Two recent trends in SEO are voice search and video. Understanding not only how to optimize for both but the logic behind doing so can help your website rank higher and stimulate your business overall.
Knowing what people are searching for and how they’re searching for it can help elevate a business and its online presence. But it can be tricky to know exactly what aspects of a website need to be optimized – or even what parts can be.
Optimizing your website to be search-engine friendly is a strategy at the core of any digital marketing agency’s work. By making a website more search engine friendly, search engine optimization (SEO) increases a website’s traffic.
Why Optimize for Voice Search?
Voice search is becoming an increasingly important aspect for search engines to adapt to. As smart speakers appear in more and more homes, ensuring your website is friendly to voice searches becomes all the more important.
The rate at which smart speakers are gaining popularity is impressive. They are predicted to be in more than half of all U.S. households by next year. In 2019, an Adobe survey found that 48% of consumers use voice assistants for general web searches. Ensuring that your website is voice-search friendly will help it rank higher and increase traffic to your site as the rate of voice search continues to grow.
Another important reason to optimize for voice search is that its result pages load in 4.6 seconds –– 52% faster than the average page. With that kind of advantage, optimizing for voice search can have a serious impact on your website and your overall SEO strategy.
How to Optimize for Voice Search
Now that you know why it’s important to optimize for voice search, it’s time we show you how you can. Three ways to optimize for voice search are to be concise, use keywords and increase your website speed.
Being concise is key to optimizing for voice search. The average answer for voice search is 29 words. It’s also important to pay attention to the words you choose. Search-friendly keywords help your content rank higher and when it comes to voice search, the higher a page ranks for a keyword, the more likely Google will select that page as the voice search result. Finally, the faster your website loads, the more traffic it’ll get when it comes to voice search.
Why Optimize for Video?
In a similar way to voice search, optimizing your website for video is becoming increasingly important. A well-created video can generate an impressive amount of links for your website, which can help attract visitors naturally and sustain that traffic long-term. Though videos can help bring greater traffic to your website, it’s important that the videos included are high quality and used intentionally.
When people click on your website, you have only a few seconds to not only attract but maintain their attention. Having a high-quality video well-positioned on the landing page can increase the amount of time viewers spend on your site and can help increase conversions to paying customers.
Where you place the video you choose to use matters, too. If it’s on the landing page, it’s important that it’s high quality because it’s the first thing viewers will see and will craft their understanding of your brand right away.
YouTube is another search engine that is critical when it comes to video. It can drive traffic completely separately from your website or other content. Depending on the search, Google often ranks YouTube videos higher than other website links, so a well-positioned YouTube video can draw impressive attention, too, which is important to consider.
How to Optimize for Video?
As far as how to work on optimizing your website for video, there are a few steps to follow as a baseline. To implement video on your website and make it search engine friendly, it’s important to follow a few basic steps.
To start, ensure your videos can be indexed –– having a valid thumbnail image for the video is one way to do so. There are also ways to implement keywords when it comes to video. A good title and description can help the video reach its target audience in the same way keywords on a website can.
YouTube is another powerful tool when it comes to video. It’s typically the best place to upload your video so that it can be found by more viewers and garner attention outside your website.
For more tips on how to optimize for video, check out Google’s best practices guide.
Understanding These Trends
When it comes to optimizing your website to be search-engine friendly, the work never stops. Just as your website is always changing as your business does, there are always changes when it comes to SEO. Even as things change, SEO never loses its importance.
A well-optimized website can elevate a business in every aspect of its work. It can help your target audience find your website –– which is the mission at the core of any website in the first place –– and once they find it, they’re more likely to become paying customers. It’s also important for your website to be well-built so that when visitors find it, they stay on it. Consider the content on the site as well as its overall speed and accessibility to truly capture the attention of visitors.
About 97 Switch
97 Switch is an award-winning Chicago digital marketing agency that specializes in marketing, web design and strategy.
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