We’ve talked about voice search before. We told you not to focus your SEO strategy on voice search in 2017, and again in 2020. Fast forward to 2024, a lot has changed. The emergence of generative AI has blasted into the mainstream, people and businesses alike taking notice, with over half (52%) of Americans using GenAI. Apple announced their Apple Intelligence with the promise of features like article summarization and added privacy with web erasers. Should you completely pivot your SEO strategy in 2024 to prepare? Not necessarily, but I will highlight for you 3 voice search tactics to get ahead of as we look ahead to 2025.
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Collect User Generated Content
How many times have you said, “Hey Alexa” or “Hey Siri”, only to get a response of “Sorry, I can’t understand your request”, leading to your frustration and abandonment of the tool altogether. The technology historically led to poor user experience and low adoption rates.
Voice assistant users are expected to grow in 2025, in large part due to improvements in natural language processing. Complex and nuanced language can now be interpreted and responded to in a more human-like manner.
This means brands have a big opportunity to start collecting user-generated content now, such as product reviews and social media mentions, to gain insights into how customers are talking about your products and services. This data is invaluable for understanding customer sentiment and preferences, allowing brands to improve content relevance.
[TIP] Incorporate user-generated content into your strategy by addressing questions your customers have directly on your website to better align with how they’re talking about your products and services.
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Make your Content More Accessible
We’re just at the tip of the iceberg with large language models (LLMs) and what they are capable of. No matter how the technology continues evolving, ensuring your content is as accessible as possible can help your brand be referenced in voice search responses:
- Use structured data to markup your content, improving the visibility and retrieval of it
- Provide descriptive alt text for images to help LLMs understand visual content
- Convert PDFs to HTML, making this content more accessible to LLMs and your customers
- Structure content using bullet points and numbered lists for easy summarization of points
- Improve load time and core web vitals so LLMs have an easier time parsing the content
The harder it is for an LLM to access your content, the less likely you are to be referenced in voice search responses.
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Optimize your Question & Answer Content
Generative AI presents the ability for someone to search via voice, text and images in one experience. Unlike traditional search, you can combine all of these data inputs to provide a more comprehensive and contextually relevant set of search results.
AI Overviews in Google are one of these new search experiences. These experiences help to answer more complex questions, and that will include lengthy voice search questions.
[TIP] AI Overviews present the opportunity for your question and answer content to appear for your customer’s most complex questions.
Take the query, “Why am I coughing so much but I don’t feel sick?”. The sites that are appearing in the AI overview have detailed question and answer content that is structured and organized in a way to easily appear in the AI Overviews.
That user-generated content from earlier comes in handy here. The better understanding of your customer’s questions you have, the better chance your brand has to appear in AIOs.
Is Voice Search Finally Here?
With the emergence of GenAI, voice search is more viable than before and we’ll likely continue seeing voice search adoption grow. These 3 opportunities will set up brands for growth in voice search in 2025.
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