
Every day, millions of consumers turn to Google, Alexa, and Siri for answers and recommendations.
But getting your content in front of these searchers isn’t a given. You’ll need to tweak your keyword research, on-page SEO, and technical SEO strategies to account for the complexities of voice search.
In this article, I’ll show you how to do just that. You’ll learn what makes voice search optimization different, how you stand to benefit from it, and my six tips for climbing to the top of the voice search results.
Key Takeaways
- Voice search optimization is a subset of SEO; it’s optimizing your site to appear in more voice search results.
- To understand the prevalence of voice search, we surveyed 1000 American voice searchers aged 18–65. Almost one-third (31.5 percent) of them used voice search daily or multiple times per day.
- Optimizing for voice search helps your site win more traffic, improves broader SEO efforts (like local SEO), and boosts your site’s overall user experience.
- Optimize for voice search SEO using these six strategies:
- Research voice-search-specific keywords. These are usually long-tail keywords, more conversational, and take the form of questions.
- Audit your existing content for voice search before creating new content. Look for opportunities to make your content more conversational, readable, and optimized for voice-specific keywords.
- Optimize your content by adding more pronouns, avoiding complex language and jargon, and answering as many questions as possible.
- Improve your technical SEO by adding schema markup and making your site more mobile-friendly.
- Implement local SEO strategies, like optimizing for Google Business and Bing Places for Business.
- Monitor your results using Ubersuggest’s keyword-tracking feature.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What is Voice Search Optimization?
- Benefits of Voice Search for SEO
- 6 Tips for Voice Search Optimization
- FAQs
- Conclusion
What is Voice Search Optimization?
Voice search SEO is a subset of a more comprehensive search engine optimization strategy. It’s a combination of strategies that help your site rank in voice search results.
It’s important to do SEO for voice search because content-based SEO strategies don’t always translate well to spoken queries. The way we use voice assistants like Siri is fundamentally different from typing questions into Google.
For example, if you’re looking for a local restaurant, your searches might look like this:
- Typed: “Restaurants near me”
- Voice: “What are some good restaurants in my local area?”
As you can see in the example above, you need to optimize your site for different keywords.
You’ll also need to improve technical aspects of your site, like its speed and mobile-friendliness, to account for the devices people use in voice search. That includes smartphones (used by 90.5 percent of respondents), smart assistants like Alexa (used by over 50 percent of respondents), and TVs and TV remotes (used by 36.80 percent of respondents).

How Voice Search Has Evolved
Voice search has changed a lot since its inception thanks to advancements in technology and AI, says Nikki Brandemarte, Sr. SEO Strategist at NP Digital.
It’s become more conversational than keyword-focused, and Google now better understands the context inherent in long-tail queries.
“To keep up with these advancements, SEO and content strategy has become less about matching specific keywords and more about providing relevant, conversational answers that fulfill the searcher’s need,” she says.
“It’s no longer about optimizing to hit a certain keyword density, but ensuring that you are providing the most helpful, direct response to a given question in a way that sounds natural & mirrors how users speak.”

Voice optimization may continue to evolve as new gadgets and technologies appear. In our survey, for example, household appliances were the most popular item that frequent voice search users wanted to try next year.
Benefits of Voice Search for SEO
There are many reasons to incorporate voice search optimization into your broader SEO strategy.
Get more traffic
In a world of smartphones and smartwatches, voice search is commonplace. So much so that 65.4 percent of people in our survey use it regularly (a few times per week) or very often (multiple times per day) — that’s a massive audience your brand can capture by optimizing for voice search.
That traffic potential will only increase, with the number of voice assistant users in the U.S. set to grow from 142 million in 2022 to over 157 million in 2026.
Boost other SEO efforts
Optimizing for voice search can improve your broader SEO initiatives, thanks to Google’s increased emphasis on search intent and semantic meaning vs. keywords.
For example, adding long-tail keywords and answering questions increases your site’s topical authority and gives Google much more context to understand your site’s content.
When you write about topics rather than keywords and provide direct answers to common questions, you also increase your site’s chances of appearing in Google’s featured snippets and AI Overviews. It can even improve your local SEO efforts, too.
Optimize the user experience
Voice search optimization necessitates you improve the technical elements of your site, which can significantly improve the overall user experience. This includes making your site more mobile-friendly, increasing load times, and adding structured data like schema.
6 Tips for Voice Search Optimization
With voice assistants listing only a handful of answers, voice search is much more competitive than traditional search. Use these tips to increase your likelihood of coming out on top.
Research Keywords for Voice Search
Optimizing for voice search means targeting specific keywords people will likely use when speaking to a voice assistant.
Voice search keywords tend to have one or more of the following characteristics. They are:
- Long-tail phrases (meaning they’re longer than three words)
- Conversational (Where’s the nearest coffee shop vs. coffee shops near me)
- Questions
Find voice search and SEO queries using a tool like Ubersuggest that automatically filters question-based queries to make your life easier.

