Voice search has arrived and it is set to make big adjustments to your current SEO strategy.

Search is continuously evolving and by 2020, 50% of all search queries will be voice search. This strongly indicates, the days of traditional search are ending.

This article will explain ways to design the perfect voice optimized website in order to remain ready in this voice search friendly world.

Identify Long Tail Keywords

People use natural search queries while searching using their voice. For example, instead of typing “Tokyo attractions”, they ask questions like “What are the main attractions in Tokyo”. You can clearly see the difference.

Voice search queries are question based, detailed, long tail and people expect a direct answer in return. Have a look at the below assumed set of voice queries for a person interested in buying a cycle. If you can get your site ranked higher up in the search results for each of these search queries then you have every chances of conversion.

Prepare a list of long tail question keywords by using tools Google suggest and Answer The Public. Moreover, you can also find questions that people ask via platforms like Quora and Reddit. In short, you need to gain more visibility on the featured snippets section that directly answers the user query. This will help your brand to gain a lot of traction.

Regularly Monitor Your Backlinks

A finding from WooRank suggests that around 12.2% of ecommerce backlinks send users to a page with a 404 status.

This means, you are losing a chunk of your backlinks to 404 pages that can fixed so easily.

Backlinks still remains one of the most important ranking factors and sites having high authority/relevant backlinks have the best chances of ranking higher in the search results. Have a look at the value of all link types and how you can create better content to earn more links to your website.

Pick an SEO Friendly CMS And Use Schema Markup

Choosing an effective CMS is important if you want to provide an impressive user experience. Your CMS should be:

• Easy to use and must provide 24x7 customer support.
• Easy to customize and must provide strong security.
• Adaptable enough in order to install the required plugins.
• SEO friendly and super fast.

Moreover, your website should have Schema Markup. Structured data is extremely important for voice SEO because it helps the search engines to easily understand the contents of your webpage. For example, if any searcher asks the question “show me bakery shops in London”, then Google will take the help of structured data and identify the location of the business before suggesting users with the best available options.

You can use the Structured Data Markup Helper to add structured data to your webpages.

Use Proper Internal Linking

I have seen many webmasters make the mistake of incorrect linking. They simply ignore the importance of proper internal linking resulting in massive loss of link juice.

One of the best ways is to follow a pyramid linking structure as provided in the below diagram:

As per Moz, a pyramid linking structure is helpful because “it has the minimum amount of links possible between the homepage and any given page. This is helpful because it allows link equity (ranking power) to flow throughout the entire site”.

Speed Up Your Website

Site speed is an important ranking factor because Google monitors the speed of every site and ranks faster loading sites higher on the search results.

You can take the help of Page Speed Insights to gain relevant suggestions to improve the loading time of your site. Implement the suggested changes and increase your chances of ranking higher up for voice search.

Also, it is recommended to take the help of CDN like Incapsula that will make your website safer, faster and more reliable. The Incapsula Content Delivery Network (CDN) comprises of a global network that makes use of an intelligent caching technology and an array of cache control options to improve your website performance while lowering bandwidth costs.

Be Mobile Friendly and Optimize Your GMB Listing

Mobile search queries have surpassed that of desktop. Voice search queries mostly happen using smartphones. This directly means that your site needs to be mobile friendly in order to get ranked higher in the search results.

Instead of making a separate mobile website, I recommend to create a responsive website. Use the viewport meta tag to optimize the multi-device user experience and use bigger buttons to make it easier for the user to click on the right button. A size of 44px by 44px is recommended.

Moreover, your local Google My Business listing plays an important role in generating leads via voice search so make sure to keep it optimized. Use text messaging platforms like Text Request to include options such as Click to Text in your Google listing because more than 70% of the traffic is mobile and people prefer to reach businesses via text instead of a call.

Take the mobile friendly test and implement the suggestions provided by Google. Regularly monitor the Search Console to check for any mobile related issues and take every step to fix that at the earliest.

Prepare Q&A Style Content

Google has slowly evolved from a search engine to an answer engine. With the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence, Google has started returning direct answers to the user’s voice queries.

Hence, it is necessary to produce Q&A styled content that contains direct answers to the user’s questions so that Google can directly fetch the answer from your website and display it as an answer box in the search results.

Conclusion

Understanding the factors that play a decisive role in better ranking of webpages for voice search queries can help your business gain more visibility and conversions from organic search.