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According to latest reports from Google, 20% of searches are now by voice. There’s no denying that with the rise of smart phones people are looking for faster and easier ways to find answers to their questions. Enter: Voice search . Not only is it important to improve your site’s local SEO but it will also becoming increasingly important to optimize your site for voice search as well.
Don’t take our word for it – just look at the stats. Are millennials your target market as a financial advisor? According to a new report , 37% of millennials reported “they ‘always’ or ‘often’ shop online via voice-controlled devices.” Within that group, 43% made a purchase using voice in the past year. Millennials not your target? Google reports that 41% of adults use voice search more than once a day.
Convinced yet? Let’s move onto the good stuff then: what does this mean for you as a financial advisor and how you can optimize your site for voice search?
1. GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
If you haven’t already signed up for Google My Business do it immediately. By signing up you’ll be building validity with Google and controlling what results appear when someone searches for your business online.
In addition to signing up for Google My Business you want to take every measure possible to make it easy for those Googlebots to crawl your site and understand it in order to increase the chances your site gets pulled up when someone uses voice search. To do so we recommend submitting your sitemap to Google and boosting Google’s confidence in your business by cross-referencing your firm name, address and phone number across multiple web listings.
2. QUESTIONS IN YOUR CONTENT
Working with financial advisors, we see many different approaches to including questions on sites but the most popular is FAQ pages. These pages are designed Q&A-style and include answers to customers commonly asked questions such as “what is a fiduciary” or “what is fee only financial planning.”
FAQ pages are great for search optimization as they optimize your site for queries someone may ask via voice search. Another way to go about including questions in your content is including them in your blog posts and other landing pages to optimize even further.
3. SCANNABLE CONTENT
Think about it – those using voice search are on a mobile device and they’re not going to thumb through pages and pages of content. Ensure your site content is short, sweet and to the point and consider using informative headers to break up larger blocks of text. Additionally, if your able to visually illustrate your point rather than through text, do it!
Related: Facebook Insights For Financial Advisors
4. MOBILE FRIENDLY
According to Google, bounce rates on mobile devices are 9.56% higher than on desktop. So mobile experience is key when it comes to optimizing your site for voice search. Unsure if your site is mobile friendly? Pull it up on various devices – your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop – and see if it sizes accordingly. If not, you must address this ASAP. Twenty Over Ten frameworks are created using the latest web standards and are completely mobile responsive.
5. MONITOR PERFORMANCE
And last but not least, Google Analytics is your best friend! Monitor your site’s performance regularly to see if there are any gaps in performance for mobile vs. desktop traffic. Google Analytics offers detailed mobile vs. desktop reports that can help you monitor your efforts and make inferences based on the data.
Unsure how to monitor your Google Analytics? We can help with that too! Our Google Analytics Consult+ package will help you get a handle on your site analytics to help you effectively measure your digital marketing efforts.