From a local SEO perspective, Google emphasizes conversational content and highlights local businesses in relation to the user’s location. Smartphones and smart speakers are bringing increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence technology into the lives of consumers. Consequently, the way of searching for information and the techniques of referencing evolve. Smart speakers are rapidly gaining ground, including Google Home and Amazon. This means for businesses that it is imperative to optimize their SEO strategy for voice-activated searches.

What impact on Google’s results?

When entering a sentence or a question in Google, a user can use a sentence, like “restaurant Montreal”, but when he performs a voice search through Alexa or Siri, the user will probably use geolocated interrogative sentences with a more complex syntax: “Siri, where can i find a good restaurant in Montreal?”

AI solutions attempt to respond to such requests in a human  manner , and they use the web page texts to do so. The content must therefore be optimized for conversational language with clear and developed answers or specific questions, which start with: what, who, what, where, where, when and why.

Thanks to voice search, responsive websites are becoming more important than ever. Due to the mobile nature of smartphone use, a large portion of voice requests via Alexa, Siri and other artificial intelligence technologies process the search taking into account the location of the user.

As voice search becomes more popular, optimizing your Google My Business listing will become increasingly important.

How to optimize your website for voice searches?

Being different from requests entered manually on Google, voice searches require the implementation of certain practices in natural referencing. Choosing the right keywords, the mobile experience and optimizing content are among the most important steps.

We must favor conversational and geolocated content.

With voice control technology, we can see that Internet users are likely to search in the form of a question, for example “What is the best restaurant in Montreal?”, Where to find a plumber in Toronto? “,” How book a train for New York? “, etc.

It is necessary to optimize the content with interrogative sentences as well as geolocated keywords. You can also put SEO tags on these questions.

The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) pages seem to respond well to the needs of voice search: long tail keywords formulated in the form of questions to answers.

While a text search can search for general information, a voice search generally searches for specific information, such as the following information: opening hours, location address, price, customer reviews, etc. Therefore, the creation of landing pages that include this type of information are likely to improve the positioning of pages in search engines for voice searches assisted by artificial intelligence.

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