How Optimising for Voice Search Will Impact Your SEO Plan in 2021

People all around the world are now using voice searches like never before. To rank in voice search results, websites will need to be properly optimised, so that they may be able to anticipate how people ask questions while searching for information.

Let us see the impact Optimising for voice search might have on your SEO plan.

Natural Language, Naturally!

With the improvement of voice recognition systems, voice technology is now well adapted to follow the natural language use of people, as if they were talking to a human being.

If you are creating an SEO plan in 2021, it becomes crucial that you take into account the natural speech patterns and choice of words of the people who are your target audience.

In an online report, it was recorded that 70% of all English language searches by voice were made in a natural or conversational tone.

Keyword Length Increase, Game Changer

When a person is typing, they may use certain keywords which may help you set an SEO plan accordingly. However, when people speak, they tend to see a lot more words than they would while texting or typing.

People type at an average speed of 30 to 40 words a minute, while they speak 110 to 150 words in the same timeframe. To accommodate this, the keywords will now change into key phrases.

To optimise an SEO plan that can adjust with voice searches, the focus will now be on long-tail keyword phrases rather than just simple words. The added benefit here being, the longer the keyword, the more chance of a conversion.

Owning Google Knowledge Graph

Google, like any search engine, looks to enhance user experience whenever and wherever possible. Voice search as we know knocks down the very notion of fundamental SEO. It is no longer just about keywords, rankings, traffic, or even conversions.

But how does the google knowledge graph come into play? You often find it active in the snippet rankings you see at the top, or the Wikipedia excerpts you see over to the right!

However, how does that play into voice search? In voice search, rankings are not everything! It is no longer about the infamous 10 blue links on the first page of the SERPs. It is all about owning the 0th position such that your brand can be chosen as the answer to a query.

It is about whether or not your brand deserves to be chosen! It is about if a user would expect your brand to rank at the top. This often means you would also have to do a lot of offline campaigns to get the brand awareness that you need.

Unfortunately, this is not an exactly quantifiable statistic, so you would need to get in some brand recognition surveys, and check your CTR vs. average position.

For instance, even if you are not ranking at the very top, and your rankings seem to have hit a baseline, yet you have a high CTR that means people are choosing you. That means you are set on the course towards becoming that preferred brand.

Voice search is now on the rise, and one of the best ways to snag that 0th position is to appease the expectations of the Google Knowledge Graph ecosystem.

More Question Words

Voice searches now frequently include question words such as – who, what, why, which, when, how, and where. These words are usually left out in word searches.

Any business or blog owner will find themselves having to ensure that the content that they create can produce relevant and accurate answers to these voice search questions, while also keeping in mind questions that require simple answers and others that are a little more complex.

Scheming to Semantic Searches

As opposed to earlier lexical searches which looked for literal matches of keywords, as an SEO strategist, you would have to look into semantic searches as well.

Semantic searches try to find the intended meaning of the user, within the context of the terms used, and not just the literal meaning of the words. Optimising voice search to include semantic searches becomes important because different people might have different ways to describe or search for the same thing, so, this way, the context and the intent can be taken into account allowing for better user satisfaction.

Summing Up

Voice search will continue to grow in popularity as voice recognition systems keep updating and becoming more advanced and sophisticated.

These are a few of the impacts of Optimising voice search for SEO plans, and after going through them, it can be said that – to keep up with the changing times it is essential to optimise your website for voice search

Is your business leveraging the future of SEO, VOICE? If not, speak to us about how we can get you ahead of the curve.