During a recent LSA webinar, Bernadette Coleman, CEO of Advice Local presented an introduction to voice search, why it’s so important for local businesses and best practices for optimizing for it in 2019.
According to Bernadette, voice search very simple — it takes a spoken query, returns a spoke query result or returns a screen query result. However, voice search is still best for single response queries only. Open-ended queries where a user asks Google for an opinion to help them decide on something, like “Where should I eat dinner tonight?” will not work.
She offered a few interesting statistics, including:
- 25% of all Windows 10 desktop searches are done via voice.
- 20% of all Google mobile queries are voice searches.
- Voice search has grown by 35x times 2008.
- Google found that 41% of adults and 55% of teens utilize voice search daily.
She provided insight into how voice search has transformed the search landscape, changing how people search, when they search and what they search for. For instance, searches have become much more conversational, with far longer queries than text searches. Additionally, because voice search is easy and convenient, it’s being utilized everywhere, whether it’s at home, in the office or in a restaurant.
Lastly, she gave several tips for how local businesses can begin optimizing websites for voice search. Here are a few of them:
- Pay attention to page speed, as it’s very important
- Keep questions and answers short and sweet
- Create content that’s easy to read and understand because it will rank well in voice search
- Write content with natural language, as voice searches are more natural and less robotic than standard text searches
- Embed long-tail keywords into long-form content
- Create voice search FAQ pages
You can view the recording of the webinar below:
For more info about LSA’s webinar series, visit: https://bit.ly/LSAwebinars.
