Voice Search & Keyword Phrases - What To Use?
Voice search has been around for awhile now, and I'm getting questions about how to do keyword phrase research. That's a fair question to ask, and it's actually past time for me to address this.
Voice searches are typically done with mobile devices and digital assistants like Alexa, and are usually fully formed sentences, and many of them are questions. There are a lot of voice search phrases that include "near me," so if you monitor Google Search Console keyword queries, you may have seen phrases that include "near me." It's a pretty good bet those are spoken queries!
Some examples from a recent client:
- acls certification course near me
- technical school near me
- trade school programs near me
In order to take full advantage of these phrases, you should have your company's full address on every page of your site. Putting it in the footer or side bar of your template is a good practice, and marking up the address with schema.org helps tremendously, as does claiming and optimizing local business directory listings, like Google My Business.
Voice Search Keyword Research Tools
Doing traditional keyword research using tools like Google Trends, Wordtracker, Moz and SEMrush will help you find long tail keyword phrases that are questions. Another great tool that doesn't cost you anything is Answer The Public. You get results in a really cool visual like this one:
Here are some other examples of questions that are probably spoken into a device:
- how to do search engine optimization
- how do you do search engine optimization
- does search engine optimization work
Use these long tail phrases in your page title tags, meta description tags, alt text tags, the content and in file names. Be sure the content you create actually reflects the phrase you're using in tags for proper context.
You can go to Google Analytics to see the percentage of mobile devices, tablets and desktops that were used for web readers on your site. I'm waiting for Google to start pulling out voice assistants like Alexa, because when the search engine does that, you'll be able to really see if voice commands are being used to find your site pages.
Until next time, stay safely between the ditches!
All the best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Screenshot courtesy of author
