Speak Up: Optimizing for Voice Search

Jun 22, 2018 | Digital, Web Services

You: “Siri, optimize my business for voice search.”

Siri: “Would you like me to search the internet for ‘optimize my business for voice search’?”

Before you throw your phone across the room, here’s why you should give an olive branch to Siri, Cortana, Alexa or whichever digital personality responds to your voice commands.

Since we first talked about this topic two years ago, voice has started to dominate the search world. That means you don’t want your customers experiencing the same frustration that you just did when they’re searching for your products.

Optimizing for voice-search offers opportunities for more visibility, new ways to meet consumer demands and more advertising potential.

Here are ways to be voice-search friendly:

Have good site speed

Page speed plays a major role in voice-search SEO. The load time for voice-search results is usually faster than the average page.

Have a secure website

Websites with SSL certificates dominate Google’s voice-search results. Secure sites are good for search rankings in general, but especially for voice-search.

Get featured snippets on Google

Featured snippets are quickly becoming a popular way for voice-search answers to generate. When your business is a featured snippet, you up your chances of being found via voice.

Make sure your snippet is as short as possible, typically 30 words or less, and as easy as possible to understand.

Optimize for local SEO

Though shorter amounts of text are better on Google snippets, longer amounts of text are better on individual website pages. We recommend 500-1,000 words on a typical web page for good rankings on Google search.

Make sure you’re listed correctly

Are you set up on Google My Business? If not, it’s time. Make sure your address, contact information and hours are listed for each of your locations so that when someone asks Alexa to find the nearest business with your product, you’ll show up first. Remember to update this information with any changes to your business.

Want some help optimizing your SEO for voice search? That’s why we’re here.