As voice-first search devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home get more popular, the number of voices searches is rapidly growing. You may ask yourself, “Do I need to optimize my site for voice searches?”. The answer is yes, but it’s not as complicated as you might think! Contact Creekmore Marketing today to learn more about how voice searches affect digital marketing strategies. As a part of our SEO strategy at Creekmore Marketing, we ensure our clients’ business information is up-to-date and accessible via Amazon Alexa, which ensures all of our clients’ data will be available for voice searches on the Amazon Echo. We perform additional voice search optimization to keep our clients top of mind in their markets. If you want to improve your presence for voice searches, here are a few factors you can optimize for: 

Long-tail Keywords

You’ve probably heard us talk about keywords before, but what is a long-tail keyword? Long-tail keywords refer to the longer, more conversational search terms people use when performing voice searches. Rather than someone searching “coffee Lexington”, they may ask Alexa, “Where can I find coffee in Lexington?”. Adding some of these long-tail keywords onto your site or creating blog posts that answer them are just a couple of ways you can optimize your site for voice searches.

Domain Authority 

A big part of the results Google or Alexa choose to show when voice searches are performed are based on domain authority. The domain authority reflects how valuable search engines think your site is based on factors like Google reviews, the number of links that lead back to your site from other sites, and the number of sites you are listed on. The age of your website and how often you post new content also factors in.

Listing Consistency

You’ve claimed your Google My Business listing. Great! What’s next? While your Google My Business listing is important, Google also wants to see that you’re claimed on other websites, like Apple, Yelp, and Bing and that your information is consistent across all of your listings. This is something we handle for our clients across the board.

Mobile Sites

Not only does your desktop site need to be optimized for voice searches, but you need to make sure your mobile site is, too. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, now is the time to invest in one. Outside of devices like the Amazon Echo, tons of voice searches are performed every day from mobile devices. Your site, both mobile and desktop, also needs to load quickly because the average voice search results page loads in about 4.6 seconds. The average page loads in almost 9 seconds!

Easy Access

Google and Alexa need to be able to find answers to their search results quickly and be able to relay them in an easily understandable manner. Therefore, answers to common questions should be readily available on your site, about 29 words long at the most, and written at a 9th grade reading level or below. If Google doesn’t have easy access to the answers on your site or if they’re too long or written at a level Google will have trouble reading, they’ll move on to the next result. There are quite a few ways voice searches affect digital marketing strategies, but if you’re already one of our clients, it’s not something you have to worry about! We pride ourselves on being up to date on all of the latest news and digital marketing strategies and have already been working on a variety of ways to optimize your site for voice searches. If you aren’t one of our clients but want to learn more about helping your site show up in voice searches, contact Creekmore Marketing today! Our team is made up of experts in a variety of marketing areas, including local SEO, pay-per-click ads, logo and website design, social media, content, and more, and we can create a custom marketing strategy for your business.