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There were over a billion^[1] voice searches a month, as of January 2018 and 40% of those mobile searches^[2] had local intent. This strongly suggests that local SEO now requires optimizing for voice.

The human brain is wired to love convenience. Voice search is enabling people to search with the help of their voice and search engines have become accurate enough to provide direct answers to their voice commands.

As an SEO, how should you revamp your strategy in order to gain an edge over your competitors?

In this guide, I’ll tell you what you can do to make your clients’ local business websites the superstars of voice search.

Focus On Long-Tail And Localized Keywords

Purely voice focused SEO requires you to research and find out long-tail keywords. More than 70% global searches, in fact, are for long tail keywords.

Purely local SEO requires, of course, the localization of keywords by adding geographic indicators^[3] to them. Geo-local indicators include; Brooklyn espresso, 18th, and Broadway french fries.

These two research strategies need to be integrated to get the best traction from voice and local SEO as a single channel. Here’s how you can do this:

• Using any of your favorite keyword research tools:

Run queries for your website’s main keywords, appended with your business geographical indicator (city/region/country/etc.) Find out a list of keywords three or more words long Arrange them in decreasing order of search volume and increasing the order of competitiveness Extract the top 100 (or 50) from both lists, and find out the ones common to both lists (means high search volume and low competition keywords)