Search engine optimization is a significant part of any voice marketing strategy because it helps determine how many customers find your products

You might think of search engine optimization (SEO) as primarily necessary for your website’s written content and how search engines rank it.

Your website is full of words, phrases, concepts, and other information that define its purpose. Google will crawl your webpages to determine what the site is about and then rank the website based on its relevance to particular search terms. When your content is relevant to a queried term, Google or Bing might put it near the top of the search engine rankings, which, in turn, brings your website more visitors.

While SEO is vital to online marketing in general, it is essential to voice marketing because of how voice search results are generated.

Here’s what you need to know about voice search and SEO, along with how you can improve your ranking on Google and other search engines.

The importance of a top-ranking

Getting your website to the top of a search engine’s rankings is crucial because it makes your website exponentially more visible. Whenever a user searches for a term related to what you do, your website has a chance to be the top result and, therefore, the first website that may be visited.

By getting more visitors, you’re putting more eyeballs on your services and products, in addition to building yourself up as an authority in your industry.

Getting the top ranking is even more critical when dealing with voice search because, rather than presenting a list of websites like a traditional device, voice assistants often only report information from the top-ranked site.

In some cases, a featured snippet, also called position zero, is presented to the user rather than a traditional search result. The featured snippet appears at the very top of the search engine results page and provides a direct answer to a question. It’s also what the voice results present to the user.

Whether there’s a featured snippet or not, being at the top of the voice search results not only makes you the top answer but, in many cases, the only answer a voice search user receives.

How to optimize your website for voice search

Getting to the top of search engine results is a long process whether we’re talking about voice search or text SEO. There isn’t an exact formula to get to the top, but you can give yourself a better chance by making a few changes.

For starters, you’ll want to use more conversational language throughout your website that mimics how people talk. When you think about it, users speak differently than they type, and if you want to show up in voice search results, your site language needs to make the associated adjustments.

Another thing to keep in mind is that users tend to ask questions of their voice assistants, rather than using basic search terms. Therefore, putting an FAQ section on your website can be a valuable voice SEO technique because it’s both conversational in nature and answers common questions that interested parties might ask.

Other ways to improve your voice rankings

Beyond the written content on your website, there are other ways you can give your site a voice search boost.

Many people conduct voice searches on their phones, so focusing on mobile optimization is important. Mobile optimization includes things like having a responsive design, improving page loading speeds, and doing whatever else is possible to improve the user experience on your website.

By ensuring that your website is accessible via mobile, you’ll make it more viable in the eyes of Google, which will improve its ranking.

The way that you structure your data is also an essential piece of voice SEO. Google uses bots to crawl your pages to look for relevant information and then rank your website based on what it finds. Making sure that your webpages are easy to crawl helps immensely because it allows Google to see what your content is about and how it can assist searchers that are using the service.

You can make your website easier to crawl by submitting a sitemap to Google and creating metadata for your written content. Your metadata essentially tells Google what your content is about but isn’t visible to readers.

By making it more straightforward for Google to get the gist of your website’s topic and relevance, you make it easier for the search engine to gather information.

SEO isn’t the only way

As you can tell, there is a lot that goes into improving the search engine ranking of your website, particularly when it comes to voice searches. While it’s always advisable to put effort into improving your position on Google, relying exclusively on this method of marketing is dangerous because you’re at the mercy of everchanging search engine algorithms.

Respond Fast provides Voice Activated Call to Action technology that allows you to present offline offers for customers to access through their voice-activated devices. This form of marketing isn’t reliant on Google, giving you more control over who finds your content and what those potential customers ultimately see. Learn more by contacting Respond Fast now.