How is voice search changing SEO?

Digital voice search services on smart phones as well as on home automation services like the Amazon Alexa, are making the process of completing digital search is much easier. Voice chat is becoming a much more reliable technology and over the past two years speech recognition has become far better ensuring that nearly 40% of adults in a recent Google Zürich survey were using voice searches at least once a day.

This can mean a number of new strategies could occur in the future as voice search becomes more popular. The current optimization strategies for SEO are all based on either a mobile or computer keyboard but SEO could be drastically changing as a result of more people in putting speech to text commands.

Here are some of the top optimization strategies that we could be moving further towards in the next year due to the prevalence of voice searches:

• Improving longtail keywords: focusing attention on more conversational searches is going to be one of the main strategies for marketers hoping to gain more voice search traffic. Rather than breaking up your keywords and using only short tail keywords in your content it may now be the time to opt for a more longtail keyword content strategy.
• Using schema markups: this type of code can be placed into websites to improve the informative results on search engine’s. Adding this type of markup with a business page for example could allow the search engine result to display the top menu items or the opening hours. Using these with any webpage could help users to find the pertinent data that they need from a voice search right away.
• Adding more FAQs: Most of the time when people are searching via a voice search, they are attempting to answer a question. Having a page that is filled with questions will help to answer direct queries and improve search engine results in a conversational keyword format.

Keep some of these top thoughts in mind as we move forward with voice searches and consider the future of search engine optimization in an age where more and more people are going mobile and asking instead of typing.