How can my website profit from voice search?
By 2020, 30% of all website sessions will be conducted without a screen. This includes questions asked to Google Assistant, Cortana, Siri, and Alexa. Even direct Google searches are more and more often being made with a voice search. Just click the microphone icon in the search box and speak into your computer or device.
Read More.Voice search can mean long tailed searches
People who search with voice tend to use "long tailed" searches. For example, a keyboard search might be "bamboo floors". With a voice search, users tend to forget that they are speaking to a computer and will give much more detail of their intent. For example. "How much does bamboo flooring cost?" Because of this, websites with more informational content get more Google hits.
For this query about bamboo flooring cost, homeadvisor.com has optimized for SEO and provided a web page with a related title and detailed information about bamboo flooring costs. In fact, homeadvisor.com actually has succeeded in getting a "featured snippet" from Google, which is a boxed area just below the paid ads that gives a summary of the answer to the search.
Google featured snippet
If you want to aim for a Google featured snippet for your website, include headlines that promise an answer to a specific question. For example, headlines that start with "how to", can be picked up as featured snippets.
Long tailed searches provide opportunities for smaller websites to rank higher, particularly for niche queries. For example: "What are the best edible plants to grow indoors." This query returns a number of search results from smaller websites, with the top site in the list having a headline of "The 16 best, healthy, edible plants to grow indoors." This is a good headline because it clearly explains to Google that it promises to answer my question. Because Google is quite good at understanding natural language, it doesn't need to have the exact search phrase in the web page headline although many websites provide their headline in the form of the question they expect to be asked.. Siri, Cortana, and Alexa also have good natural language ability.
Most sites also need a Google Place
Finally, for small websites, be sure to establish a Google Place. I tried the query :"Find a restaurant with a Sunday buffet." The Google Places appear at the top of the search results. The second result in the Google Places list tells me that this restaurant's website mentions "Sunday brunch buffet." This means that you don't have to stuff all your content into your Google Place because Google Place will link to your website to find the best search result
