Voice Search: Optimizing Your WordPress Site for Voice Assistants

Quick Overview:
With the exponential growth of voice search in recent years, enterprises have considered it necessary to optimize voice search SEO. Improving voice search optimization for WordPress sites, especially to optimize your WordPress site for Voice Search, aims to accelerate conversions, improve user trust and loyalty, and increase mobile traffic. Enhancing a WordPress website’s voice search SEO requires a complete focus on the content and speed. You need to publish to-the-point and authentic content on your website, which must get loaded within three to four seconds. Further, in this blog, you will discover the methods of voice search optimization and its benefits.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Optimize Your WordPress Site for Voice Search

The statista.com data clearly indicates the rapid growth of the voice recognition market. It also says that it’s high time that every business should perform voice search optimization for WordPress websites to take the lead.

As voice search SEO is a new-age requirement, many firms still need help to improve it. But, no need to fret now, as in this blog, all essential information is gathered and curated in a structured manner.

So, let’s look at it, starting from the fundamentals.

Voice Search: A Brief Overview

Before diving into voice search SEO, you must understand what voice search means and how it works.

The most significant examples of voice search are “Hey, Siri” and “OK, Google.“

When you activate virtual assistants on your mobile and ask them to search for a song, video, blog, tutorial, or anything else, it comes under voice search. The virtual assistant takes your query in voice format and provides the output in a similar format by searching the internet.

Additionally, in the background, such virtual assistants use search engines like Google, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo to find the answer to your queries. Therefore, in voice search, you say things to search engines instead of typing them.

What is Voice Search Engine Optimization?

Voice search engine optimization refers to the practice of enhancing a website so that it gets displayed in SERPs when someone enters a voice query.

For instance, if you sell a t-shirt under INR 500 through your eCommerce store. And you want your website to get listed in SERPs when someone voice searches for the same. Then, you need to optimize your WordPress site as per voice search SEO standards. As a result, when a user asks a virtual assistant or utilizes Google voice search to query about t-shirts within INR 500, then your online store would be provided as voice output.

In simple terms, you need to implement SEO techniques, tactics, and practices so that search engines list your site when someone uses a voice search.

The Benefits of Voice Search Optimization

Voice search optimization works as a fundamental pillar in improving WordPress website indexing, and it also provides the following advantages:

• Builds User Trust
• Enhances SERP Ranking
• Helps in Reaching Out to a Wider Global Audience
• Boost Mobile Traffic
• Enhances Brand Visibility

Builds User Trust

When users perform a voice search through a device or virtual assistant, such as Siri or Alexa, they tend to trust the output. If you have ever listened to the voice output, it mostly starts with the phrase, “according to [website name].”

When people hear the website name, they start to trust that source. From now on, people will look for that particular website for answers to their queries. That’s how user trust builds along with retention and conversion rates.

Enhances SERP Ranking

Every company wants to rank on the first SERP or Search Engine Result Page. The techniques, such as reliable and short content, are the fundamental pillars of voice search optimization. When you start publishing authentic and plagiarism-free content, search engines rank it above all. And when you use voice search, it’s evident that the first website will get preferred.

Therefore, implementing voice search SEO helps you improve the content, leading to website ranking across search engines.

Helps in Reaching Out to a Wider Global Audience

Optimizing for voice search is one of the best ways to reach a broader audience. Once virtual assistants and voice search engines rank your site, more people will become aware of your brand.

Numerous studies show that very few people refresh results or navigate to other sites from those listed as voice search results. Thus, more people start to open your WordPress website and read your content, resulting in a broader user base.

Boost Mobile Traffic

According to a Google survey, 27% of people use mobile phones for voice searches. So, if you perform voice search optimization for a WordPress website, you can increase traffic from mobile devices. The 27% of people will navigate to your website and can even convert into potential customers.

In addition, the traffic boost will help you improve the website ranking and take an edge over competitors. However, ensure that your WordPress site is highly responsive for relevant mobile traffic and easily adapts to the screen size.

Enhances Brand Visibility

As you now know, people trust more on voice search results than traditional SERPs. In addition, sometimes, people you don’t target trust your content and become your potential users. Due to all this, the brand starts getting recognized, resulting in higher footfall on the site and acceleration of brand awareness.

