Throughout history, inventions have been made that have made things faster.
The radio made communication faster. The car made travel faster. Robotic automation made factory processes faster.
Humans love things to be fast and easy. That’s why voice search is increasing in popularity. Why type everything out when you can just speak it?
So if you have an online store, your eCommerce SEO strategy should be optimising the site for voice search.
What is Voice Search Optimisation?
Voice search optimisation is the process of optimising your website and its content for spoken requests. These requests will come from smart home assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.
Google will return the top result and speak it out, instead of presenting a list of results, which is the usual.
Therefore, to improve online visibility, you naturally want to be that top result, and you need to arrange your site in a certain way to make that happen.
Voice Search Trends in eCommerce
Voice search trends in eCommerce clearly show the importance of reconfiguring your site to capture these customers.
- Voice-based commerce is expected to reach $80 billion annually by 2025.
- 75% of U.S. households will own at least one smart speaker by 2025, increasing more voice-driven shopping.
- 71% of consumers prefer using voice search over typing.
- 27% of the global online population uses voice search on mobile devices.
- 58% of consumers have used voice search to find local business information.
The Future Is Conversational: LLMs and Search
Voice search is already shifting how people use search engines, but it’s just the beginning.
With ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, search is becoming a conversation. Users ask full questions and get answers tailored to the context, no keyword guessing, no endless scrolling.
ChatGPT’s voice feature takes it even further. Search turns into a proper back-and-forth, not just a one-off query.
What does that mean for websites?
If your content isn’t clear, structured, and helpful, AI won’t bother with it. It’ll skip you and summarise someone else.
Time to speak the language of LLMs, or risk going quiet.
Benefits of Voice Search Optimisation for eCommerce
The benefits of voice search optimisation are numerous, but the main one is obviously taking advantage of the rising popular trend of voice searches on Google.
As an online store owner, you need to keep one step ahead of the newest trends. If you’re not catering to every type of customer, then you’re leaving money on the table.
Here are some other benefits:
- You get all the ‘high intent’ shoppers. These are people who are ready to buy.
- You get a boost in local sales.
- You build trust and enhance the customer experience.
- You gain an advantage over your rivals. Many businesses are not remotely optimised for voice search.
How to Improve Your Voice Search Optimisation
There are some easy things you can do to increase your chances of being the top answer in people's voice searches.
Optimise for People Also Ask
One of the best Google search locations you can find yourself in is “People Also Ask.” These are questions which are frequently put into Google.
If you can get the answer to a question in PAA, then you have a good chance of getting into voice searches. Why? Because Google often takes answers from PAA.
Read on to find out how to increase your chances of this happening.
Make your site text longer and more conversational and question-based
To increase your chances of People Also Ask (PAA) and to optimise for voice search in general, you need to put a lot of your website text into longer and more conversational language.
Frame it as a question. Think how you would search for a particular product on your site if you were the voice searcher? What would you say to Siri or Alexa?
For example, instead of saying “white sports shoes for men”, change it to something like “size 10 sports shoes for men in London SW1.”
Then, when someone does a voice search for “Where can I buy size 10 sports shoes for men in London SW1?” your store has an excellent chance of being selected.
Two important points, though. One, keep the answers to your questions brief. Only 1-2 lines. Second, use bullet points, lists, and tables to make information easier to understand.
Optimise for local searches
People often make the search query “[type of business] near me” or “[type of product] near me.” They want to get to somewhere local to get the item or service fast.
This means SEO optimisation for online stores needs to include Local SEO for eCommerce.
Local SEO is a huge topic in itself. But sticking to the narrow confines of voice search optimisation, you can increase your chances by claiming and optimising your Google Business Profile.
Fill out all parts of it, especially the business name, address, phone number, and opening hours. Heavily emphasise your location such as “the best beer in Inverness.”
Make stronger local connections by getting backlinks from other local businesses.
These efforts will get you onto Google Maps, which is invaluable for “near me” searches.
Improve site speed and mobile responsiveness
Google absolutely adores fast websites, especially ones that look good on mobile devices.
This is why you need to develop an obsession for site speed and mobile responsiveness, if you want to improve your search engine ranking for eCommerce.
To optimise for mobile, the images and text needs to automatically resize to fit the mobile screen. Or you need a completely different mobile design, which kicks in when the size of the screen is detected. This is otherwise known as mobile optimisation for eCommerce SEO.
Either way, you need to make sure all needless clutter is removed from the mobile version – social media widgets, pop-ups, needless images and text.
Site speed also ties into this – you need to remove all unneeded elements, including scripts in the site header. When a site loads, it has to load all these things, and that slows it down.
Images also need to be optimised to be as small as possible. Use an image optimiser like TinyPNG to shrink the pixel size of each image as small as possible.
Plus, don’t forget to change the file format. PNG is a no-no. JPG is fine in a pinch. But for best results, convert to WebP or AVIF.
Then use Google’s site speed test to see how fast your site goes. Google will rate your speed and offer recommendations on how to make it better.
Add schema to your site
Schema is a more advanced SEO for eCommerce. Unless you’re very tech-savvy, you should get a developer to do this for you. It’s so easy to make a mistake.
Schema – also known as ‘markup’, is basically what you see in the image above. It’s interactive details which display things like average ratings, price, discounts, and delivery charges.
Everything you need to encourage someone to click through.
Google maintains a list of schema, but as we say, unless you know what you’re doing, call in a pro for this one. There are hundreds of different possible schemas, many related to eCommerce, and many not.
But if you get this one right, you can give yourself a serious SEO boost. And get an edge over rivals who don’t have schema markup on their sites.
Add a FAQ section
As we said at the beginning, language on your site should be conversational and framed as questions. This describes Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to a tee.
On each product page, put a list of questions people are likely to ask about that product, and put the answer underneath. Keep your replies to two sentences at the most, and keep it concise and to the point. Google doesn’t like rambling answers.
For even better results, use the FAQ schema so Google recognises it as such. If you use WordPress, use the Yoast plugin or Rank Math, which automatically adds FAQ schema for you.
Final Word
Voice search SEO for eCommerce is something barely thought about by online businesses.
Everyone is so focused on getting into traditional search, that voice search is a distant thought, if at all.
So if you can carry out all these tips, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition. And in this era of intense online competition, you need all the advantages you can get.
