Top Voice Engine Optimisation strategies that help your website rank higher

Voice engine optimisation is the future. According to the Search Engine Journal, over 25,000.000 smart speakers were sold in 2017. The reason behind simply being that businesses realised that consumers now prefer voice search over text search. With voice search, there is no need to type, the answer is read back and it’s faster. As such, in order to develop a good relationship with Alexa, Cortana, Siri or any other smart speaker, it’s crucial for the business to come up with effective strategies that will make smart speakers pick up their content as the first answers. If you can have a look at Novibet, you will see that several sites are already working hard to build fruitful relationships with smart speakers.

Woman conducting voice search on mobile phone at home

Long tail keywords

With typical (text) search, it’s possible and in most occasions advisable to use a single word or small phrases keywords. However, when it comes to voice search, it’s a completely different ball game. Evidence shows that when people use voice search, they often use at least four keywords onwards. It is for this reason that when creating your content, you need to have long tail keywords.

Meet SEO best practices

It’s crucial in typical searches to meet the top SEO best practices for effective results i.e. higher search ranking but this is more so important when it comes to voice search. When it comes to voice search, there is no settling for second best but for the best i.e. pole position in search results. In order to attain that pole position, you, therefore, need to meet the following schema markup, secure your website with SSL encryption, images with alt tags, highly responsive website, site authority, solid site hierarchy, local pages optimised with Google My Business, and mobile-friendly site.

Understand what Google is looking for

When you use voice search, you will realise that Google or Bing or any other search engine you are using release the search results in the form of a snippet. This snippet gives you a guideline on what the search engine looks for before returning the search results, therefore, you need to take into consideration these guidelines if you want your page to return higher. Common things that search engines look for before returning results include keywords in the Universal Resource Locator (URL), keywords located at the start or inside the first paragraph, unique titles and description tags, use of headings, conversational language i.e. your content should be written in such a way that seems like you are talking to a real person, use of trigger words such as best, what or how, long tail keywords (5+ words), highly detailed content, and content answering a specific question or addressing a specific topic.

Use of semantics

You also need to master semantics in your content i.e. you need to be able to effectively use different words in your text that mean the same thing. This is to say if someone searches for ‘things to do in autumn’, s/he is going to land on your page even if the title of your page, Meta description and keywords read ‘things to do during fall season’.

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