Voice search and Automation: Impact on traditional SEO

As technology advances, the industry of SEO will change. Voice search and automation are some of the biggest ways that this can affect traditional SEO as you know it. While voice search has been around for nearly a decade, in recent years voice search and automation have taken off thanks to the inclusion of devices like Alexa and Google Home. This technology offers convenience to the user, but it also offers a wide variety of information that you can use for your marketing campaigns. Here are the top ways that voice search can impact SEO

• You can Better Target Your Audience

  What’s great about AI is that it can process a mass amount of information, quickly providing relevant and better feedback. This is valuable information that allows you to better target who your audience really is. Knowing your target audience is crucial because this helps you to create content and marketing campaigns that will be more likely to reach them. Businesses are starting to use AI to create and interact with personas, allowing them to develop more effective marketing campaigns.

• Understanding Semantics

  Through traditional text searches, if someone was looking for a specific type of restaurant they would type “Best Italian restaurants in (location)”. But people use voice search much differently. When using voice search, they would simply ask “Is there an Italian restaurant near me?” What does that mean from a marketing standpoint? That you need to be more conversational in your content to better optimize it for voice search. The fact is that people will search for things using different phrases depending on whether they are voice searching or text searching. By optimizing your content, you will get more attention.

• Takes Away “Black Hat” SEO Techniques

  In the past, people would use so-called “black hat” techniques like keyword stuffing to attract people to their website. While there is a line before search engines penalize this type of technique, there are plenty of sites that manage to get away with it. The more advanced automation becomes, the less likely techniques like this are actually going to work. This will get rid of some of the more frowned upon practices that were once used and help make everyone more equal in the search engine world.

• Increases the Importance of Mobile

  By now, you should know that optimizing your site for mobile devices is important. If not, it’s about to become even more important thanks to voice searches. However, it’s getting to a point where you will want to really focus on optimizing your website for mobile users since this is where a lot of voice search is used. Ensuring that you have a highly responsive mobile site and compressing your images, this is a great first step to optimizing your mobile website.

• Importance of Focusing on Local Search

  When you have a brick and mortar store, your primary goal is to get people to come into your store. That means that you need to be able to focus your SEO tactics on bringing voice search people to your physical location. Voice search makes it even more important to focus on local search techniques, such as saying things like “near me” or “nearby”. Doing this will improve your chances of being ranked higher on voice search results.

• Use Automation to Optimize Voice Search

  As previously mentioned, automation makes it easier to compile and analyze data. One of the best things that you can do with this data is to use it to optimize your site for voice search. Your content, images, and even the layout of your website as well as marketing materials must be optimized for voice search if you are going to get the attention you want.

• Importance of Featured Snippets

  Blocked content, meaning content that utilizes H-tags, lists, or bullet points, are considered “better readable” for search engines. If the search engines can better read your content, you will perform better on search results. Voice searches make this even more important. Featured snippets are something that you need to take the time to create to optimize voice searches. This is usually a piece of content under 29 words that concisely summarize your content. This is what will pop up initially when people ask a specific question.

• Longer Queries

  In the past, you would want to use the shortest keywords possible to attract attention. You would typically only use a few words as your keyword and this would be enough to rank higher on search engines. However, voice search changes that. These queries may be as long as 10 words or more. This goes back to the importance of semantics. Using longer, more natural keywords will give you a more effective approach.

• More Questions, Fewer Keywords

  With traditional SEO, your focus would be on short keywords like “Italian restaurant” since that’s what the user would type in. Now that you have voice search, you need to optimize your content to answer specific questions like “Where are there Italian restaurants near me?” You must use your keywords and pose them in a question to rank higher on these search engines now that voice chat is becoming more popular than ever.

• Offer a More Concise Answer

  When people are sitting at home and have a specific question that they are asking their devices, they want a quick but concise answer. For example, someone asks, “What’s January’s birthstone?” They don’t want to hear some long statement; they want to hear “January’s birthstone is garnet.” Placing the answer to a specific question at the beginning of your content will make it easier for the voice search to answer the question.

Automation and voice search is absolutely changing the world of SEO. If you are going to be more successful, you need to adapt to these new technologies with our SEO experts to keep up with the competition. These new technologies are becoming more popular than ever, so the best thing you can do is to adjust your strategy & contact us or write to us at info@letsnurture.com.