When your customers ask Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant a question, they get one spoken answer. This isn’t like a traditional search results page with ten blue links; it’s a winner-take-all scenario. If your business isn’t that single answer, you’re invisible for that query. This shift requires a new approach to SEO, one focused on conversational language and direct solutions. The good news is that the tools you need to compete are likely already in your marketing stack. This guide provides a practical, step-by-step walkthrough of how to use Ahrefs for voice search optimization, from finding the right keywords to structuring your content to become the definitive answer.
Key Takeaways
- Prioritize question-based keywords: Voice search is conversational, so your keyword strategy must be too. Use Ahrefs to find the long-tail questions your audience asks and structure your content to answer them directly, moving beyond simple keyword fragments.
- Structure content for the single best answer: Voice assistants look for clear, concise information. Format your articles with FAQs and lists to win featured snippets, and use Ahrefs’ Site Audit to ensure your site is fast, mobile-friendly, and uses schema markup.
- Measure what matters for voice search: Success depends on winning featured snippets and ranking for local queries. Use Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker to monitor your performance for these specific goals, giving you clear data to refine your strategy.
What is Voice Search Optimization?
Voice search optimization is the process of tailoring your website’s content so it can be found and read aloud by voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. When someone asks their device a question, the goal is for your content to be the single, definitive answer they hear back. This isn’t just about ranking on a results page; it’s about becoming the sole result for a spoken query, effectively winning the “zero-click” search.
Think about why people use voice search. They’re often multitasking—driving, cooking, or walking down the street. They need quick, direct answers, not a list of ten blue links to sift through. Optimizing for voice means adapting your strategy to meet this need for immediacy and convenience. It involves understanding the types of questions your audience asks and structuring your content to answer them clearly and concisely. Many of the best practices for voice search, like targeting featured snippets and improving site speed, are also great for traditional search engine optimization, so the effort benefits your entire digital presence. By focusing on natural language and direct answers, you align your content with how real people communicate, making your site more accessible and useful.
How People Use Voice Search
Voice search is no longer a niche behavior; it’s a daily habit for many. Data shows that 41% of adults use voice search at least once a day. People rely on their digital assistants for a wide range of tasks, from getting quick information to making purchasing decisions. A common use is searching for quick facts (68% of users) and getting directions (65%). More importantly for businesses, 47% of people use voice search to find information about local businesses, and 44% use it to research products and services. This shows that voice search directly influences consumer behavior and can drive traffic and sales for your business.
How Voice Search Differs from Typing
The biggest difference between voice and text search lies in the language. When we type, we use shorthand and keyword fragments, like “Ahrefs voice search.” When we speak, we use natural, conversational language and ask full questions, such as, “How do I use Ahrefs for voice search?” This shift requires a different approach to keyword research. Instead of focusing only on short-tail keywords, you need to target long-tail, question-based phrases. Voice searches also tend to favor a single, concise answer. Search engines often pull this answer from a featured snippet—that answer box at the very top of the results page. To win at voice search, you need to win that snippet.
Key Ahrefs Features for Voice Search
Ahrefs offers a suite of tools perfect for building and executing a voice search strategy. By focusing on four key features, you can find the right keywords, create relevant content, fix technical issues, and track your progress. Each tool plays a specific role in aligning your website with the conversational nature of voice queries, helping you provide the direct, concise answers that users and search assistants are looking for.
Keywords Explorer
Voice searches are conversational, making Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer essential for uncovering these queries. You can search a broad topic and filter for question-based or long-tail keywords that mimic natural speech. By identifying how people actually ask for information, you can tailor your content to provide direct answers. Ranking for a primary search query often means you’ll also rank for its many long-tail variations, a huge advantage for voice search visibility. This tool helps you move beyond simple keywords and into the realm of conversational search, which is the foundation of any voice optimization effort.
Content Explorer
To succeed in voice search, you need to know what kind of content already performs well. Content Explorer lets you find the most popular content for any topic, giving you a blueprint for success. This is a great way to analyze top-ranking articles and identify patterns in their structure. You can see what formats, like lists or how-to guides, are winning featured snippets, which are often the source for voice search answers. By studying what’s working, you can create content structured to meet the needs of both users and search algorithms.
Site Audit
Technical health is non-negotiable for voice search. Voice assistants prioritize websites that are fast, secure, and easy to access on mobile devices. The Ahrefs Site Audit tool crawls your website to find technical SEO issues that could be holding you back. It flags problems like slow page speed, a lack of mobile-friendliness, or improper use of structured data. Fixing these issues ensures search engines can easily find and understand your content, making it more likely your page will be selected to answer a voice query. A technically sound site is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy.
