This is a guest post by Bernard. If you’d like to contribute to our blog, feel free to get in touch with us.
I think you can agree with me: it’s really hard to make your ecommerce site stand out in Google’s search results page.
There are so many aspects to good SEO, but you’re also busy trying to improve all the other parts of your ecommerce business.
It seems almost impossible that you can break through and get great rankings for your ecommerce site.
But what if it wasn’t so difficult?
What if you could optimize your site for search little competition and great results?
Well, you can, with voice search.
These are the devices like mobile phones, digital virtual assistants such as Amazon Echo, Alexa, Google Home, Siri, Cortana, or others like the Roku.
Today I’m going to show you how you can optimize your ecommerce site for voice search—and not only stand above the competition, but also get much better sales.
Voice search is great since it allows people to do hands-free searches (such as when they’re driving, or just for fun). It’s also much more efficient for users to speak than to type.
Even better, while voice search made up 20% of Google’s total searches, it’s set to make up 50% of all searches by 2020.
#1 Make your site faster
Visitors nowadays have very little patience for slow-loading sites. Anything that takes longer than 7 seconds means you’ve just lost another site visitor.
They’re even less patient on mobile. This is especially true since the programs they’re using (like OK Google) has to come up with a good answer to their question within a second or two.
If you have slow-loading pages, the voice search app won’t be able to get all your information in time. That means you’ll get passed up and ignored.
You need to make sure your site is loading within 3 seconds, though optimally under 2 seconds.
#2 Prepare for voice search queries
People search very differently when they type and when they speak. For example, if you’re typing a search query into Google search, you’ll probably type in “Black Friday deals Seattle” or something similar.
However, when doing a voice search, people tend to speak in fuller phrases and sentences. So it would look something like:
“Siri, what are the best Black Friday deals in Seattle?”
or
“OK Google, how do I find the best Black Friday deals in Seattle?”
For that reason, when you’re optimizing for voice searches, you need to make a list of long-tail keywords and questions (sentences and phrases) that are related to your business.
Then, make sure your content is optimized for that.
So, for example, instead of going for keywords like “children’s shoes” you should use long-tail keywords such as “brands with the highest quality children’s shoes.”
You can also optimize for questions, such as, “What are the highest quality children’s shoes?”
#3 Make your mobile experience better
Let’s say you’ve taken care of #1 and #2 from above, and your content is optimized for voice queries and your site speed is good.
But how does your actual site look when a visitor comes to your site? Remember, SEO (including voice search) isn’t about just getting visitors to your site.
It’s also about keeping visitors engaged. If visitors have a terrible mobile experience and have a high bounce rate with a low average time on page, then your rankings will drop in the search results pages.
That’s why you’ll need to make sure that your mobile experience is great for all users. This is especially true if you are (and you should be) preparing for the high ecommerce holiday shopping season.
#4 Use schema markups
Schema markups can help search engines like Google quickly find out the keywords and crucial information about your content.
You can often see this with all types of content, including recipes:
Above you can see not just the eye-catching image, but also the rating, votes, and other important details like cooking time and calories.
With ecommerce, you can use rich snippets in the same way. Here’s what we see when typing in “apple ipad with retina display”:
Only one result really stands out, and that’s one that is using schema markups, which are known as rich snippets.
In this example, we see the average rating and the number of reviews.
When search engines like Google can easily pull the information from your content, they can easily pass this along to searches to make your site stand out above your competition.
Wrapping Up
With these 4 tips, you’ll be much more able to stand out from your competition in multiple ways. After all, although voice search is soon set to make up 50% of all searches, not many of your competitors are focusing on it.
That gives you the perfect opportunity to boost your rankings, increase your visitors and boost your ecommerce sales.
Good luck!
About the Author
Bernard is a content marketer for Omnisend, the ecommerce marketing automation platform dedicated to helping ecommerce stores build strong, lasting relationships with their customers. He also has a passion for good research and helping ecommerce businesses with their multichannel marketing needs.