You can click “View All” under Questions in the Keyword Ideas section of Ubersuggest’s keyword research report.
You’ll get a report like the one below, which lets you filter and sort results based on metrics like search volume and keyword difficulty.

AnswerThePublic is another handy tool that only serves up question-based search terms.

Enter a seed keyword (SEO in the example above), and you’ll receive a list of results broken down by question words.
Audit Content
It’s often not necessary to create new content when optimizing for voice search — at least not at first.
Run a content audit to uncover dozens of opportunities to optimize your site’s existing content using the keyword research you’ve just compiled.
While you can use a site audit tool like Ubersuggest to identify SEO issues like broken links and missing meta descriptions, a voice search content audit requires you to comb through your site page by page.
Start with your most highly trafficked pages, and look for the following:
- Opportunities to incorporate long-tail keywords into headings and body copy
- Ways to make your tone more conversational
- Opportunities to add and answer more questions
- Pages with an advanced reading level (copy and paste your content into a tool like Hemingway)
- Ways to improve your page’s semantic SEO score. A tool like Clearscope and Frase will highlight topics or phrases that should appear in your content.

Here’s what a report from Hemingway looks like. It gives your content a readability score (aim for Grade 9 or lower) and highlights long sentences and grammatical errors.
Optimize Content
The days of stuffing your content with keywords simply to please crawlers are long gone. To be successful with SEO, you’ve got to be authentic, use language naturally, and offer valuable content.
Essentially, you must be human (we all are, so this shouldn’t be a problem). Writing conversationally is the best way to do this.
You can write conversationally in the following ways:
- Use plenty of pronouns (I, we, you, us, they)
- Use natural language (that means no complex words or business jargon)
- Add an FAQ section to answer question-based keywords
Don’t go overboard and write in such a basic way that your content offers little value. But do adjust your language and style to make your content as accessible and approachable as possible.
Once you’ve nailed your tone, add more voice search-specific keywords to your content by answering as many questions as possible.
You can do this naturally using question-based subheadings and answering the question in the first line. This makes it easier for search engines to find your answers and makes it more likely they will use them in featured snippets and AI Overviews.
This is a tactic I use regularly:

You can also add a “frequently asked questions (FAQs)” element at the end of your content to answer several questions one after the other.
Again, I use this tactic in almost all of my articles:

Remember Technical SEO
Technical SEO can improve the speed, structure, and usability of your site, making it easier for search bots to crawl and increasing your chances of ranking highly in all SERPs — but especially voice search results.
Start by running a technical SEO audit to identify any fundamental issues with your site like crawl errors and duplicate content issues. Then focus on the following voice-search-specific technical optimizations:
- Schema markup
- Mobile optimization
- Page load speed
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is code you add to your site’s HTML that highlights key information about your business and content.
Common markups include:
- Addresses
- Opening hours
- Reviews
- Pricing
- Contact information
Here’s an example of what schema markup looks like in a page’s source code:

And here’s what it can look like in Google when the search engine pulls in FAQs:

Plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math make it easy to add schema markup to your site, and you can read my guide to using schema markup to get started.
Having a mobile-friendly website is important, given that 90.4 percent of our survey respondents said they voice search using a smartphone.
Make sure you:
- Have a mobile responsive design or theme
- Compress images and JavaScript
- Remove intrusive elements like popups
You should also pay particular attention to your site speed. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check your site’s performance and get a personalized list of improvements.