Rank Tracker
Optimizing for voice search is an ongoing process, and you need a way to measure success. With Rank Tracker, you can monitor your website’s position for the specific question-based and long-tail keywords you’re targeting. This allows you to see how your optimization efforts impact your visibility in search results. Tracking your rankings for these queries, especially your ability to capture featured snippets, provides clear feedback on what’s working. This data is critical for refining your strategy and making informed decisions, as SEO statistics consistently show the value of holding top positions.
How to Find Voice Search Keywords with Ahrefs
Finding the right keywords for voice search means thinking less about traditional search terms and more about natural, conversational language. People speak differently than they type, often using full questions and longer phrases. Ahrefs provides a powerful suite of tools that helps you uncover these specific queries, giving you a direct line into your audience’s spoken questions. By focusing on the right keyword types, you can create content that directly answers what users are asking for.
Find Question-Based Keywords
Since many voice searches are questions, your keyword strategy should reflect that. Start by using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find queries that contain words like “what,” “how,” “why,” and “where.” You can enter a broad topic and then use the “Questions” report to see a list of relevant questions people are searching for. This report is a goldmine for content ideas that align perfectly with voice search behavior. You can also analyze your competitors’ top pages to see what questions they rank for and identify gaps in your own content strategy.
Analyze Long-Tail Keywords
Voice searches are naturally longer and more specific than typed searches, which makes long-tail keywords essential. These are longer phrases that, while having lower individual search volumes, are highly specific and often indicate strong user intent. In Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, you can search for a core topic and then filter the results to show keywords containing four or more words. This will instantly reveal thousands of long-tail keywords. While each one might not bring a lot of traffic, their combined volume can be significant, and the traffic you do get is typically more qualified and closer to converting.
Map Keywords to Search Intent
Understanding the “why” behind a search is critical for creating effective content. Long-tail and question-based keywords often have a very clear informational intent, meaning the user is looking for a specific answer or explanation. Use Ahrefs to analyze the search engine results page (SERP) for your target keywords. Look at the top-ranking pages. Are they blog posts, product pages, or videos? This analysis helps you understand what kind of content Google believes satisfies the user search intent, allowing you to create content that meets user expectations and is more likely to rank well for voice queries.
Identify Featured Snippet Opportunities
Voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant often pull answers directly from featured snippets, also known as “position zero.” Winning these snippets is one of the most direct ways to capture voice search traffic. In Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, you can filter for keywords that already trigger a featured snippet. This allows you to see what questions your audience is asking and how your competitors are answering them. You can then create better, more concise content to try and take over that spot. Look for question-based keywords that don’t yet have a featured snippet, as these represent prime opportunities to rank.
How to Structure Content for Voice Search
Once you’ve identified your target keywords with Ahrefs, the next step is to structure your content in a way that voice assistants can easily understand and use. Unlike traditional SEO, where the focus is on how a human reads a webpage, voice search optimization requires you to think about how a machine parses information to provide a single, spoken answer.
This means organizing your content with clear, concise answers to common questions. When a user asks their smart speaker a question, the device scans the web for the most direct and authoritative response. By formatting your content correctly, you signal to search engines that your page contains the exact information the user is looking for. This involves writing in a conversational tone, using formats like FAQs, aiming for featured snippets, and implementing technical elements like schema markup. Each of these strategies makes your content more accessible to both users and the voice technologies they use. Getting this structure right is fundamental because it directly impacts whether your content gets chosen as the definitive answer. It’s less about keyword stuffing and more about clarity and organization. The goal is to make your content the easiest and most logical choice for a search engine to read aloud.
Write Using Natural Language
People talk differently than they type. When someone uses voice search, they’re more likely to ask a full question like, “What’s the best way to repot a monstera plant?” instead of typing “repot monstera.” Your content needs to reflect this conversational style.
Focus on incorporating long-tail keywords, which are longer, more specific phrases that mimic natural speech. Think about the exact questions your audience would ask and weave them into your headings and body copy. Writing in a natural, accessible tone not only aligns with voice search queries but also makes your content more engaging for human readers. It’s about creating a resource that answers questions clearly, just as you would in a real conversation.
Format with FAQs
A Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page is one of the most effective formats for voice search optimization. This structure directly addresses the “who, what, where, when, why, and how” questions that users commonly ask. Each question-and-answer pair creates a self-contained piece of information that a voice assistant can easily pull and read aloud.
When creating your content, think about dedicating a section to FAQs or building entire pages around this format. By organizing information this way, you make it incredibly simple for search engines to identify your page as a relevant source for direct answers. This strategy improves your chances of being the chosen result for a voice search query.
Target Featured Snippets
Featured snippets are the answer boxes that appear at the top of Google’s search results, and they are prime real estate for voice search. In fact, a significant percentage of voice search answers are pulled directly from these snippets. According to Ahrefs, over 40% of voice search results come from a featured snippet.
