Voice and Local Search
Voice Search
Requesting information by speaking rather than typing into a search box clearly has its benefits of being hands-free and efficient which has led to an expected $80 billion commerce industry by 2023. Voice search has been evolving for some time now and as people become even more comfortable with it the industry will continue to grow and this means some SEO related changes will be needed for businesses. The early adopters that redesign their platforms to support both visual and voice search can expect a increase digital commerce revenue by 30% by 2021 so it is clear that optimizing voice search is now a key factor in SEO.
Optimizing Voice Search - Featured Snippets
One of the most essential factors to consider in voice search optimization is "featured snippets" which are these things:
They are the answer boxes Google provides with a quick answer or summary from a content snippet from a relevant website. These featured snippets are most likely to show up when your search is in the form of a question and include:
- Information quoted from a third-party website
- A link to the page
- The page title
- The URL to the page
To get a featured snippet you should be on the first page of Google but you don't exactly have to rank first. As long as you're within the top 10 you have a good shot unless Wikipedia already is featured then it might be difficult to beat them... Either way it is worth trying to get create your content into a snippet because the results would be well worth it.
Featured snippets are very important in voice search optimization because when people use voice search they tend to ask questions. This is key because snippets also tend to appear when the search is in the form of a question. Instead of resulting the entire first page of Google when you use voice search, they answer will typically come from the snippet if there is one, meaning your website could provide the voice search result for everyone and position your brand in a powerful spot.
The Importance of Local Search
Local search optimization is all about promoting physical locations of businesses such as a taco truck or an locksmith. Any business that directly meets with the customer is a local business and should recognize the importance of local search.
The traffic from a local search is appears to have a high conversion rate. For example, 50% of people who did a local search on their phone went to a physical store within one day. This is heavily caused by the fact that mobile users are often making local searches when they already have intentions of going out or are already on the go, making searches like "food open now" and "barber shops in Seattle"which are also searches that relate back to voice search. These kind of questions are popular for voice search so to optimize local search you follow similar rules as optimizing voice search. People often need to look up your business for many reasons such as seeing the menu, hours, location, or reviews so optimizing local search is extremely important for many businesses that provide products and services locally.
There are many ways to optimize a business of local search and local voice search and this chart from Moz gives an overview of the strategies.
NAP
One thing that local search depends on heavily in NAP consistency and breadth. NAP is an acronym that stands for name, address and phone number. This is the core information about any business in terms of local search. NAP needs to be consistent across all platforms and third-party sources wherever your business is mentioned so that search engines can trust the data they find. If the NAP is inconsistent not only will search engines lose trust but customers will be misdirected. NAP also should have a broad spread across the internet (Facebook, Yelp, Google My Business) so that you build a wide set of references and trust with the search engine resulting in a ranking boost.
Thanks for reading. Check out these links to learn more.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-seo/what-is-local-seo-why-local-search-is-important/#close
https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-is-local-search-marketing-seo
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/01/11/voice-search-optimization-guide-2019/