Voice search is every­where these days. It’s in our Super Bowl com­mer­cials. It’s on every major smart­phone plat­form. Forty-one per­cent of adults used voice search dai­ly as of 2014, accord­ing to a North­Star study. That per­cent­age was even greater among teens, the next gen­er­a­tion of searchers. Voice search and vir­tu­al assis­tant usage is expect­ed to grow – up to 50 per­cent of search may be dri­ven by voice in 2020, accord­ing to com­Score pro­jec­tions.

Prod­ucts with voice com­mand have been around for years; it’s nev­er been too dif­fi­cult to pro­gram some­thing to respond to a sin­gle word or a few sim­ple com­mands. Seman­tic voice search, how­ev­er, rep­re­sents a mas­sive shift in both user con­ve­nience and the ways search engines will have to deliv­er infor­ma­tion.

This expan­sion in voice means Google, Siri, Cor­tana, and Amazon’s Alexa must become more sophis­ti­cat­ed about under­stand­ing user intent. It also means mar­keters will have to get more inven­tive in the ways we frame con­tent to fit a voice search par­a­digm.

More­over, mar­keters should con­sis­tent­ly be as cus­tomer-ori­ent­ed as ever when it comes to SEO. Here are a few ways that you should con­sid­er adjust­ing your strat­e­gy based on these trends.

1. Write For Conversational Phrases, Not Just Keywords

Let’s face it, our brains struc­ture writ­ten search queries dif­fer­ent­ly than how we ver­bal­ly ask ques­tions. In order to cap­ture traf­fic for voice search you need to con­sid­er the way peo­ple may change their spo­ken search habits from the key­word-dri­ven way most peo­ple search.

Writ­ten search queries may be more suc­cinct, but ver­bal queries can be wordy and full of lan­guage that requires search engines to real­ly lever­age their seman­tic search lis­ten­ing tools.

Rather than “thai restau­rant in Mid­town,” a voice search may be clos­er to “What’s the name of that Thai place on Peachtree?”

In some cas­es it doesn’t seem like Google has fig­ured out seman­tic voice search­es yet – I’m in Atlanta, not NYC. A sim­pler non-seman­tic search pro­duces a map pack result first with more help­ful results.

Con­sid­er oth­er ways your cus­tomer may search for your ser­vices or prod­ucts. Brain­storm longer-tail key­word phras­es that high­light the root of a searcher’s intent.

Instead of think­ing about key search terms in one- or two-word phras­es, try to ask your­self, “Who, what, when, why and how?” to help you con­sid­er what else might inter­est some­one look­ing to learn more about your busi­ness. Then, be sure you’re includ­ing these phras­es in your con­tent strat­e­gy.

2. Long Tail Means Long(er) Form Content

If you want to own these long-tail phras­es, your con­tent needs to be sub­stan­tial enough to sup­port opti­miza­tion with­out stuff­ing every para­graph with key­word phras­es. Rather than just try­ing to cap­ture a phrase or top­ic, think deeply about the ques­tion or prob­lem your con­tent will solve for your cus­tomers.

Mar­keters and SEOs should be com­fort­able cre­at­ing this val­ue-rich con­tent. If you don’t cur­rent­ly have some­one on your team with strong expe­ri­ence in cus­tomer-focused con­tent cre­ation, it’s time you find a way to bring some­one on or part­ner with oth­er parts of your busi­ness to cre­ate strong con­tent togeth­er.

3. Think Local

When it comes to the “where” aspect of search queries, your strat­e­gy should delve deep­er than cre­at­ing a con­tact page for your busi­ness. Your earned SEO mar­ket­ing chan­nel should also loop in prop­er­ties like your indi­vid­ual loca­tion pages on your web­site, along with your pay-to-play social chan­nels like Yelp and oth­er con­trolled local list­ings.

These local prop­er­ties should be accu­rate and syn­chro­nized. Opti­mized local search pro­vides a frame­work for Google to con­sis­tent­ly serve up your results. This is a time inten­sive endeav­or, whether you’re a brick-and-mor­tar or a click-and-mor­tar busi­ness.

If you’re ser­vice based, your focus should be on opti­miz­ing Google My Busi­ness list­ings. Ser­vice-based com­pa­nies should also high­ly con­sid­er step­ping up their reviews and rat­ings strat­e­gy by encour­ag­ing their cus­tomers to leave reviews both on-site and through plat­forms like Yelp. Local direc­to­ries pro­vide anoth­er plat­form for use­ful, trust­wor­thy con­tent, with the added bonus of deliv­er­ing your Yelp star rat­ing that appears so fre­quent­ly in iOS spot­light search­es with rel­e­vant con­tent.

Note the “Reviews by Yelp” mes­sage for this iOS voice search result.

4. Prioritize Schema Markup

Google and iOS fre­quent­ly use schema data to deliv­er Knowl­edge Graph results. If you want to appear in some of those direct results, you need the prop­er markup on your site to give Google the oppor­tu­ni­ty to serve up this kind of con­tent from your com­pa­ny.

This can be an easy endeav­or with the right resources, but if those resources are lim­it­ed you need to high­ly con­sid­er which type of search (who, what, when, where, why, how) is most fruit­ful for you to opti­mize your schema strat­e­gy toward, and then cre­ate markup specif­i­cal­ly for those queries and result­ing land­ing pages first.

Pop­u­lat­ing meta­da­ta for your search results with reviews or use­ful con­tent may pro­vide some low-hang­ing fruit to test how search engines find voice-ready answers for search.

Schema data was cre­at­ed to improve the user-expe­ri­ence in SERPs. It only makes sense that search engines and oper­at­ing sys­tems would heav­i­ly rely on this type of extra infor­ma­tion while pars­ing through what peo­ple mean by the seman­tic lan­guage that voice search encour­ages.

Google is always lis­ten­ing and learn­ing from its users. Mar­keters must con­tin­ue to align with Google trends and the needs of our cus­tomers. With the pace of tech­no­log­i­cal change and cus­tomer adop­tion, we’ll need to hus­tle to stay ahead of the com­pe­ti­tion and con­tin­ue to deliv­er results that cus­tomers want and need.

How have you adjust­ed your mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy to reflect the changes with voice search trends?