Tips for Voice Search Optimization
When? What? Who? How? Where? Why?
For voice search optimization, it is particularly important to provide the right answers to questions. Because voice-based search queries often start with “What’s the weather like in Hamburg today?” or “Where’s the nearest supermarket?”. FAQ pages and how-to articles are particularly important here. In addition, natural and spoken language is increasingly finding its way into search behavior.
Long-tail keywords are the focus of optimization
Due to a change in users’ communication behavior, the focus is shifting from single, short search terms to long-tail keywords. Reason for this: We treat Google like an assistant with whom we talk in complete sentences and from whom we expect answers in complete sentences.
Create high-quality content for snippets
A key factor in voice search optimization is snippets. Snippets are the direct answers to search queries that are displayed at the top of the SERPs in an answer box. Via audio, these snippets are played back directly as an answer in voice search. Consequently, only the best search result counts in voice search.
Know your target audience much better than you know yourself!
If you want to be well prepared for voice search, you should get to know your target audience. We recommend that you create so-called buyer personas and analyze them. If you know the questions of your personas, it will be much easier for you to answer them. Tools like Answer the Public help you with this.
Mobile-first still applies
Since search queries are almost exclusively made via mobile devices, your content must be perfectly displayed on them. The loading time should also be as short as possible. Tools like Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insight, and Google Lighthouse help you to identify and optimize weak pages.
Structured data is mandatory
To structure and uniformly mark up data across the web, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex have created schema.org. The markup helps you to mark up and structure content on web pages so that this content can be processed more easily by search engines. Markups are used by search engines, for example, to display rich snippets in the SERPs.