Earlier we discussed about the Why Small Businesses in Singapore Should Choose Outsourcing, Let’s discuss about Voice Search now.
(Give your business a competitive edge with voice search. Learn here how to combine voice search in your business marketing.)
Have you optimized your business for voice search?
If you think that voice search is too futuristic to imply now, let us give you a wakeup call…
- Half Singaporeans smartphone owners tried voice tech services like Sire, S voice and Google Assistant.
- Over 28% Singaporeans use voice search at least once a month.
- 17% Singaporeans use voice search weekly.
- 41% users say they would user voice search in future.
- 60% Singaporeans would like to have voice assistant in their car.
- 59 % Singaporeans expressed internet in using voice assistant to communicate with retail stores.
ABOVE ALL, voice searches make up 20% of the total search on mobile devices which will be 50% by 2020.
It means that you need to incorporate voice search in your marketing strategy to boost your online presence. It improves users’ experience as they can search via voice command, thereby getting freedom from the hassle of typing orexploring multiple links. Just speak and get it.
How to Make Your Business Website Ready for Voice Search?
Since people use their voice to search, they are likely to use more natural language like they use in conversation. They may not be typing short phrases like best holiday deals, Singapore weather or Leonardo Da Vinci date or birth. Instead, they speak the phrases this way…
Where can I get the best holiday deals? …..
What’s the weather like in Singapore? ………..
What year was Leonardo Da Vinci Born? ……
So your usual keywords or phrases may not be suitable for voice search as they are meant for typical “keyboard” search, not for speech. Besides, you need to make your website mobile friendly.
By taking all these factors into account, here is a step by step method to optimize your website for voice search.
Get Listed. Get Found in Voice Search
First and foremost, get your business listed on the top listing sites and directories in Singapore, including Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google My Business and Facebook. It will not only boost your online citations, but also consolidates your online presence. However, the listing should be accurate and consistent with correct details.
How to Do This…
Apart from adding basic details like business name, address and contact details, add information like opening hours, availability of parking facilities, short routes, amenities, etc. Create a short description of your business to be added to your business listings. Last but not the least—add images of your workplace.
Leverage User’s Testimonials
What people think about your business really matters. Getting more reviews will help your business ace voice search game. The business with more reviews (generally positive) is likely to top the voice search results.
Here is a same search result with Google Voice Search and Siri. And both have placed the search results with more reviews on the top.
How to Do This…
- Ask your customers to leave reviews on your website or Google listing page.
- Add review schema to your website to help Google crawl your website information in order to showcase it in the search results.
Take Care of Phrases
Most voice search queries are technically a query or questions(as we have told you earlier). They often include the words like what, where, when and why. The voice search query is more conversational and natural in tone.
The reason is pretty simple—the nature of search queries is not the same when they are typed out or spoken. When users type the phrase in, especially on their smartphone, they keep the search short, may be about two words to get the quick result (also saving them from labor of typing). For example, they may type “weather in Singapore” to see the result.
With voice search, the same user is likely to say longer phrases (long tail keywords) as it require less effort than typing. Here you may say something like, “what’s weather today in Singapore?”
How to Do This…
Incorporate a FAQ strategy in your blogs, social media posts and other content by focusing on the most important concerns to your consumers.
Imagine you are a gem stone dealer. So, you need to focus on the queries like “Which stone is lucky for Leo” or “When to wear sapphire”. You need to get inside the mind of your target audience.
Tools like Answer the Public are really useful to generate question phrases from your longer phrases (see the image below). Then, sort out the question phrases to build a FAQ page or create content on specific topics.
Make Your Website Mobile Optimized
This is a no brainer. After all, you are targeting smartphone users.
A mobile optimized site is one where contents are easily readable or viewable, eliminating the need of pinching or zooming the site. Besides, it should load quickly. One more reason is that Google will use mobile versions of websites as primary ranking factor.
How to Do This…
- Make it responsive for all the screens
- Work over speed.
- Use Google Mobile Friendly test tool to check if your website is mobile friendly
Bottom Line:
Voice search is the future of technology and should be a part of your business strategy. By optimizing your business present for voice search, you will have better chances to be found. Again, half Singaporeans are using voice assistant.