in search results. To build more backlinks effectively, your brand should focus on creating high-quality, relevant content that naturally attracts links from authoritative websites within your industry or niche. This can include publishing insightful blog posts, creating and sharing engaging videos and infographics, and producing original research and case studies that provide value to your target audience. Also, actively reaching out to industry influencers, bloggers and journalists to promote your content and earn mentions and backlinks can significantly boost your brand’s link profile. And the more high-quality backlinks your brand earns, the higher its chances of ranking well in traditional and voice search results, as search engines prioritize websites with a strong authority and relevance.
Capture the value of voice search — with Brandon’s expert assistance
Looking for ways to elevate the effectiveness of your brand’s voice search efforts? At Brandon, our team of search marketing experts has a wealth of experience building successful search strategies for our clients — with a focus on both voice search and traditional search — and we’re here to help your brand reach new audiences, too.
Further, our fully integrated marketing firm can cover the entire spectrum of your brand’s marketing needs, from SEO and social media to email marketing, e-commerce, digital marketing, media, creative, analytics, public relations, brand strategy, web design and more — all in one place. To get started with help ranging from a simple website analysis to a comprehensive strategy tailored to boost the performance of all of your marketing campaigns, contact us today.