It is needless to say that the voice search is going to rule the not-so-distant future of the web. With the likes of Google Assistant, Cortana, Alexa, Siri, and more, people are now more tech-savvy and less interested in using their fingers to even type a query. The increasing busyness of the individuals is the reason why they are shouting loud to get an answer to their problems.
As per our interview with an Indian IT firm, Intlum, the data that came up was extremely astonishing! In the month of January 2018 alone, there have been 1 billion voice searches conducted by online consumers. And the most surprising fact is, the statistics are already one-year-old which means today the number has definitely increased! As the studies are saying, 30% of the online searches will be made using voice search by the year 2020.
As more and more users are considering voice search as their searching option, you, being an online business owner, need to buckle up your shoes and consider how this huge backlash will impact your mobile website.
In the world, full of competition, your attention should be equally divided between the designing aspects and interactivity of your website. Your priority for the voice searchers can be one aspect that can keep you alive. So, the bottom line is, voice search is surely a must-see feature of mobile site designing. Now, we should always look for the best approach for mobile site designing keeping the voice search in mind.
Following are some points which are required to be considered while you are approaching for the mobile website design in 2019 and beyond.
Provide Answers to Common Queries at the Top
According to a survey conducted in 2018, a business will be called immediately after being found by almost 28% voice users. Thus, while it is important to have a well-designed website that appeals to the local shoppers or customers, it also becomes important to provide them with the required information right away. When an individual is making use of his/her phone and the voice search option, chances are good that the person is looking forward to getting in touch with the company in the shortest way possible. But connecting via call is not the only kind of action the users are going to take. The voice searchers may consider other ways they may want to get engaged with. You have to think of the other ways which can be availed by the users to be engaged with the website.
- Book an appointment or reservation
- Know about the hours of operation
- A live chat for product or service info
- Get the information about sales or shipping offers
When a search is made via voice rather than text, the chances are the users do not want any scrolling or manual action for viewing the information. So, keep the information at the top of your web page or more preferably, on the meta title or description itself (however, it leaves you with the fear of not getting clicked!).
Add Location to Your Content
When it comes to designing websites for the local audience, it becomes quite mandatory to localize the contents! In order to make your content local, you may make use of the colors, visuals, and verbosity that resonate with the target audience of yours. This point is especially pertinent while attempting to engage the voice searchers.
According to the studies and researches, 46% of the voice users use their voice search enabled devices to find the local businesses each and every day. If you have a website that is built for a particular geographical region, you may use this tendency in your favor!
- The region’s name can be included in the metadata and content.
- Create the location specific web pages in line with the relevance.
- Make use of the region-specific visuals.
- Tag the images and videos of your website with the name of the particular region.
- Provide a transcription of the video or audio used on your website if they discuss a particular location.
You need to do everything in your hand to make sure that the voice searches with the ‘near me’ or ‘in location’ phrases bring out your website at the top position.
If you compare the voice search result and the conventional text search result side by side, you will be able to see the difference not only in the ranking position but also in the metadata of the sites appearing on the SERP. While there would be a slight difference in the ranking, you will perhaps see a considerable difference in the metadata of the same sites ranking with both the search mediums.
Answer Their Questions in Callouts
As per Google’s study, 41% of the voice users feel that their voice search queries offer a conversational feeling, rather than the one-sided dialogues. With the increasing user experience with this sort of discussion, your website’s performance in the voice search will be affected.
You need to write the content and frame it on the website in a way that it appears on the voice search results. To initiate the process, start by figuring out the kind of questions that can be asked by your target audience. If you are unsure about the questions, ‘Answer the Public’ can be a viable tool to do so.
Once you generate the questions around one defining keyword, you can check their popularity on KWFinder or UberSuggest or Google Keyword Planner. If the site is around for a while, Google Analytics data can be a wonderful resource to gather popular queries. Get the queries from Google Analytics by going Acquisition > Search Console > Queries.
Add the queries to your metadata which is the best and the easiest way to get your website ranked on the basis of those questions or queries. This is how your website will appear on the voice search result page.
So, these are the three ways you can optimize your mobile website for voice searches. Once you are done with the optimization of your website for the voice searches, you are going to see a viable result in terms of increased users who raise their voice to search for a query.