If you’re having trouble adapting to the voice-search revolution, or you’re looking to overhaul your web content in 2020, give me a shout! I’d love to help you ensure your website is more welcoming and effective for
your customers.
Write your content with effort and realistic tone and your search rates will improve; you can’t fool the system anymore. The only way to reach the top of the page now is to have great content (including product descriptions and blog posts) that sounds like a human wrote it.
What you need is intuitive, effective, engaging, natural-sounding copy. I think of it like this: the Google engine isn’t a robot anymore, so we don’t need to talk to it like one either. It’s more like Artificial Intelligence than ever before, learning from natural speech and taking notice of content that seems to actually take customer needs and wants to heart.
As Google evolves to deflect even more abuses of its ranking system and more and more people use voice search to get to the content they want, it’s become less important to write with technical keyword research at
the heart of your content.
It sounds odd for me to be asking you to worry less about keywords, but that’s exactly what I’m doing.
Write Naturally, Worry Less About Keywords
To help your products reach your customers this way, you need to incorporate more natural-sounding long-tail keywords within your metadata and copy.
In this example, you might have the words ‘[XYZ product] is the most eco-friendly kitchen spray available in the UK’ within the product’s description, which the voice search technology will easily be able to pick up.
It’s the second one. It will always be the second one.
b)
“Alexa, what’s the most eco-friendly kitchen spray?”
a)
“Alexa, best eco detergent spray UK”
What is a customer more likely to say to their Alexa speaker?
Long-tail search terms are longer, more specific forms of keywords you may have already been using. When SEO keywords are used effectively, long-tail search terms naturally follow within the content.
However, with voice search, it’s rare that a user will start with the SEO-friendly terms.
Think Carefully about Long-Tail Search Terms
With the popularity of voice search soaring, it’s perhaps time to step back slightly from short-form SEO keyword-driven content and to look at the bigger picture. Here are my tips on how to optimise your web
content for voice search.
When you first wrote your web content, it’s probably fair to assume that one of the main priorities at hand was the inclusion of SEO keywords.
SEO has been one of the most important aspects of copywriting for the past decade or more, and has dictated what the vast majority of us write about, promote and even sell on our websites.
How to Optimise Your Content for Voice Search
It’s estimated that 50% of all searches made in 2020 will be via voice. On top of that, 30% of all web browsing will be done without a screen.
Many of these searches result in purchases. That’s mind-blowing, isn’t it? But what does it mean for your website?
Voice-activated search and speakers are fast-becoming the UK’s favourite way of finding information out and searching for audio and visual content. Bear that in mind when you’re writing your next blog post.
Until next time…