January 15, 2019 | Categorised in:

It’s 2019, and competition for the highest ranking pages is fierce, and voice searches are starting to become more and more prominent. It’s estimated that by the year 2020, over 55% of all households will have smart speakers, and this is up from 13% in 2017. This means that it’s important to optimise your website for voice searches today so you can stay ahead of the SEO game going forward. We’ve put together several tips to help you get your website ready for voice searches, and they include:

1. Write How You Speak – Your website’s content should start making the switch from short phrases to longer phrases, or how you’d naturally speak. Instead of having keywords like “highest rated web design companies,” you’d have “Who are the top web design companies in 2019?” Try to formulate and write your content for a high school level at the highest.

2. Focus on Your Local Audience – Did you know that roughly 46% of all voice searches are for local businesses or products? This means that you really want to focus on your local SEO rankings. One way to do this is to incorporate keyword phrases like “near me” into your SEO strategy because this can help local voice searches find your site.

3. Utilise Featured Snippets – Most featured snippets are 29 words long and under because this is the average voice search length. Position zero or a featured snippet is a short and concise summary of your webpage. You can add things like long-tailed keywords, bullet points, lists, and H-tags in order to help Google read and understand it. In turn, this can help your ranking.

4. Streamline Your Website’s Loading Time – Google Voice acts just like a normal search in regards to website loading speed. Websites that load quicker gain more favour. Double check that your site is responsive on both PC and mobile devices, your images are optimised, you compress your files and you work on utilising your website’s caching to improve your overall load speed.

5. Consider User Intent – Do your potential customers want to buy something from you or are they simply searching for information? Their intent is why they performed the search they did in the first place. So, if you want them to buy from you, optimise your content to reflect this with words like “price” or “buy.” If you want them to come to your site for information, use phrases like “what is” and “how to.”

Getting your website ready for more voice searches can help drive traffic as more and more people start utilising voice searches. These five quick tips can help ensure that you stay ahead of the SEO rankings in 2019.