Voice Search Optimization: What Every Designer Needs To Know

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a continually evolving field. New technologies change the way people search and how sites like Google find and show them relevant results, requiring adaptation from designers to remain competitive. One of the most important of these shifts today is a move toward voice search optimization.

What Is Voice Search Optimization?

Voice search optimization is the process of refining your content so it ranks higher in voice-based searches. It’s similar to standard SEO but focuses on the 62% of American adults who use a voice assistant.

Artificial intelligence (AI) products like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant rely on natural, conversational language. Consequently, anything users ask these tools will result in a search that looks more like a full question than a string of simple keywords. Voice optimization recognizes that catering to these queries will look different than conventional SEO.

Good voice search optimization also considers how the results sound to users, not just ensuring AI assistants can find them. A conversational question requires a conversational response, or else it would feel out of place and may leave audiences confused or drive them to another source.

Why Is Voice Search Optimization Important in 2025?

Voice search optimization is crucial today because voice-based searches are growing. As generative AI has become increasingly popular among consumers, it’s slowly replacing traditional web searches as the primary means of finding information. Targeting this audience means optimizing for conversational language.

In 2023, roughly 13 million U.S. adults used an AI chatbot as their main search tool. By 2027, experts predict as many as 90 million people will do the same. Because these bots use natural conversation, performing in this growing segment of queries means targeting voice users.

Designers should also consider how voice optimization influences accessibility. Over 40 million Americans live with a disability, and some of these conditions can make it difficult to type on a keyboard or see results on a screen. Voice support provides a solution, so optimizing for such searches makes a site more accessible.

How to Optimize for Voice Searches

Now that it’s clear why businesses should optimize for voice queries, it’s time to learn how. Here are five best practices to follow when targeting voice searches in 2025 and beyond.

Target Conversational Keywords

The most foundational step in voice search optimization is optimizing for conversational queries. Using a word or two as your target keyphrase might work for traditional SEO, but it lacks the context and structure of a natural question.

For example, instead of targeting “daylight savings 2025,” consider targeting “when does daylight savings time start in 2025?” or “when does daylight savings time end in 2025?” Notice that relevant answers change depending on the contextual words around the primary keyword. That makes intent even more crucial in voice searches than text ones, but more on that later.

When searching for long-tail keyphrases, look to Google’s “People Also Ask” results and Featured Snippets for help. Over 70% of voice searches use these sections to provide answers, and they can be handy ways to discover what users are actually searching.

Focus on Audience Intent

As alluded to in the last step, user intent is critical in voice optimization. Conversational language is often more specific than keyword-based searches, so the best-performing content in this space is likewise highly specific.

Go beyond targeting question words like “how” and “when.” Consider why someone may be searching for something, and determine what their individual questions may look like when trying to get those answers. Catering to several related questions is a good way to account for a few subtle variations in intent or language.

This focus is ideal for other SEO strategies, too. Google always prioritizes showing relevant content, even at the expense of page experience. Targeting a specific audience’s intent over a simple keyphrase is the best way to ensure relevance. 

Answer Questions Quickly

One easy way to make a page more voice-friendly is to use natural questions as subheadings. However, this strategy is only effective when the answer to that question comes immediately after the header.

Older page optimization strategies often place answers deep within the content to encourage scrolling and engagement. With modern web habits, though, making key information harder to get to or find will only frustrate visitors. It also makes it harder for crawlers to find answers to the questions posed in the subheadings, limiting the page’s relevance in a voice search.

Aim to provide the most relevant information for a query at the top of the page, directly under the appropriate subheading. Everything beyond the first few sentences can give context or examples for those who want to know more.

Structure Your Website’s Data

Voice search optimization requires attention to some technical details, too. Conversational searches are all about speed and convenience, so a webpage must be able to load quickly and make it easy for crawlers to find what they’re after.

Structured metadata is key to ensuring content can appear quickly in a voice search and cater to technical searching needs. Use schema markup to clarify what HTML tags mean or make graphs and other visualizations more interpretable to search engines and AI assistants. It’s also important to ensure all images have descriptive alt text for the same reason.

Technical fixes like this don’t directly impact ranking factors. However, they help web crawlers understand how and why certain content is relevant to certain searches, in turn boosting voice search performance.

Test and Re-optimize if Necessary

Finally, as with all SEO strategies, designers should test their optimization efforts to judge their efficacy. Monitoring page performance immediately after any design changes is critical so teams can spot and fix any missteps before they lead to too much lost business.

A/B testing is the unofficial industry standard, but it can be slow. The method can take up to six weeks to produce meaningful results, and some websites may need to move faster than that. In such cases, multivariate testing, which compares multiple variables simultaneously, may be the best way forward.

Any uptick in performance after voice optimization suggests similar improvements could help other pages. A persistent drop in traffic or less-than-expected growth is a sign that further tweaks or a different strategy are necessary. It will likely take several rounds of adjustments and testing to fully optimize a page.

Optimize for Voice Searches Today

As generative AI grows, voice’s share of overall web searches will increase. Design teams must take note of this trend. The time to embrace voice search optimization is now if the site hasn’t already begun this journey.

Following these five steps is a critical starting point for tailoring content to conversational searches. Forming strategies around such methods now may prove vital in remaining competitive in tomorrow’s internet landscape.