You don’t have to make every single improvement — I don’t, and I still have a blazingly fast site. But you should complete as many as possible to get your Speed Index below two seconds.
Implement Local SEO
A lot of people use voice search to find answers to local queries. Getting directions or traffic information was the second most common task in our survey, for example, used by over 50 percent of respondents.

Voice assistants know this and use local directories like Google Business Profile and Yelp to provide answers to common queries. That makes optimizing these profiles essential.
Start with your Google Business Profile. Create a listing (or claim one) if you haven’t already, and then fill out your profile in full.
Follow my Google Business guide to complete your profile in full, making sure you:
- Add key business information like your name, address, phone number, and opening hours
- Verify your business
- Optimize your profile by adding photos, services, and a description
- Get as many reviews as possible
Here’s what a completed Google Business profile looks like:

Next, do the same for other directories like Bing Places for Business and Yelp.
Then, build citations to increase your local visibility. A citation is any mention of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP). It’s a bit like a backlink: the more citations you have, the higher you should rank in local results. You can find citations on a variety of different apps, platforms, and directories online.
Here’s an example of a local citation for Bronx Pizza on Foursquare:

Finally, you’ll also want to optimize your website for local keywords if they’re relevant to your brand.
Use Ubersuggest to get local keyword ideas and make sure you’re answering the questions local people have:
- Phrases people use to describe the neighborhood around your location
- “Near me” in your title tags, meta description, internal links, and anchor text
- Landmarks around your business location
- The titles of local institutions that are relevant to your business
Focusing on your local SEO will help your voice search, so check out my Definitive Guide to Local SEO.
Monitor Results
You probably won’t see results from your voice search optimization efforts immediately, but you should still monitor your performance by tracking all of the new keywords you’ve optimized for.
Tracking voice search keywords will also keep you abreast of any SERP changes, such as the introduction of new features like AI Overviews.
Use Ubersuggest to track keywords, and get daily status updates and alerts about critical issues on your website:

Don’t let this be a one-off effort, though. Voice search optimization, like other SEO efforts, should be a regular endeavor. So keep looking for ways to optimize your existing content, research new conversational keywords, and include them whenever you create new content.
FAQs
What is voice search optimization (voice search SEO)?
Voice search optimization or voice search SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to show up in search engine results pages for voice searches.
Voice search SEO is a nuanced version of traditional SEO that takes into account the fundamental differences in the way we speak compared to the way we type. You’ll need to rank for different keywords, tweak your style of writing, and improve the technical aspects of your site (like loading times) because more people use smartphones to do voice search.
How does voice search affect SEO?
Marketers need to target slightly different keywords when optimizing for voice search. That’s because voice search queries tend to be more conversational and longer than written search queries. They are also more likely to take the form of questions.
You should also write in a more conversational manner, use schema markup to help search crawlers better understand key information on your site, and include an FAQ section to answer as many questions as possible — just like I’m doing here
Conclusion
Optimizing for voice search is a great way to grow your organic traffic. Not only are there a huge number of voice searches happening every day, but the techniques you use to optimize for these queries (semantic SEO, technical SEO, and local SEO) are a fundamental part of a broader search engine optimization strategy.
Hey Siri, what have readers got to lose?

See How My Agency Can Drive More Traffic to Your Website
- SEO - unlock more SEO traffic. See real results.
- Content Marketing - our team creates epic content that will get shared, get links, and attract traffic.
- Paid Media - effective paid strategies with clear ROI.
Unlock Thousands of Keywords with Ubersuggest
Ready to Outrank Your Competitors?
- Find long-tail keywords with High ROI
- Find 1000s of keywords instantly
- Turn searches into visits and conversions
Free keyword research tool