Guide To Optimize Your Website For Voice Search And Video Search
The world of search is changing. Ways in which people search for any information on the web are changing.
With the introduction of voice assistant devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home, voice searches are increasing every day. Video searches are also undergoing a major change as videos are not only a part of video searches, but also show up on top of normal Google search results.
Manually typed searches will be a thing of past in a few years. With more and more people preferring to watch videos instead of reading articles and using voice searches on Siri, Cortana, and Google assistant, it is time to optimize your website for the powerful world of voice and video searches.
Guide to optimize your blog for voice search:
With more and more people using mobiles to access the internet, voice searches are growing exponentially, because it is easier to search through voice rather than to type on the small phone screens.
With advanced AI algorithms used by major search engines, voice search offers a more personalized experience to the users and mimics an actual conversation. They also offer a more tailored experience to the user as the search engines rely on natural language processing technique to understand voice commands.
Over a period of time, the voice assistant understands your tastes and preferred searches and offers customized results suited to you.
Most websites are not at all optimized for voice searches. This gives you a window to work on this opportunity before everybody jumps on the bandwagon. There are other reasons why you should start thinking seriously about voice search SEO.
According to Google, the number of voice searches done on mobile phones doubled in the past one year. This means that the number of searches done normally is declining so you are losing traffic if your site is not optimized.
To optimize your site for voice searches, you need to take the following steps:
1. Use long-tail keywords
Most voice searches are for finding out the exact information that a person needs and use specific long tail keywords. Conversational phrases that people use during normal conversation are also included in these keywords.
Your content should aim to provide the exact answer the user is looking for through the search query.
2. Work on the website’s mobile readiness and loading speed
Needless to say, your website should be mobile-friendly and should load fast. This is important for all search methods and not just voice searches. Use Google search console and add the mobile version of your website in it to track the search queries.
Avoid using flash as most mobiles don’t support it. Make sure that all your pages are crawlable by the search engine bots.
3. Focus on creating your content around common questions
Almost all voice search queries revolve around a question as people think of it as a conversation. Search for popular questions, go through the “people also ask” section, and then create content around these questions.
Make sure that the content is divided into small paragraphs written in a conversational tone.
4. Add a FAQs section to your existing articles
Optimizing the existing articles for voice searches can be pretty tricky. Add a FAQs section to the existing articles focussing on the questions related to the topic.
Use commonly used phrases and exact spellings to rank high in voice searches.
5. Optimize for featuring on the rich snippets section of SERP results
You will be surprised to know that most voice search results use the featured snippets section of the search results. This position is also called the zero position and features a web page which gives the most relevant information to the search query.
Use Schema markup to highlight the microdata of your website. This will give your site an edge over your competitors in voice search results.
Recommended reading: Create a Silo website and implement Google schema markup to improve your rankings in search engines.
The world of voice searching is relatively new and exact analytics for these searches are still not available, unlike manual searches. This being said, SEO experts are claiming that voice searching is the key to the future of searching.
Guide to optimize your blog for video search:
While voice might be the future, videos are the present. Video searches have grown significantly in the past few years. Unlike website SEO which revolves around content, optimizing your website for video searches is completely different since there is no content to work with.
Here are some ways in which you can optimize your videos for video search.
1. Index the videos using the Google video extension sitemap tool
Most website owners think that submitting a common sitemap for their website to search engines works efficiently in video SEO as well. This is a common mistake as creating a separate sitemap for videos can help your videos to rank well on the search engines as these sitemaps contain some vital data about your video.
2. Write an engaging Meta description and title to support the video along with an attractive thumbnail image
Adding a relevant and attractive thumbnail image to the video increases conversions significantly. The first thing people see when they search for something is the thumbnail image and it will determine whether the video is clicked or not.
Create an engaging title which lures the viewers and add a Meta description to help the search bots know more about the video.
3. Add a transcript to your video
This step acts as a page copy of your video and makes it easier for the search engines to crawl the video and the text. Some people prefer reading a video transcript when they are not able to listen to the video due to various reasons. So, this transcript also has an impact on the ranking of the video on search results.
4. In case of multiple videos, embed the most important video first
This ensures that the video you want to rank is first crawled by the search engines. Normally, Google does not show multiple videos of the same page on search results. It also indexes only one video per page, so use this tip wisely.
5. If you have multiple forms of content on a page including videos, optimize the page in all aspects
Optimizing the video is not enough to rank the webpage and the video. If you have included text, videos, and images or any other form of content on your website, optimize all the aspects of the page and video to truly rank. Check the on-page and off-page SEO of the website. Work on the lagging parameters to take the page up on the search engine results.
6. Use social media to get the word out there about your video
Do not just rely on Google to do all the hard work. If you think you have optimized the video and the supporting page completely, put the word out there.
Get social and promote the video on your social media pages to get social shares. You can also run FB ads to make the video reaches a larger audience.
Recommended reading: 16 Tips to get targeted traffic from social media
Are you ready to optimize your website for voice search and video search?
So these were our detailed guides for optimizing your website for voice and video searches. Voice searches are going to become huge in the coming years due to the introduction of new and modern voice assistant devices. Video searches are already increasing at a significant rate, so it is always good to reap the benefits.
Have you optimized your website for voice and video searches?
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