Voice search – the voice that is slowly but surely setting the tone for SEO

Simple but powerful: the functions of voice search

It was a lot of fun when Siri suddenly started giving us answers to our questions in 2011. A personal assistant who understands what we say and offers us solutions! Over the years, many tech giants have joined this technological revolution with Alexa and Cortana. Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine our digitalized lives without these ladies: today, more than 50% of internet users are using voice input to ask Google & Co. questions verbally. What we perceive as a small bonus function is in fact a complex piece of technology: to enable us users to perform voice searches, mobile devices use so-called natural language processing, NLP for short, to decode the content. To do this, the user’s question is separated into different components, such as keywords and questions, in order to analyze their meaning. Another marvel of technology that excites and inspires! This is precisely why experts predict that the use of voice search will continue to increase in the future. A prediction that companies and their web admins should consider making a top priority. The main reason for this is that websites need to be prepared for voice search in order to survive in the SEO ranking.

The toolkit for your digital success

If we were to draw up a list of measures that are essential for SEO ranking, they could be summarized in one sentence: everything that brings the user quickly and precisely to the right result for their search query. This not only makes them happy, but Google too – meaning the business concept always comes to a positive conclusion. Your website is solely responsible for this. Everything from the technical aspects to the content of your website will help tip the scales so that Google ranks you first. The difference to conventional searches (yes, that’s what the manual entry of search terms is now called!) are almost inconspicuous, but important levers that have a significant output.

The makeover of your website – a small guide

“Keywords” is the first point on which you should review your website. There is no need to emphasize again that these should match your content and the user’s search query. But here it’s the length that counts! Because unlike conventional searches, where users tend to enter brief short-tail keywords, voice search is the name of the game: “The sky is the limit”. After all, if you can talk to your smartphone, you can be a bit more detailed! This is precisely why it is important to integrate long-tail keywords. So, when users are traveling in Berlin and are searching for a bakery, they won’t just enter the keyword ” bakery Berlin”, but will tend to enter “bakery Berlin near Kurfürstendamm with good coffee”. Including these long-tail keywords not only optimizes your SEO ranking, but also improves your success when you activate Google Ads for your online strategy. Aligning these long-tail keywords with voice search and your matching website content increases your quality score and leads to a better ad ranking. Speaking of quality score: you can also take voice search to a new level with an add-on. How? Very simple. Create content that answers users’ questions. You know what I’m talking about: the good old FAQs! Include them in a category on your website and add helpful blog posts as desired. This makes the search engines’ work all the easier, as your content already provides the most suitable result from the outset. Or you can get your website to talk! With the integration of conversational commerce you can create the perfect conversation partner for your users in the form of chat bots. When paired with the background information in your FAQs, your chat bot is guaranteed to have an answer to every question.