Moreover, voice search SEO aids in building loyalty among the target audience, supporting increased productivity and revenue.

The Mechanisms To Execute Voice Search Optimization for WordPress Sites

You should consider the following mechanisms, techniques, and tactics to improve voice search optimization for WordPress websites.

Create Content Focused on User Intent

As you know, content is considered king in SEO, and authentic and user-focused content helps improve all-rounder metrics. To improve voice search SEO, you should focus on user intent while curating the content. You can effortlessly create content that reaches the target audience by putting effort into the following four aspects.

The four aspects include:

• Navigational: Improve your content to answer directly navigating queries, such as “open Positiwise.com blogs.“
• Informational: Information queries are in question format, such as “How to create a custom Gutenberg block on WordPress?“.
• Commercial: These queries are with intent to buy something, such as “Where can I find the cheapest SSL certificate?”.
• Transactional: Transactional queries are in a direct execution format, such as “schedule consultation” or “order pizza from Domino.”

Improve WordPress Website Speed

Voice search engines only have a limited time to look into each website and find the answers. It’s obvious that if your WordPress website is before others, voice assistants will prefer it. Thus, you should enhance the speed of your WordPress site through the following methods:

• Deploy your WordPress site on a content delivery network (CDN).
• Use server-side and client-side cache plugins.
• Compress the images and website files.
• Use a lightweight theme.
• Remove unwanted plugins, APIs, and third-party system integrations.
• Update PHP and WordPress versions.
• Follow HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP coding standards during development.
• Constantly monitor the site and improve performance.
• Utilize an SSL certificate.

Prefer Using Structuring Your Data

To optimize voice search for your WordPress website, you should structure your data on all web pages. As per Google’s algorithm, the search engine undergoes every piece of content to determine the type of content and your target audience. In addition, it also verifies whether the information is unique and whether it fulfills the requirements of the end-user or not.

Therefore, you should always use schema markup on your website. And the most reliable ways of structuring data are publishing FAQs, writing relevant headings, and more. Furthermore, you can install the Yoast SEO plugin on your site, as it provides built-in features to structure content and improve voice search SEO.

Use Long-Tail Keywords

The queries in voice search are more protracted and to the point than written search engine inputs. Incorporating long-tail keywords makes your content relevant to virtual assistants. Thus, the chances of your content getting provided as output get higher, resulting in brand awareness and an increase in traffic.

So, you should always try to use long-tail keywords in the content, such as blogs, articles, and H2 headings, to optimize SEO.

For instance, if you use the keyword “best pizza,” the chances are lower that the voice search engine will select your website. However, if you use a long-tail keyword, like “best pepperoni pizza with mozzarella cheese,” the chances would be much higher. 

Keep Content Short and To-The-Point

While searching for the answer to user queries, voice search looks for to-the-point and short answers.

For instance, if you are writing a recipe in 1500 words and in paragraph format. Also, if the same recipe is available in 750 words and in bullet points, then the virtual assistant will prefer one with 750 words. The primary reason for choosing the second source was bullet points, which are considered to-the-point answers.

Therefore, you should always provide concise answers instead of focusing on word counts and stuffing the content with inappropriate information. Additionally, you can use end-user queries as H2 headings to improve the SEO.

Consult With Voice Search SEO Expert

Consulting with an expert always helps, as they know the answer to what, why, how, and when of voice search SEO. You can also consider discussing requirements with a firm offering WordPress development services and digital marketing. It would help you improve the overall structure and enhance website speed.

You should also hire a WordPress developer and SEO experts to build a standardized WordPress website. As a result, additional costs and time will be saved in the extended run.

Concluding Up on Optimize Your WordPress Site for Voice Search

Optimizing WordPress websites is necessary with the 3x to 4x growth of voice search and usage of virtual assistants. With the help of voice search optimization for WordPress websites, you can improve the site ranking, increase traffic, and impeccably reach out to a global audience.

To Optimize Your WordPress Site for Voice Search, enhancing voice search SEO requires time and focusing on publishing concise content. In addition, you should work on enhancing the site speed, as virtual assistants have a minimal time of 4 to 6 seconds to search for the answer. Furthermore, you must consult with a WordPress development company to know the exact voice search SEO mechanism to implement.