Developing a business in a virtual platform has been more accessible these days. Advancing marketing tools and resources have never been a fruitless endeavor. Although there are multiple SEO tools and aspects, Voice search optimization has never received the recognition it deserves. Regardless SEO marketing agencies have grasped the significance of Voice Search SEO in boosting virtual businesses. If you are chasing after ways to grow your virtual business, you must learn about voice search SEO and its tactics to grow more visitors and leads to your online store. Please read the article to have an insight into the topic.

What is voice search optimization? How to use it to boost your business

Voice search optimization is optimizing the webpages, in this case, your businesses, to appear at the top of the results when searches conduct verbal searches. Voice search optimization makes your content more predominant in voice search results. The sales driven by voice optimization are growing and hence considered the prime opportunity for businesses to earn sales! Google is transforming voice searches by enhancing its search analytics to enhance the users’ search experience in every way. 

Therefore you can’t be surprised that 50% of internet users in America use voice search features, and 71% of consumers of various businesses prefer to conduct their queries by voice rather than typing.(Source) 

The convenience, the requirement of searching queries in hands-free situations, and fun element of searching through voice are considered as the major reasons why they use voice search SEO, especially when they want to purchase a product or service. 

Moreover, recent statistics by “Statista” reported that searches believe that voice searches are more accurate and reliable ways of searching on the web.

Therefore it is evident that voice search SEO plays a paramount role in the development of your business.

How can you utilize it to grow your virtual business or your website

A Digital marketing agency understands the importance of building a keyword strategy. Building keyword strategy begins by understanding the keywords people use for voice searches. The keywords used for voice searches differ from those used in text searches. For instance, consider the following strategies while building your keyword strategies:

• Question keywords: Why, when, what, how, and where should be used in your keywords as searchers use these phrases like talking to a person. Searchers never use “Gas station near me” or “Restaurant near me,” they ask questions like: “Hey Google, what are the top-rated restaurants near me?” “Hey Siri, where is the nearest gas station?”
• Long-tail keywords:  the words the user uses to complete their questions, such as “Today,” “Last week,” “Tomorrow,” and so on.
• Filter words and phrases: we would never need these words when building keyword strategy for text searches, yet keywords such as “I, of the, on the, for, to” are some of the filter words heavily used by the searchers while conducting voice searches.

How to utilize voice search SEO to help your business growth

As discussed before, the general SEO techniques don’t apply to voice search SEO optimizations, as they carry their own optimization category. There is an overlap between on-page optimization and voice searches, but the fundamental qualities make all the difference.

Statistics conducted by Google show that searchers use phrases similar to “Can I buy,” which have grown by 500% between 2016 and 2018. It is evident that voice searches are becoming more predominant in sales, and search engine techniques are also evolving to pick up the meanings of longer phrases and more conversational queries and produce relevant searches. Therefore businesses should strive to take advantage of this category of SEO optimization to boost their sales. Here are some of the effective practices in voice search optimization:

A digital marketing agency follows some or all of these practices to enrich its voice search optimization

• Utilizing keywords that are predominantly used in questions and other long-tail keywords prevalent in the concerned market
• Using conversational language in their content
• Give more priority and focus to the local SEO
• Capture Google-featured snippets in their content.
• Utilizing schema markup; helps the search engines with the context of the businesses’ content, thereby improving the website’s visibility in the voice search results.
• Mobile optimization and pacing up the website for better user experience. Google is prioritizing the websites with higher load rates to provide an enriched user experience for the searches. 

Conclusion

Although SEO experts are not expected to overhaul the SEO strategies to capture voice search traffics, there are several elements to work on and to catch up with the evolving voice search trends. It all begins with knowing the target audience and focusing on building a better experience for the searchers.