How Voice Search Optimization Can Add SEO Value to Your Website

by Hamza Riaz, Guest Contributor

​Voice search is an innovative method of browsing the web for favorite products, services, movies, and lots of other stuff. According to an infographic by FME extensions, about 50% of the internet searches will comprise on voice, by 2020. The increasing use of voice search technology is making more and more online shops to optimize their websites accordingly. 
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It can help them double the traffic to their websites by serving the users coming through conventional methods and getting ready to attract the voice searchers as well. The users are less likely to type in for a product, as they would like to speak about it. 

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The changing user behavior will affect SEO as merchants. Before it is late for you to pace up with the online sales, you may need to optimize for voice searches before hand. Here is how it can add SEO value to your website. 

Be searchable in multiple languages
The Voice search tools like Google assistant are capable of understanding multiple languages. This makes your website searchable in different languages. A multilingual website that aims to target speakers of different languages with localized keywords can have the advantage of optimizing for voice search only. 

As a result, the SEO of such a website simplifies to a standard language. The speech recognition technology identifies the language, extracts the keywords from a question a user asks and narrows down the results with local searches. The store owners, who once required optimizing multiple languages variants of a product page, will enjoy the ease. 

Improved local searches
Reaching out to customers online in your vicinity is difficult when you have to rank against generic terms. This limits the local SEO to directly listings and local business listings on multiple search engines. Additionally, online marketers use location-based keywords for creating content, which is no more useful and attractive. Eventually, it is a struggle the local businesses are suffering from.

With voice searches, the local searches improve as the users often speak to find a product or service in the nearest store. The words like nearest, closest, best in town, etc help the local businesses popup in voice searches. Hence, they will not have to worry about outreaching the people in the surrounding areas.

Increased mobile users 
A huge majority of mobile users do the voice search as they have built-in virtual assistants in their smartphones. Siri by Apple, Alexa by Amazon, Cortana by Microsoft, and Google Assistant are some of the commonly used applications that aid the voice search on mobile.

A website that is well optimized for voice search and mobile users score high in SEO. With the mobile-first update, Google is giving more SEO value to websites that provide better user experience to mobile users. Therefore, the voice search affects mobile SEO as well.

Content rich in quality will surface
The voice search works by finding content that is written the way we speak. It will bring out only those useful pieces of content that aim to address certain issues and problems. Content marketing is one significant part of SEO that is about the production of relevant and useful content.

The voice search will second the thought and will bring forth only the simple and easy to understand text that will be acceptable for a layman. As we have previously observed how the search engines reverted with the most matching results against long tail keywords. The same will go on with the voice searches. Therefore, the searches will refine and start showing results that are more relevant. 

Conclusion 
Voice search is increasing at an exponential rate. The ease of finding things online is making more and more mobile users utilize the feature. In turn, it is impacting mainstream SEO. It is redefining the way the online buyers used to browse the internet. More importantly, it is helping the local businesses and multi-regional online stores in reaching out to their target audiences. 

Author bio:

Hamza Riaz is a Digital Marketing Expert at FME Extensions, a company that develops extensions for popular shopping carts like Magento, WordPress and WooCommerce. Also, He expresses his thoughts and experiences in the form of write-ups. You can find him on LinkedIn.

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