3 Simple Ways to Ensure Your Site Ranks Higher in Voice Searches

Optimizing your website for voice searches is no longer just important—it’s absolutely essential.

Using our voices to conduct online searches is commonplace these days. In fact, around 63% of US adults engage with a voice assistant in their daily lives, whether it's their phone, TV, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, and so on. 

Unfortunately, many business owners aren’t capitalizing on this explosion of voice search traffic because they don’t understand one simple thing: optimizing their websites for voice search differs from standard SEO.

I know, I know, you’ve already optimized your site for search ranking with keywords and tags and links. And while that’s crucial for traditional online searches, those techniques don’t always help your site rank with voice searches.

Here are a few simple updates you can make to your website that will help get your business in front of the crowd of voice searchers.

When we do a traditional search, typing on a keyboard or touching the keys on a device, we’re more likely to use the fewest possible words. For example: Looking for reviews of Disney's The Lion King? You’ll probably type something simple like “Lion King” and then scroll through the results.

In a voice search though, you are much more likely to ask a full question, just like you were talking to a person. For example: “Did The Lion King get good reviews?”

Business owners can address this change in search habits by ensuring some of their site content is question-based. A Frequently Asked Questions page is a great option for this. Voice searches almost always include the word who, what, when, where, or why. Anticipate the questions your customers will ask and include those on your FAQ page, along with clear, helpful answers.

Near me searches—search queries that target a product or service + the user's geo-location—are growing even faster than voice searching itself. From 2021 to 2022 alone, near me searches increased by a whopping 136%!

Grow your site’s ranking in this sort of “near me” search by adding information about your location. Tell your site visitors about the area; maybe a little history about the town or fun local attractions. You can also include “near me” tags in meta descriptions and title tags to increase your ranking.  This is a tactic Locallogy uses on our location pages, making it effective for both SEO and voice searches.

The point of this type of optimization is to establish your business as one that’s worth visiting in your area. 

As we’ve already learned, most of us have smart phones. And a lot of us are using those smart phones to do voice searches. But what happens when your website isn’t optimized for a mobile device? Not much, really. You won’t rank high on mobile searches if your website isn’t optimized and even if you do get a site visitor, they probably won’t stay long.

Don’t worry – A complete site revamp is not always necessary. Start by reviewing your content. If you have a lot of long,rolling paragraphs or big chunks of text, you might want to consider a change. Shorter sentences and smaller paragraphs are always the way to go. These work best on a smaller screen and are easier to read. (Hint – Even on a desktop or laptop screen,no one wants to read a novel on your website. Keep it short and simple.)

If you can’t avoid a large block of copy, try adding subheadings and splitting up the text using bullet points or numbers. Again,these are much easier to manage on a smaller screen.

Review the images on your site, as well. Are they taking forever to load on a mobile device? If so, consider tweaking the image size or resolution to help with load speed. And don’t forget to incorporate white space.

If you plan on customers using mobile voice search to find your site, your site needs to be ready for that mobile traffic.

Need help optimizing your site for voice searches? Locallogy would love to help! Drop us a line today.