A Guide For Enterprise Marketers

Smartphones put the world at our fingertips. People have questions they need answered, as well as services or products they need.

All of these things are just a search away, and now we’ve seen a cosmic shift from traditional search to voice search and voice assistants.

Statistically speaking, voice search and assistants are not something enterprise marketers can ignore because:

• Almost half of internet users in the US (48.7%) will use voice assistants, eMarketer predicts.
• 54% consumers are leaning towards voice technology in the future.
• 49% of US consumers use voice search for local services.

Voice optimization at scale is what every business should be doing. For enterprises, the challenge is scale due to the wealth of content assets they control.

In this guide, we’ll look at specific tactics and optimizations to support your voice strategy, including schema tagging, keyword research, site speed, FAQs, Google Actions, and more.

Here’s how to get started optimizing for voice searches, with a focus on businesses.

Voice optimization 101

Create guidelines for content and voice search

Marketing teams should sit down with the content team or send guidelines outlining the importance of voice search optimization, including these keywords and protocols to ensure optimization.

Businesses should have SEO management already in place.

However, you will need to review existing governance and protocols for voice search. In fact, you want to add entire sections that focus primarily on voice.

Why?

Content creators and teams are bound to make mistakes.

It is up to your protocols to find content issues by performing thorough content checks.

Pre-publishing content analysis should already be part of your processes.

If not, you can add:

• Thorough review of content before publication.
• Optimization analysis.
• Comparing content with researched keywords and questions.

Guidelines are a key part of any aspect of business marketing because team members can come and go so often.

Redefine your keyword research to include long tail keywords

Here’s the good news: Assistants are smarter than ever before. Today’s voice assistants can understand a person’s voice even with:

• Background noise.
• Various accents.
• dialects.

Hyper-personalization is prominent in the way assistants respond to users, which means businesses need to gather as much data and information as possible about their ideal target market.

You need to do your best to understand your audience and their voice optimization needs.

When it comes to voice assistants, you need to push your SEO even further because, instead of simple queries, people are asking complex questions to voice assistants like they would ask a friend.

How?

Adding more than long tail keywords which have long been neglected at the enterprise level.

Long-tail keywords often have lower search volume and are less of a priority for businesses targeting high-value, high-traffic keywords. However, voice search is natural and longer than just one or two word phrases.

Your pages must answer questions (just like highlights do) and should include:

• How do I use XYZ product?
• How much do XYZ products cost?
• How do I solve problem XYZ?
• Where.
• WHO.
• What.
• etc.

People using search ask questions, and you have to answer them. Redefine your keyword research process to include more long tail keywords and question keywords.

Create processes and procedures for SEO teams – internal and external – to incorporate questions into your current content creation process.

Optimizing multimodal search and the rise of visual search

Visual search it’s not really new. Take a picture, put it in Google Lens, and it tries to find the right picture for you.

For example, that adorable dog bed you saw at your friend’s house? You can take a photo and search for the exact item on Google.

But at the 2024 I/O developer conference, Google added something new to Google Lens.

• You’re making a video.
• Ask questions in the video.
• Get an answer back.

Users can record a video of their broken toilet and ask why the flange is stuck and what they need to fix it – all in video format. Google will now analyze the video and respond to you.

Vision language models (VLM) are advancing, but companies will need to focus on other multimodal searches as well:

• Text to image search.
• Image to text search.
• Search from image to image.

Imagine a high-end luxury clothing company.

The user uploads a picture of a floral pattern and adds a query, [floral dress in this style but with blue roses]and the return query can display your product.

Clear visuals with proper description optimization can help a business rank for this type of multimodal visual search.

Optimize for site speed and mobile experience

Voice searches primarily come from mobile and assistant-enabled devices.

Every business must thoroughly optimize for mobile with:

• Responsive designs.
• Fast page speeds.

Your team should run occasionally Google PageSpeed ​​​​Insights to find issues that are slowing down your site and improve load times.

Multimedia optimization is key, especially with the rise of multimodal search. Compressing images and videos, implementing delayed loading, and browser caching are all things you can start doing today to improve the mobile experience on your sites.

