Since its introduction to mobile devices by Google in 2008, voice search has seen a lot of iterations and improvements throughout the years which were further catapulted when Apple introduced Siri, the voice assistant in 2011. Optimizing your video for voice search has become significant because there are simply more voice assistants that are available and accessible to the general public than before, thus resulting in the number of voice searches skyrocketing.
What Is Voice Search?
With the technological growth in these last few decades, you no longer have to type in to search for web results, videos, and a lot more, instead, you can simply ask for those, and search using your voice thus the name voice search. With over a billion voice searches per month, you can see the popularity and the impact of voice searches on how we use the internet. As a marketer or entrepreneur, it is high time your videos are optimized for voice search.
Why Voice Search Is Important?
Let us look at the reasons why voice search is important:
- Rise of smart devices: The recent in-demand smart speakers, TV, and in fact, many smart appliances support voice search and voice assistants, increasing the need for optimizing content for voice search.
- Time effective: Using your voice to search than typing it out is time effective. For one, you don’t need to have the device in your hand for using voice search rather how searching by typing out a query tends to work.
- Provides better Local SEO reach: The voice-searching feature is usually tailored to your specific location. Ask the news and it tends to prefer the news in your locality a bit more than other ones, ask the weather and you will be given the current weather in the locality you are in. And also most voice searches are locality-specific requests such as checking out the directions for a nearby store.
- Competitive edge: When deciding on a smart device to get, the voice-searching ability of the device has become an important category that people tend to look at before making their final choice. Having a capable voice search feature will provide a competitive edge over competing devices.
Tips To Optimize Video For Voice Search
When a user uses voice search to search for particular types of video on platforms such as YouTube. The platform algorithm flies through certain data of your video to pick them to be shown to the user. Here are some tips to optimize video for voice search.
- Meta Title and Description: Metadata is used by the search engine algorithm to measure the relevance of the video related to the query input. Research for keywords and include the target keyword in the Meta Title of your video. And optimize your Meta description. Even though it may not be visible to users, the meta description is thoroughly looked at by the algorithm to determine the relevance of your video to the provided query.
- Video File name: The YouTube algorithm is very advanced but even it cannot comb through millions of videos to find perfect videos suitable for the provided query. It combs through metadata such as meta title and meta description and also the video file name. Do not forget to optimize the video file name by including keywords thinking that it won’t be visible to the users. The algorithm checks the name of the uploaded file and tries to figure out if the video will be suitable for the query input to be shown in the search results.
- Video description: A well-written and optimized video description can be very crucial in getting your video in the first-page search result. You have to include a few relevant keywords and make the description searchable. Remind yourself not to overdo it by cramming in keywords, get to the point, and use natural language.
- Captions and subtitles: Captions and subtitles are the hot spice to your Margherita pizza. They are uploaded as separate text files that can be read by search engines. So while the algorithm is combing through millions of videos and their potential to be related to the voice search, captions and subtitles are also searched through.
FAQs
Voice search changes the way people search for information. When optimizing your video for voice search, you need to understand the natural language people use when searching for information. Use conversational language in your video title, description, and tags, and include long-tail keywords that match natural language queries.
There are several ways to optimize your video for voice search, including adding closed captions to your videos, creating concise and engaging titles, using relevant keywords and phrases, optimizing your video description and metadata, and providing value to your audience.
Some best practices for optimizing videos for voice search include keeping your videos short and to the point, using natural language, providing answers to common questions, using long-tail keywords, and creating engaging and informative content.