- Overview
- Content Structure
- Keyword Research
- On-Site SEO
- —>Voice Search <—
- Off-Site SEO
- Local SEO
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Voice Search Guide for Small Business
Over 50% of American households have at least one smart home device, and over 30% have broadband with a smart speaker and voice assistant. People ask their smart speakers for answers to questions and install skills to re-order their favorite things. Yet, voice search is still considered an experimental market. Building a voice search strategy and smart home skill can easily elevate your brand to the cutting edge. With voice search, you can reach customers directly in their homes through welcome inbound interactions.
- What Does Voice Search Mean to Small Businesses?
- How to Optimize Pages for Voice Search Results
- Creating a Smart Home Skill
- Podcasts, Podcast Ads, and Voice Search
- Winning Orders and Reorders with Voice Search
What Does Voice Search Mean to Small Businesses?
- Free channel and low-cost strategy
- Low competition for an under-explored market
- Massive market of daily users
- Optimized for local business
Voice search is used by family members of all ages and as homes with internet become universal, so too has smart home integration. Children ask smart homes questions. Professionals use their AI personal assistants through smart watches and phones on the go. Being the answers and and one of the few available voice-search-accessible services is a powerful and often unclaimed position – the perfect environment for small businesses to claim a market share.
Voice search is officially free to enter and is still effectively a new frontier in digital marketing. Corner the market on local voice-search orders for your product or service niche. Local businesses and distinctive e-commerce brands both have the advantage of being things people commonly shop for through voice search. This opens the door to many small businesses all the way to solo entrepreneurs and startups to optimize for voice search where competitors are focusing only on SERPs and social media.
Become a mainstay of daily life with voice search and smart home content strategy.
How to Optimize Pages for Voice Search Results
Voice search provides snippets for smart speakers to quote in response to questions. When a smart home user asks “Why is the sky blue?” or “Why do we put mozzarella cheese on pizza?”, your website could be the source that their smart home quotes. Your icon and link will appear on smart devices with screens and in the search history. If you ask for more information, your website is more likely to be the one first checked for further authority statements.
Even better, you want your services to be immediately listed when customers ask “Where is the nearest pizza place?” or “Can I have helium balloons delivered to my house?” To do that, you need voice search SEO strategy. Try these tips to create voice search results pages or increase the likelihood of each page providing a voice search result.
Conversational Keywords
Use conversational keywords. Consider the way your audience asks questions and may speak to their smart speakers at home. Ask and answer questions in your content and provide quick, concise, and friendly informational blurbs. Prioritize conversational answers in order to improve the smart home user experience and create a sense of conversing with your brand.
Build FAQs and Pages with Questions and Answers
FAQs and question-answer sections work very well for voice search optimization. Print the questions your customers and leads are asking (or might ask, or should be asking) and provide quick answers.
Smart homes seem to prefer answers that are less than three or four sentences long, so that their answers do not drag on for the user. So concise, complete answers in quick summaries work best.
Local SEO
Integrate your location into content so that the smart homes know which businesses are most relevant to their user. Local businesses benefit from the smart home relevant filter if local SEO is properly integrated into your strategy.
Mobile Performance
Page load matters, as virtual assistants need answers fast. In addition, voice search is the second most popular search method for mobile devices. So make sure your information pages load in a snap and have great mobile performance for on-screen information displays.
Develop Your Brand “Voice”
Answer questions in a unique voice that may be recognizable, even if quoted through a smart home persona. This will make your brand’s answers stand out and start an initial positive, often amused, relationship with your voice users.
Snippet Optimization
If you are already working on snippet optimization strategy, many of the principles for voice search optimization overlap. A voice search result is, in many ways, a smart home quoting the top snippet result.
Creating a Smart Home Skill
Don’t hesitate to develop a smart home skill. Choose one or two essential features to make accessible through voice commands, or set your team to create an immersive voice-accessible experience. A smart home skill allows the virtual assistant to take certain actions using specific commands. For example, “Alexa, tell PapaJohns to reorder my last order” can order pizza directly to the user’s home based on previous settings.
But you’re not limited just to local orders. You can enable the skill to have any interaction with your app, website, accounts, and orders that can be built in, and then activated with certain keywords and phrases.
Podcasts, Podcast Ads, and Voice Search
Voice and audio content is increasingly popular – and can be accessed through smart home conversations. People looking for stuff to listen to while they exercise, clean the house, work and do schoolwork, or catch up on specific subjects can ask for content from their smart homes and get a list of topical podcasts.
Hosting Podcasts for Voice Search
Asking for the news from a specific provider results in a free sequence of newscasts. Asking for a flash briefing receives a sequence of daily newscasts from different networks. Small businesses have an opportunity to become a popular content provider simply by filling a voice-search audio niche with free and subscription content.
Guest Podcasts and SEO
Being a guest in existing podcasts is another great way to build your off-site SEO by exposing your brand to new audiences. Sharing your expertise, mission, services, and creating a rapport with new listeners is a great way to introduce your brand to the voice search marketplace.
Podcast Advertising
Podcast commercials have a unique character that can be powerful if done correctly. Podcast listeners like a complete audio experience, and disruptive commercials are on the outs. However, commercials built around the sound and even the premise of the podcast they embed into can be wildly popular and win a fandom from the listeners for becoming part of the show. This is an entertaining and highly approachable option for small businesses voice marketing.
Winning Orders and Reorders with Voice Search
How do you turn voice search SEO into conversions and revenue? Voice search has some of the greatest potential for local and repeated orders due to the convenience aspect of the virtual assistant. By making your pages searchable and your features accessible through a smart home skill, your brand can become part of a customer’s daily or regular routine.
In fact, innovative small businesses may even carve out new business models and revenue streams through smart home skill functionality.
Voice search strategy is an under-explored market ready for small business innovators. If your brand is ready to become one of the few local or online businesses in your niche with a voice strategy, contact us for your first consultation.
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