Smartphones put the world at our fingertips. People have questions that need answering, as well as the 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, voice search and assistants are not something that enterprise marketers can ignore because:
Almost half of U.S. internet users (48.7%) will use voice assistants, according to eMarketer forecast.
54% of consumers are leaning towards voice technology in the future.
49% of U.S. consumers use voice-enabled searches 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 take a look at specific tactics and optimizations that will support your voice strategy, including schema markup, keyword research, site speed, FAQs, Google Actions, and more.
Here’s how to begin optimizing for voice searches, with a focus on enterprises.
Voice Optimization 101
Create Content And Voice Search Guidelines
Marketing teams should sit down with the content team or send guidelines outlining the importance of voice search optimization, incorporating these keywords and protocols to ensure optimization.
Enterprises should have SEO governance in place already.
However, you’ll need to revise your 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’s up to your protocols to find issues with content by performing thorough content checks.
Analyzing content before it’s published should be part of your processes already.
If it’s not, you can add in:
Thorough content review before posting.
Optimization analysis.
Comparing content to researched keywords and questions.
Guidelines are a key part of every aspect of enterprise marketing because team members can come and go so often.
Redefine Your Keyword Research To Incorporate Long-Tail Keywords
Here’s some good news: Assistants are smarter than ever before. Today’s voice assistants can understand a person’s voice even with:
Background noise.
Diverse accents.
Dialects.
Hyper-personalization is prominent in the way assistants respond to users, which means enterprises must gather as much data and information about their ideal target market as possible.
You have to go the extra mile to understand your audience and their needs to optimize for voice.
For voice assistants, you have to push your SEO further because, instead of simple queries, people are asking complex questions to voice assistants like they would to a friend.
How?
Adding in more of the long-tail keywords that have long been neglected on the enterprise level.
Long-tail keywords often have lower search volumes and are less of a priority for enterprises that target high-value and high-traffic keywords. However, voice search is natural and longer than just one- or two-word phrases.
Your pages need to answer questions (just like featured snippets do) and should include:
How do I use XYZ product?
How much do XYZ products cost?
How do I fix XYZ problem?
Where.
Who.
What.
Etc.
People using search are asking questions, and you need 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.
Multimodal Search Optimization And The Rise Of Visual Search
Visual search isn’t exactly new. You take a picture, pop it into Google Lens, and it tries to find a match for you.
For example, that adorable dog bed that you saw at your friend’s house? You can take a photo and search for the exact item on Google.
But, at the I/O developer conference in 2024, Google added something new to Google Lens.
You shoot a video.
Ask questions in the video.
Get an answer back.
Users can take 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 (VLMs) are advancing, but enterprises will need to focus on other multimodal searches, too:
Text-to-image search.
Image-to-text search.
Image-to-image search.
Envision an enterprise for high-end luxury apparel.
A user uploads an image of a floral pattern and adds the query, [floral dress in this style but with blue roses], and a return query may show your product.
Clear visuals with the proper description optimization may help the enterprise rank for this type of multimodal visual search.
Optimize For Site Speed And Mobile Experience
Voice searches come primarily from mobile and assistant devices.
Every enterprise must optimize heavily for mobile with:
Responsive designs.
Fast site speeds.
Your team should periodically run Google PageSpeed Insights to find issues slowing down your site and to improve load time.
Multimedia optimization is crucial, especially with the rise of multimodal search. Compressing images and videos, implementing lazy loading, and browser caching are all things that you can begin doing today to improve the mobile experience on your site(s).
See 10 Enterprise Page Speed Optimizations & Implementation Tips to learn more.
Optimize For Local Search To Boost Business
Local and regional optimizations are huge for businesses that operate locally.
Over 50% of people search for local businesses via voice search.