Between the growth of hands-free use of mobile devices and the explosion home “digital assistants” like the Amazon Echo, voice searches are rapidly becoming the norm rather than the exception.
But these types of searches require web pros and marketers to take a new approach to optimizing their pages, though some of the tips included in this infographic from Headway Capital apply equally to all types of search, including search engines’ preference for pages with fast loading time and searchers’ preference for results that provide easy-to-read information.
Voice search tips you may not have considered include:
The importance of a comprehensive FAQ page on your website, with entries written as concise answers to the questions most likely to be asked through voice search.
Optimizing your text to be easily shown in a snippet, such as a paragraph, list or table providing the answer to a question.
Using schema and/or Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to help users and search engines better interpret your information.
Claiming your Google business listing, putting all the essential information where it can easily be found.
(Need to know more about schema and snippets? Download our non-web designers’ guide to what these protocols are and how to use them.)
Of course, many of the same steps you have taken to optimize your website in the past still apply. Clear and descriptive page names and URLs, alt text for images, and keywords and longtail phrases included in headlines continue to send signals to search engines that identify what your website is about and what information each page contains. Take a page-by-page look at the details that impact search results with our On-Page SEO Template & Guide, the most popular resource in the JONES Inbound Marketing Learning Library.