Echo, Play Work From Home

So many people these days have smart assistants in their homes whether it's Microsoft's Cortana, Google Home, Amazon Alexa, or the tried and true Apple Siri, we are all using voice search more than we realize.

Upon researching for this topic, I began to really take an audit of my use of voice search and came to the conclusion that I use it more than I thought I did. I remember when I first got my Amazon Alexa or Echo, as I call it. I was so excited to experience what I thought was the cutting edge of technology. I would ask it random questions like "Echo, what sound does a whale make?" Or "Echo, tell me a joke." I loved to hear what the answer was. I also got my Echo around the time reaching the 2016 election; there was so much going on that I couldn't fall asleep without asking Echo what my flash briefing was!

What is Voice Search?

Voice search is when users of a voice assistant make a query with their voices rather than the old-fashioned way of typing out the query in a search bar. Yes, I said typing out a query is old-fashioned.

"By 2020, more than half of all internet searches will be made without the use of screens. That means, rather than typing a topic and clicking through links, many consumers will instead get answers while conversing with smart speaker devices, their cars, TV remotes, and more." - Amy Webb

Voice search makes it easier for people to look something up without the click of a button; it is faster than traditional searching methods. It is also important to note that voice search is an absolute game-changer for folks with disabilities and is a giant step toward bringing accessible UIs to the masses. As an able-bodied person, I can take these luxuries for granted, but they can truly make a difference in the lives of many users with disabilities. Read more about first-hand experiences here.

Why is Voice Search Important?

As mentioned above, voice search makes lives easier and creates a more accessible technological landscape for all users. For businesses, it is important to keep track of the world of voice search because it isn't just the future; it's here. Firms need to understand how voice search works so they can optimize their website. If your business is not optimized for voice search, you will lose a large amount of traffic.

Voice Search Optimization

According to Search Engine Watch, "71% of us would rather search via voice assistant than by physically typing in queries". So how can a business optimize its website for voice search? Here are six factors a business must consider when optimizing for voice search.

Featured Snippets: These appear at the top of the SERPs. Google finds relevant content from your search and places it into a box.

If a query result has a featured snippet, the voice assistant will be pulling from that information. For a business, featured snippets are valuable because up to 30% of the 1.4 million Google queries contain them.

User Intent: Why are people searching for your website? Is it for information or for retail? This is the intent behind why the search was made. Intent can be obvious, like searching the word "buy" or it can be ambiguous. It's important to understand intent so you can create content that is relevant to the query.

Long Tail Keywords & Questions: When using a voice assistant people tend to search like they are having a conversation, they make full sentences rather than a few keywords. A business can optimize for these long phrases by using different tools like Serpstat, an SEO platform that allows the user to see how a person would usually search for a certain topic.

Page Speed: This is the time needed to lead a page. Page speed can influence if your site will show up in voice search results. With voice search, users want to get the fastest results possible because they are often using this capability in a rush. Analyze your current website speed with PageSpeed Insights and adjust from there.

For example, this is the PageSpeed Insight for my Mother's bakery, The Blissful Whisk. Her website is fairly new and was created in the midst of COVID so she could do online ordering without having customers text her directly (talk about small-town charm). As you can see, the website is not optimized for voice search. That's something the business needs to work on, but she does make some damn good pastries!

Structured Data: This is the code added to the HTML markup that is used by search engines to better understand your content. This helps the crawlers used by search engines read your content effectively. This aspect of optimizing for voice search is slightly confusing to me because I know absolutely nothing about coding, but something tells me that will change later this week when I write about coding. Check out Schema.org to find out how you can implement structured data.

Local SEO: "Siri, find coffee near me." More often than not consumers use voice search to find local businesses. They aren't necessarily searching the words "near me" but adding a location tag to their query. Businesses need to make sure that their business listings information is up to date so that their business may pop up in that location search.

More on Local SEO

Local search is incredibly important for businesses. Here are a few stats to convince you.

• "50% of people who did a local search on their phone went to a physical store within one day."
• "78% of local-based searches on a mobile device end in purchases being made offline."
• " 1 in 3 searches on a smartphone was conducted just before arriving at a store."

So how can businesses improve their local SEO? One way is through NAP. NAP is an acronym that stands for the business' name, address, and phone number. Some also include a W for the website, but we'll stick with NAP because it sounds cooler than NAPW. According to Google, "Local results favor the most relevant results for each search, and businesses with complete and accurate information are easier to match with the right searches." This means for marketers, that an easy step towards optimizing local SEO is to keep your NAP up to date so that it can get matched to a local query. An inaccurate NAP is bad for SEO and can lead to a negative ranking which makes it harder for your company to come up in an organic search.

Voice and local search were made to help us move through life faster. Businesses need to take this into account to not fall behind. Optimizing for voice and local search while keeping your NAP up to date can help bring more users to your website and hopefully lead to more conversions. Don't overlook voice and local SEO.