The way we search for products online is changing, especially when it comes to voice search. With the introduction of smart speaker devices (like Alexa and Google Home) in homes over the past few years, the normality of using voice to search for things online is becoming the norm.
Voice search may already be a part of your everyday life and can prove to be really useful and will continue to grow in popularity in the coming years. This is why businesses are looking to prepare their online shops for voice search devices.
People are using voice search as a means to find items online more and more so what do you need to do to ensure that your online shop is ready for voice search?
Long-tail Keywords
Voice search is still search, so to help you get your listings to the top of Google you’ll need to look at your current SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for your online shop and one major part of that is long-tail keywords.
Long-tail keywords (longer and highly specific keyword phrases) are an important part of your SEO strategy but they can also help you with voice search results too. This is because people tend to use more conversational language when searching for something via voice search so long-tail keywords are going to be much more useful in this situation. They may also have lower search volumes and therefore less competition for the top spots.
One way to look into what type of long-tail keywords you should be using in your website content is through Google Search Console. The length of search queries may also indicate voice search was used as well as conversational keywords which we’ll talk about later on.
Conversational Content
As well as long-tail keywords you’ll also want to work on your existing and any new content to make its tone more conversational. This is because most voice searches are in the form of a question so by making your content conversational you’ll have a better chance of answering that question and being nearer the top of the results.
One of the fastest ways to do this is by creating a Q&A page on your website and it’s also a good place to include some of those long-tail keywords. Another way is to create more interview-style blog content between two people, perhaps two experts. If you draft your interviews in an FAQ style they will end up being a more natural way of speaking which will help with seeking out answers using voice search.
Structure
Structured data is something that you should be looking into to help your SEO results. Structured data is code in a particular format that makes your content easier to read for search engines such as Schema.org. The search engine reads the code and uses the data it finds to populate results and can easily be added to your website. It’s this code that talks to the search engines and tells them exactly what information is going to be useful for the search query so it can provide richer results.
Google has also released Speakable (beta).
“The speakable schema.org property identifies sections within an article or webpage that are best suited for audio playback using text-to-speech (TTS). Adding markup allows search engines and other applications to identify content to read aloud on Google Assistant-enabled devices using TTS. Webpages with speakable structured data can use the Google Assistant to distribute the content through new channels and reach a wider base of users.” Google
We can see this technology expanding to ecommerce in the near future as well as other types of websites for the purpose of voice search.
Google Products
Speaking of Google, one final thing to do to make sure your online shop is ready for voice search is to set up a Google My Business page if you haven’t already done so. Doing so allows you to provide information about your business to Google and it can use that information in its search results for both desktop and voice.
An example of a search like this is “Where is my nearest butcher shop”. The person is looking for a ‘butcher shop’ in their ‘local area’ so the long-tail keywords for this would be ‘butcher shop in [location]’ or ‘…near me’.
Now while their device would need to know their location first of all, the information you provided in your Google My Business account will help ensure your business is one of the top results.
Preparing your online shop for voice search will help you not only get ahead of the curve but also ahead of your competitors, so make sure to evolve your online shop and prepare for the future of online shopping.
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