How to optimise content for voice searches

Voice searches have finally started to mature in recent years. Applications such as Google Voice Search, Apple's speech assistant Siri and Amazon's Echo are steadily becoming better at understanding what we are looking for. This has significant consequences for content makers and marketers. But how do you optimise your content for this purpose?

Searching by voice takes less effort than manually entering a search request. It is thus logical that voice searchers are increasing in popularity. According to comScore, this trend will be continuing for some years. The market research expects that, in 2020, voice searches will work for almost 50 percent of all search requests. 

Complete questions
The differences to the traditional way of search go further than just the input method. Where earlier users mainly searched for terms and phrases, the voice search allows them to ask complete questions. Instead of "recipe pizza pepperoni", the personal assistants and search algorithms ask the following questions: "What is the best recipe for an Italian pepperoni pizza?" This explains why the number of search requests starting with "who", "what", "where" or "how" went up by 61 percent in a year.

It is also particularly important that the content should answer the questions that people ask their search engines in a natural way. The value of keywords and metatags, which were once very important factors for search engine optimisation (SEO), has decreased a lot in recent years. Voice searches are thus gaining a lead by allowing users to ask full questions.

SEO, but differently
To put it plainly, voice searches are rapidly turning the SEO world around. This is a generally positive development, as it contributes to the need to produce content that people can really make use of. But how does one do that? Following the steps below will take you a long way towards your goal.

Step 1: Select the questions that your target group will ask
There are various ways to find out what your potential clients are looking for. For example, you could look at the questions being asked on the website, social media and internet forums. You can also find out from the sales division and customer services what questions are frequently asked by clients. You can even listen in to conversations to adopt their exact wording. This allows you to get closer to the language used by your customers. Another option is to carry out a search for the most frequently occurring search terms on a specific subject.

A useful suggestion is to apply the "who, what, when, where, why and how" questions to your subject, product or service. This will soon result in a whole lot of related questions, which are probably also regularly asked.

Step 2: Use a voice search to ask the questions yourself
Use a number of different voice search tools to gain an overview of the pages with the highest ranking. The Google app for Android and iOS would be an excellent point of departure. This will allow you to get to know the competition and better to understand what your content should look like. Pay particular attention to the questions that are not being answered. First focus on these loopholes in the information supply and then try to improve the existing pages. This last step will take a lot more effort.

Step 3: Create content that answers the questions
Enter your responses in text in the same way as you would use them in a conversation. When optimising for voice search content, it is crucial that you should formulate brief, clear answers that do not cause any confusion. Avoid formal or excessively commercial use of language and use colloquial language as much as possible. You can then enrich the answers to your questions with related and equally useful information.

When creating content, also take into account variations on the same questions, so that you do not miss out any users who might word things differently. To illustrate: the questions "what do I need when going on holiday", "what do I take along on holiday" and "what has to come along on holiday" will all require approximately the same answer.

Step 4: Work with structured data
It is very important for voice searches that Google should know exactly what your content is all about. This is to ensure that your content appears when the correct questions relevant to your organisation are asked. Because questions are becoming ever more detailed as a result of voice searches, Google has to understand the intention of your content ever more accurately.

One way of achieving this is via structured data. You do this by providing your web page with code that can be understood by the search engines. You can include quite detailed information about the content of the text in this code, as well as how this is related to the remainder of your website and thus to your service provision. The correct implementation of structured data is a really technical task, which should therefore also be left to an SEO specialist or website builder who understands it.

Step 5: Increase your authority
One thing has clearly not changed: the authority of your website is still an important factor. For natural search requests (which are applicable to speech by definition), Google still usually displays the answer directly above in a so-called "answer box". The idea is to provide a brief answer in a large font, so that it is easily visible on a smartphone screen. For its direct answers, Google makes use of authoritative sites that frequently appear in a high position in search results.

If Google consistently uses your website as a source for direct answers, this can result in a great deal of additional traffic. This is especially true if Google's direct answer is not very detailed. To increase the chance of Google using your content in a direct answer, you must ensure that the specific question is answered as quickly as possible and in clear (colloquial) language.

Positive side effects
A successful SEO strategy must be consistently applied in all your communications. One benefit is that this allows you easy access to relevant content for social media. After all, you know what the target group is asking. The answers to their questions will definitely result in a lot of likes. Perhaps you might even get an idea for a new product?

This means that organisations need to get to work. This new SEO reality probably means that their existing texts will no longer meet the requirements. This does not mean that they should be binned straight away! It is already very useful just to give the old content a new cover, with more natural language use and a little additional information.

Voice search is here to stay. This provides opportunities for marketing managers, probably because the aforementioned is not yet common knowledge. Thus stop focusing entirely on keywords and rather have a thorough discussion with your smartphone. If people think that you are mad, you will know better.