When you do a search on your phone or tablet, you probably enter one or more keywords into the search bar. But with the rise of voice-activated devices like smart speakers and digital assistants, searches are becoming more conversational and question-based, which means you need to optimize your website for voice search SEO in order to capture a larger share of this traffic.

The majority of voice searches are carried out on mobile devices, so it’s important to make sure your site is optimized for mobile. This includes ensuring that your website loads quickly, doesn’t have too many visual elements that can be easily clicked by a finger and works smoothly when viewed on a smaller screen. You should also prioritize local optimization, as a large number of voice search queries are used to look up businesses in the area. This involves optimizing for location-specific keywords, claiming and updating your Google My Business listing and ensuring that all of your other online business information is consistent and accurate across the internet.

Creating relevant content for voice searches is the most important step to take when optimizing your website for voice search. This means focusing on long-tail keywords that match the way people speak and phrase questions to their digital assistants or smartphones. For example, a person searching by voice on their iPhone might say “who’s the best local dentist near me?” while someone using Google on their laptop would type in “what is the closest dentist office?”

In addition to writing content that matches the way people use their voices, it’s important to write in a conversational style that’s easy to read. People who conduct voice searches typically speak in longer sentences than when they’re typing, so it’s a good idea to break your blog posts up into shorter paragraphs and include plenty of headings, bullet points and numbered lists. This helps readers stay engaged and makes it easier for them to digest the information they’re reading.

It’s also a good idea to incorporate schema markup into your website’s content. This is a form of micro-data that search engines use to better understand your content and how it should be ranked. Adding this code to your content doesn’t have an immediate impact on search engine rankings, but it can help you improve your chances of being featured as a Google Featured Snippet in voice search results.

Finally, it’s critical to remember that voice searches are conducted on multiple platforms, from Google Assistant and Siri to Amazon Alexa and the other digital assistants available to consumers. This means that your voice search optimization strategy should encompass all of these platforms to maximize the reach of your content. You’ll want to target each of these platforms for their specific audiences and ensure that your content is appropriate for the voice search algorithms they use. To do this, you’ll need to research each platform’s search algorithm and understand the kinds of queries that they are displaying in their results.