How Your SEO Tactics Should Evolve to Accomodate Voice Search

21 Nov How Your SEO Tactics Should Evolve to Accomodate Voice Search

If you’re looking to increase your online marketing presence, one of your primary tactics is probably SEO, or search engine optimization. A staggering 75% of search engine users won’t scroll past the first page of results, and search engine optimization is the best way to get your site to that coveted first page.

But online marketing is hardly a stagnant practice, and search engine optimization will soon be shaken up by the increased prevalence of voice search on mobile devices. Here’s what’s going to change:

Local Searches
Many people who search using voice commands are on the go and in a hurry, often because they’re headed somewhere local. This means that targeting local markets will become even more important. Showing up on a local search could lead to foot traffic in your business the same day a search is performed.

Conversational Queries
Since users search using speech, queries are becoming more conversational and more complex, meaning that SEO strategies will have to evolve to reflect this. Content marketing and search engine optimization have always gone hand in hand, and that will only become more true as voice search takes over. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing, generates about three times as many leads, and is considered “very” or “somewhat” effective for SEO by 92% of marketers. In fact, companies that blog over 15 times a month get five times more traffic.

Using these blog posts to pose questions that users might search and answering them in the body of your post is a great way to target voice searchers. You can also open forums on your site where people are encouraged to ask questions, leading searchers with the same questions to your site.

Searching Within Apps
Google recently opened up its voice search algorithm to be included in third party apps. This means that any app can now write the “Okay Google” voice search command into its coding. A smartphone user could activate voice search, for instance, and say “Okay Google, search GrubHub for local Chinese restaurants,” and as long as Grub Hub was voice search optimized, it would bring up results within the app. This means that it will become more important for companies to appear in apps like GrubHub that connect customers to businesses.

Adjusting your SEO tactics with voice search in mind will be a great way to stay ahead of the pack.