To make things easier for people and find information that is most relevant to their original intent, Google is tirelessly working on improving its services. Thanks to its tons of updates and features, including the voice search tool, that has taken searching to another level. Voice search has been in practice for less than a decade. People have now increasingly began using voice tools as a means for seeking information. Intelligent personal assistants such as Google Now (Android and iOS) Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Windows 10) have just marked the start of this new era of search.
Though typing a query in the search box still remains the major means of fetching results from the search engine, the days are not so far where you might see a tough competition between voice and text searches. This means you will have to do tweaks or major changes to your websites to stay ahead of your competition.
Why should I optimize my website for voice search?
Google recently announced that 20 percent of all searches have voice intent. The error rate of voice search in Google has come down from nearly 25% as it was a few years ago, to 8% in the current year. This is also one of the main reasons for people developing an affinity towards voice search. On that note, here are some ways to effectively optimize your website with respect to voice search.
Pay attention to your website’s content
The way people talk and write are two different things. While a typed query will generally be shorter than a spoken one, try to include keywords that will match with the conversational phrases of users. When you are a local business, every phrase uttered by the user can literally be turned into clicks. Therefore, craft your website’s content so that they answer the common queries. This can increase your website’s traffic.
Understand the various voice search media
Whether it’s Google Now, Echo or Siri, every platform has got its own set of constraints. They are continuously evolving. For example, the growth of Amazon’s Echo is pretty impressive. From 130 skills in January of this year, the skill set has grown to around 1000. Plan on how to increase your visibility with respect to various platforms including Android and iOS and their respective voice devices.
Specify important details in text format
Most local searches are usually done with an intent to look for restaurants, stores, directions, home services, weather and local events. Therefore, your business name, physical address, phone number, directions from popular interstates/roadways should all be in text format so that customers can find it as soon as they speak the words they need information about.
To know where you stand in the search results with respect to platform, perform repeated tests with different phrases across various personal assistant devices. This can help you figure out where your strategy needs a push to perform better in the market.