Why should you optimise for Voice Search?
With the rise and growing popularity of Voice assistants – such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Siri – and mobile device use, optimising your website for voice search is a crucial SEO factor.
The main reason why voice search is going to be the next SEO trend is the benefit of using a voice compared to typing. Typing is much slower and searching via this method still requires you to think about which result is better. In comparison, a voice search will aim to automatically find the best result and it’s much quicker to alter a voice search over typing.
At Gold Coast Websites, we’ll provide a few important SEO tips that can help improve your voice search functionality.
Improve PageSpeed
It’s no secret that a slow website is a conversion killer. In the age of Social Media, short attention spans are now more common and that means your website needs to be as quick as possible!
BurstSMS sums this up well:
According to a study in the year 2000, humans had an attention span of 12 seconds—only 33% longer than a goldfish at 9 seconds. But that was over 18 years ago. Recently, Microsoft discovered that the average person’s attention span is now less than a goldfish at a mere 8 seconds.
So how do you optimise your website page speed?
Here are few tips we generally suggest:
- Resize large images and reduce image quality (without impacting any text in the image)
- Do not choose cheap web hosting! It’s cheap for a reason as your website will be placed on an already overloaded server – which equals = a slow website load time.
- (WordPress only) Only install essential plugins.
Convert your site to HTTPS
In 2018, Google is now marking websites without HTTPS as “non-secure”.
Users should expect that the web is safe by default, and they’ll be warned when there’s an issue. Since we’ll soon start marking all HTTP pages as “not secure”, we’ll step towards removing Chrome’s positive security indicators so that the default unmarked state is secure. Chrome will roll this out over time, starting by removing the “Secure” wording and HTTPS scheme in September 2018 (Chrome 69).
Source: https://blog.chromium.org/2018/05/evolving-chromes-security-indicators.html
As a result, it’s critical to have a HTTPS website. A non-secure message can scare away potential customers and security must be paramount.
Fortunately, Gold Coast Websites are experts at converting HTTP to HTTPS.
Just check our 2016 guide here:.
Create high quality content
As stated by Backlinko, “The average word count of a voice search result page is 2,312 words.” Source: https://backlinko.com/voice-search-seo-study
That aligns with Google’s algorithm of ranking longer and high-quality content.
When you’re creating content, always think about the user and not the search engine.
- Create user-friendly pages with videos, images and useful text content.
- Use short and concise words and don’t waffle.
Use Long Tail Keywords
What is a long tail keyword?
Basically, it’s a longer description of a keyword that can include a location and/or phrases such as “near me”/”looking for”.
An example in our industry would be searching for “website designer”, which is a short keyword and highly competitive.
Whereas, a long tail keyword can separate us from the competition. Such as using “looking for a gold coast website designer” or “website designer near me”.
Get in touch
If you’re looking for a Voice Search SEO expert, get in touch with the team at Gold Coast Websites today!
