Online search features have changed significantly over the years. There was a time when searching on Google could mean you were inadvertently committing to hours of irrelevant search results just to find the information you needed.
Fast forward to today, and voice assistants and AI-powered search have now made information discovery incredibly fast and efficient. But when it comes to SEO and search engine marketing campaigns, understanding how new ways of finding information online impact brand visibility is critical.
Below, we’ll cover essential elements surrounding voice search SEO as well as practical strategies for making your web content easier to locate by voice-enabled devices.
What Is SEO for Voice and AI?
Voice Search Optimization (VSO) is an extension of standard SEO practices that focuses specifically on improving content visibility when users leverage voice-activated search on their mobile devices or home assistant applications. Since these applications use different algorithms when sourcing and providing information to users, VSO helps business align their content strategies with newer AI-driven algorithms.
Many of these applications focus on providing direct and concise answers to their users as opposed to delivering longer, drawn-out answers. While traditional SEO focuses more on keyword relevance and optimal positioning, VSO is about creating more answer-focused content that’s easy for algorithms to pick up and provides fewer interactions before users find what they’re looking for.
How Voice Search Works
Voice search all begins with a user sending an audible request to a comparable voice-enabled search device. These devices are built with highly sophisticated language processors that convert commands into contextual search queries, which the application carries out on the user’s behalf.
A big part of what makes voice search more unique is that each user may have unique ways of asking the same question. Because of this, voice-search-enabled platforms break down inquiries to identify the actual user’s intent. This intent is used to quickly and accurately find answers likely to address a user's request, which are then read back to them by the device.
Why SEO for Voice and AI Matters
The reality is that voice-enabled search and AI-powered assistants are only growing in popularity. This means that while traditional SEO efforts may still be important, businesses need to adapt their strategies in response to these new changes.
By optimizing web strategies in response to the increased usage of voice-enabled search features, you’re ensuring that you can future-proof your marketing efforts. It also allows you to make progressive changes to your SEO strategies, making it much more likely that your content will be seen and referenced by newer AI algorithms.
Core Strategies for SEO in a Voice + AI World
In response to these new developments in search marketing, there are some core strategies you’ll want to follow to keep your content visibility in voice-enabled search:
Write Conversational, Natural-Language Content
Instead of maintaining traditional content formats designed to be highly informative or written in semi-formal tones, it’s essential to start personalizing your content. Write in ways that voice-search algorithms can easily reference, which is typically done in more conversational tones.
Use Long-Tail and Question-Based Keywords
When choosing the keywords your content is targeting, try to incorporate more question-based terms and phrases. This is a much more seamless format for AI-powered search tools to reference and helps to address a user’s search intent more clearly.
Build FAQ Sections for Quick, Structured Answers
Incorporating an FAQ section into your content is a great way to allow for more conversational language in your content. By referencing relevant answers directly next to commonly asked questions, the likelihood of AI hallucinations is reduced, and these tools can more easily source useful information.
Aim for Featured Snippets and Passage-Level Results
Featured snippets have become a key source that many AI-powered search tools use to locate and provide information to users. By formatting your content so it’s more likely to show up in these snippets and optimizing specific paragraphs and sections that could be pulled as passage-level results by generative AI, you’ll find much more success when trying to increase brand visibility.
Content That Performs Well in Voice and AI Search
Not all content may be easy to optimize for voice or AI-enabled search. However, the following content formats are generally a good place to start:
- Featured Snippets - Focusing your efforts on getting into Google’s Featured Snippets can be a great way to increase your chances of content getting seen and used in voice responses. To achieve this, try to make sure you’re giving brief, accurate answers in your content to commonly asked questions related to the topics you cover.
- Concise Q&A Formats - While not all your content may be built around Q&A formats, the more answer-based content you can create, the better. This makes translating user intent much easier for AI-driven algorithms and can increase the number of times your content is referenced in AI outputs.
- Structured Lists and “How-To” Guides - One way to keep your content easier to locate and use is to provide structured lists or how-to guides. These provide hierarchical data that AI tools can leverage to support ongoing dialogues with users who may have more than one question on a particular topic.
- Local Business Information - Many users leverage voice searches to find local products or services. If your business has a local presence, it’s important that your site clearly identifies important information such as your business hours, address, and phone number. This makes it easier for AI tools to reference local data and serve it to users more consistently.
Structured Data and Schema for AI Optimization
Understanding and implementing structured data, also known as “schema markup,” across your site is an important strategy for making your content more visible to newer AI-powered search algorithms. The good news is that there are many tools and plugins that make this process easy to do.
The purpose of using structured data is that it helps to organize each of your content pages into recognizable formats like FAQ pages, how-to guides, or local business information. This reduces the amount of search AI tools need to do when responding to user requests that clearly are looking for this type of information.
There are generative engine optimization services you can leverage that specifically focus on structuring your content to support this effort. This can be a valuable investment for ensuring you future-proof your content development strategies while minimizing reductions in your organic search traffic.
Embracing SEO for Voice and AI
There has been an increased reliance on digital tools and devices to improve both the accuracy and time efficiency associated with online searches. Understanding these dynamics and shifting your strategies to support these changes will ensure you’re able to sustain your web traffic as you modify your SEM approach.
By auditing your current web development strategies and ensuring both your GEO and SEO tactics align with modern AI tools, you’ll ensure you can future-proof your business as you scale.