Voice Search is Here to Stay

Dealers, if your customers aren’t already using voice search to find information via search engines, they will be soon. According to Search Engine People, 20% of all mobile searches on Google in 2017 were made by voice and that number is only expected to rise. Do you have a smart speaker from Amazon or Google inside your house? Even if you aren’t a fan of voice assistants, they are steadily rising in popularity. What does this mean for your business? It is now crucial that your dealership website content is optimized for voice search.

While the idea of optimizing your content for voice may seem daunting, it shouldn’t be - it makes writing for SEO easier. While it’s now more important than ever to have an abundance of well-written, high-quality content on your site, that content should also be written in a natural and conversational way. The reason for this? People type a search engine query much differently than they would speak it aloud. For example, a person might type “Kawasaki Vulcans for sale near me” - but when they perform a voice search for the same purpose, they might say “Siri, find the closest motorcycle dealership that sells Kawasaki Vulcans.” As searches become more conversational in nature, it is important to remember to write content on your site that reads naturally, not robotically.  

If there is a large amount of SEO value already built into your website through articles, blog posts, or other types of content, you don’t need to worry about losing the credibility you’ve earned. According to a Backlinko study shared by HubSpot, “Content that ranks highly in desktop search is also very likely to appear as a voice search answer…75% of voice search results rank in the top three for that query.” Google and other search engines are still expected to determine rankings based on quality and relevance, whether it’s a voice search or a typed search. However, a result with a conversational tone that best matches a voice search query is now more likely to be favored by search engine algorithms, all other things being equal.  

The biggest difference to keep in mind when trying to optimize your content for voice search is that there will only be one result – the one that the search engine deems best according to the speaker’s query. While it’s still important to provide helpful and relevant content that contains targeted keywords, aiming to also write content that sounds like a person actually wrote it will help your website earn the top result spot. Implementing voice search strategy in your SEO efforts could make the difference in a search engine offering your dealership website to a prospect over your competitor.