Optimizing Financial Advisor Websites for Voice Search

Voice search is growing rapidly and it’s important for your financial website to keep up with this trend early on if you want to stay ahead of your competitors.

According to Google, around 27% of the world was already using voice search on their mobile devices in 2018. This number has likely grown significantly since then with the surge in popularity of smart speakers like Amazon Alexa, Apple HomePod and Google Home. 

What Makes Voice Search Results Different?

People who use voice search expect direct answers to their questions that are read back to them. Most won’t bother scrolling through other search results as long as they’re satisfied with the voice assistant’s answer. When it comes to smart speakers, scrolling isn’t really an option because they don’t have screens. 

In a lot of cases, the answer that’s read back isn’t the first result that comes up in the search engine results page. It’s actually from the featured snippet that’s chosen by the search engine for that particular query or keyword. Featured snippets usually contain the most direct answer to a question or search query.

How do you optimize your website and your content for voice search? We’ll discuss a couple of ways below.

Target Conversational Long-Tail Keywords

When someone uses voice search, they won’t use the same keywords they would type into a search engine. 

Instead of:

‘ideal 401k contribution amount’

They’ll say:

‘How much should I put in my 401k?’

Of course, search engines are smart enough to deduce the user’s intent and will provide the same featured snippet for both search queries. But if you want to have more of your pages show up in voice searches, then you should come up with a content strategy that focuses on conversational long-tail keywords using questions that your target audience might use.

Come Up With More FAQ Pages

A good way to directly target conversational long-tail keywords is to come up with more informational FAQ-type pages. This lets you address the most common questions in the most direct way possible. 

An important thing to note about featured snippets is that they provide very concise information, and aren’t very wordy. They’re not like blog posts or articles used for content marketing wherein you’re writing to capture the reader’s interest. Featured snippets get to the point in as few words as possible. 

Of course, you can always include direct responses to long-tail keywords in your regular blog posts. But you may have to go back and rewrite a lot of your successful pages just so it has a better chance of being a featured snippet. It’s going to be much easier to come up with new pages that specifically target voice search users.

Think Local 

A lot of voice search users look for local businesses using the ‘near me’ modifier. 

For example, they might be searching for:

‘financial advisor near me’

In order to show up on their radar, you’ll need a solid local SEO strategy. This starts by making sure you’ve updated your Google My Business and Yelp pages with all the information they might need like your name, address, phone number, email, and operating hours.

You should also use structured data to be able to provide search engines with more data about your practice and show up in more rich snippets. 

Using schema markup, you can include additional information like:

• Areas served
• Customer reviews and ratings
• Products and services

This helps users and search engines quickly figure out important details about your practice.