How to Optimize Content for Voice Search

There’s no doubt about it – voice search is becoming a prominent trend for online searches. In fact, the number of people who use voice search to conduct their searches has jumped from 12-13% in 2019, to almost 40% today.

This means that when people are looking for something they need at any time, whether it’s an article or details on a product they’re researching on Google, they may be relying on voice search more and more often. With this in mind, marketers and users alike are eager to optimise content for these queries.

In this blog post, we’ll break down how you can optimise your content using keyword research and some new strategies in SEO you may not have considered before.

We’ll also describe some best practices in terms of using keywords in your key phrases, heading tags and content.

Keyword optimisation works by utilizing the term ‘optimize’ or ‘optimizing’ as it suggests a process of making something better or resolving an issue. You will be able to see the result immediately – content that works with voice search is more likely to get more clicks and leads, which can be tracked via Google Analytics.

Optimizing for Voice Search

Voice search has become so widespread because of its ability to provide instant access to sites, products and services. Voice recognition technology has outpaced other natural speech recognition software that’s been around for decades. It’s getting better at understanding the meaning of queries and even offers detailed answers to questions that were previously unanswerable. This is all due to advancements in technology, and how people utilize it every day. 2022 saw a 29% increase in voice search usage, with 2023 looking like it will likely surpass this number.

Whether you’re optimizing for voice search or not, there are still steps you can take to make your content more user-friendly and ensure that users find what they’re looking for:

1.) Making sure your site is mobile-friendly is one of the most important factors to consider when optimizing your content. People are 60% more likely to vote on a mobile-friendly site, too.

2.) Ensure that your content is optimized for search engines. You should never compromise by going straight to the top of any list – it’s important to ensure your content is visible on all devices as that’s where users will be searching from. Google prefers websites with site speed, appropriate markup and content that’s easily read, so be sure to stay on top of this when it comes to overall user experience.

 3.) Ensure that your keywords are relevant, unique and correctly placed throughout your page.

 4. ) Ensure your content is Search Engine optimized for the various search engines so that it can be found in the best way possible.

How do you know if your content is optimized? Here’s an example of how to identify keywords that are relevant to your page and the queries people use to find those pages.

For example, let’s assume you have 100 articles on your website and 50 of them are about weight loss products. In this instance, search engines would give higher rankings based on what people actually searched for – not necessarily the keywords you may have typed into Google – as long as you’re targeting people who are interested in weight loss products.

The best way to find out if people are interested in weight loss products is by looking at Google Trends for weight loss products. If you hunt down these types of keywords and perform some keyword research, you can find out where people are looking for them to see if they have any relevance to your content. As an example, let’s look at the chart below from Google Trends.

Also Read: What are the Similarities and Differences Between SEO and SEM?

Keyword Research for Voice Search

Now that we’ve learned a little about how to optimize content for voice search, let’s break down some general steps you can take in terms of keyword research. As we can see in the above image, the keyword search ‘how to lose weight fast’ is the highest amount of Google searches per month. To optimize content for this particular query you should use this term, making sure it’s used within your overall key phrase. You should also add some variations of terms related to this key phrase and include them in your content if they make sense.

For example, you may want to include the following:

1.) “lose weight fast and easy”,

2.) “how to lose weight fast”, and

3.) “how to burn fat fast” as long as they make sense within your content or key phrase. In this instance, you’re only including terms that are relevant to your keyword.

4.) You should also add in some more specific keywords above and below this one, as long as they make sense within the content or key phrase. One of the popular phrases people tend to search for related to weight loss is “how to lose weight fast with exercise,” so you may want to include that within your content if it makes sense. This is why it’s important to be thorough.

5.) You should also add in some negative keywords, or words that may or may not be relevant to your content. For example, words like “lose weight fast and safe” are irrelevant to this overall key phrase, so we wouldn’t want this in our content.

6.) Also, remember that some of these terms, like “lose weight fast and easy” will likely bring up results for articles with different titles and descriptions. Some people who are searching for weight loss keywords may use simple searches over long-tail searches as it makes it easier for them to find the best result.

This is why it’s important to know what people are actually searching for, and not what they may type into a search engine.

When optimizing your content, you should consider the following:

1.) The keywords you want to rank for.

 2.) The words people are likely to use when searching for these terms.

3.) The words that appear in titles and descriptions of articles that relate to those terms.

4.) Feel free to start typing in some search phrases on your own site – this will give you insight into whether people are looking for them or not, so you can see if they have any relevance or not to your content.

5. ) Try to pay attention to how your article is presented to the user – this will give you hints as to what words they’ll be looking for in order to find it.

6.) You can also take a look at the backlinks of your site or the indexed pages for these terms and see if they’re actually related or not, so you can be sure there aren’t any duplicate or ‘no-follow’ links that are unrelated.

7.) It’s also important to focus on how many people are actually searching for these keywords, and what their intent is. Are they searching for something that you provide, or do they want to perform some other action? To get an overview of how many people are actually searching for a specific keyword, and what their intent is, you can use SEMRush’s free basic tool.

Conclusion

Voice search is the latest trend in the SEO world and people like using voice search due to the convenience it provides. Moreover, search engines like Google are pushing this way of searching things on the internet. Hence, you should leverage the benefits offered through voice search optimisation or you will miss a big chunk of organic search traffic.