See 10 Enterprise Page Speed ​​Optimization and Implementation Tips learn more.

Optimize for local search to drive business

Local and regional optimizations are huge for businesses operating locally.

Over 50% people search for local businesses through voice search.

For example:

• Where is the nearest subway near me?
• What grocery stores are open nearby?
• Where is the nearest pharmacy?

You’ll want to review Google and other local business listings.

Lists should always contain business hours, short ads and photos.

Complete listings make it easy for searchers to reach out to your business or visit it in person.

Terms can include the phrases “near me” or can be specific, such as [car manufacturers in Detroit].

One of the key tips for business success when optimizing for local is to consider regional or regional slang.

Your research teams should understand the local slang and dialects that can be used in the search.

For example, [where can I get the best soda in Boston] will change to [where can I get the best pop in Ohio] because of regional slang.

Internal teams should help you create these differences before moving into new markets to help content creation and search engine optimization teams maximize the potential of local voice search.

In the last few years, the number of voice assistants has almost doubled. From your iPhone and Android to Alexa and other platforms, assistants are everywhere.

Personal settings as well as your location are taken into account in all three types of searches:

1. Discovery: Find a plumber in Atlanta, Georgia.
2. Directly: Call Bill’s 24/7 Plumbing and Septic Department.
3. Knowledge: Why is my water turning brown in Atlanta?

Conversational phrasing must be considered in all corporate offices to capture as much local search traffic as possible.

Businesses need to do more for voice searches than just search and optimize their listings on Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Yelp and other local directories.

You need to focus on long tail keywords, improve your keyword research even more and try to add context to your content.

Main schema markup to add content context

Exploitation scheme it is crucial to help search engines understand the content of a company’s website. Review and incorporate schema markup guidelines to improve voice search.

A few tips to help you master the scheme are:

• Start using Google Pronounceable scheme (beta) for the parts of your text that are best for Google Assistant and voice search.
• Use analytics to understand keywords and phrases that users use.
• Find voice clips in new and old content to add schema.
• Think about your content ua conversational way to improve context.

Schema markup, when used properly, can help add context to the content on each page and enable greater voice search potential.

Speakable Schema gives you fine-tuned control over how voice assistants highlight your content. For example:

{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "WebPage",
"name": "Ludwig’s homepage",
"Speakable":
{
"@type": "SpeakableSpecification",
"cssSelector": ["intro", "summary"]
},
"url": "http://www.example.com"
}

Using JSON, you can add spoken structured data to make your introduction and summary more verbose. You can customize this for any cssSelector you want.

Businesses also find greater success with voice when they add structured data to:

• Product information.
• Prices.
• Availability.

As a business, a 1% to 2% increase in search traffic can add significant revenue to your bottom line. Schema.org has examples how to use schema for e-commerce using microdata, RFDa, structure and JSON-LD.

Add FAQ sections to key pages

Remember how to add questions to your keyword research?

It can be challenging to find ways to add questions to pages without interrupting the natural flow of your content.

How can you overcome this? Frequently asked questions.

FAQs can add tremendous value to your pages and help you start improving your voice search optimization.

One way to start incorporating this is to:

• Perform a full content revision on the page(s).
• Identify sites and blogs where you can answer questions.
• Start adding FAQs to the most important and high-potential pages.

Since you’re optimizing for voice search, answering questions in a conversational tone is key.

Start the transition to conversational language

Content creators have been hearing about tone and consistency for decades.

“Speak the customer’s language” is often repeated in different industries.

However, when it comes to voice search, there is a shift towards conversational tone.

As it turns out, a stuffy “business tone” isn’t how most people use their Google Assistant or Amazon Echo.

You will have to ensure content teams are involved with these changes.

A quick meeting to tone down the conversation and maybe update the summaries sent to the writers can help drastically.

A great way to make your content conversational is to have:

• Editors review all content.
• Read the content out loud.

Small changes, and if you can add spoken words and slang, can make a world of difference when trying to create more conversational content.

While there will always be traditional typed searches, businesses and marketers should focus on the opportunities offered by voice search.

More resources:

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