To increase your chances of winning a snippet, structure your answers clearly and concisely. Use formatting like bullet points, numbered lists, and short paragraphs to present information. Directly answer the target question at the beginning of your content before providing more detail. Ahrefs’ Site Explorer can help you identify which of your competitors currently own snippets for your target keywords, giving you a clear goal to work toward.
Implement Schema Markup
Schema markup is a code vocabulary you add to your website to help search engines better understand your content. Think of it as adding labels to your information. For example, you can use schema to tell Google that a piece of content is a recipe, an event, a product review, or an FAQ page. This context is critical for voice search.
By implementing schema markup, you make it easier for search engines to parse your content and feature it in rich results, including voice answers. For instance, using FAQPage schema explicitly tells Google that your page contains a list of questions and answers, making it a perfect candidate for voice queries. While it sounds technical, many plugins and tools can help you generate and add schema without needing to write code from scratch.
How to Use Ahrefs for Local Voice Search
Local voice searches, like “find a plumber near me” or “what’s the best pizza in Brooklyn,” are all about immediacy and location. Users want quick, relevant answers for needs they have right now. To capture this traffic, your business needs to show up in local search results. Ahrefs provides the tools to analyze your local search performance and find opportunities to improve your visibility. By focusing on local keywords, understanding your competition, and ensuring your technical SEO is solid, you can position your business to be the go-to answer for voice assistants. This process involves a combination of keyword research, competitor analysis, and on-page optimization, all of which can be guided by data from Ahrefs. Let’s walk through how to use its features to fine-tune your local voice search strategy.
Research Local Keywords
Voice searches are conversational, which means people use longer, more specific phrases. These are often called long-tail keywords. Instead of typing “pizza,” someone might ask, “Where can I get deep-dish pizza that delivers near me?” Your job is to find these phrases. In Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, you can search for a term that defines your business, like “plumber” or “coffee shop,” and then filter for long-tail variations. Look for questions and phrases that include location modifiers like “near me” or your city’s name. This helps you create content that directly answers the specific questions your local customers are asking, making you a more relevant result for voice search.
Analyze Local Competitors
When you perform a voice search for your services, does your business come up? If not, see which competitors do. You can use Ahrefs to analyze the websites that are ranking for your target local keywords. Look at their content, what keywords they target, and who links to them. This gives you a blueprint for what’s working. While you’re at it, check their Google Business Profile. A complete and updated profile is critical for local voice search visibility. By learning from your competitors’ successes, you can identify gaps in your own strategy and make improvements to your content and local listings to start capturing that traffic.
Optimize for Mobile
Most voice searches happen on phones, so your website must work perfectly on mobile devices. A slow or clunky mobile site can cause potential customers to leave before they even see what you offer. Your site’s speed is especially important; aim for it to load in under three seconds. You can use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to run a comprehensive check on your website’s health. It will flag issues related to mobile-friendliness, page speed, and other technical problems that could hurt your performance in voice search results. Fixing these issues ensures that when a user finds you through a voice search, they have a smooth and positive experience on your site.
Manage Business Listings
Voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant pull information directly from online business directories to answer local queries. This makes managing your online listings essential. Your Google Business Profile is the most important one, so keep it accurate with your correct business name, address, phone number (NAP), and hours. Consistency is key. Regularly check that all your business info is correct across your website and other major local listings. Inaccurate or inconsistent information can confuse search engines and cause you to be overlooked for relevant voice searches. While Ahrefs tracks your keyword rankings, maintaining accurate business listings provides the foundation for that local visibility.
How to Handle Technical SEO for Voice Search
While your content strategy is the heart of voice search optimization, your website’s technical health is the foundation it’s built on. If your site is slow, hard to use on a phone, or confusing for search engines, even the best content will struggle to get picked up by voice assistants. Think of technical SEO as clearing the path for your answers to be delivered instantly. You can use the Site Audit tool in Ahrefs to run a comprehensive check-up on your site’s technical performance and identify areas for improvement.
Analyze Site Speed
When a user asks a question, they expect an immediate answer. A slow-loading website simply won’t be chosen by a voice assistant. Faster page speed, mobile-first indexing, and structured data are becoming key factors in determining whether a website ranks well for voice search. Use the Performance report in Ahrefs’ Site Audit to check your site’s speed and identify what’s slowing it down. Common culprits include large image files, clunky code, and slow server response times. Focusing on improving your page speed by compressing images and minifying code can make a significant difference.
Implement a Mobile-First Design
Most voice searches are performed on mobile devices, so your website must provide a seamless mobile experience. Google uses mobile-first indexing, meaning it prioritizes the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexing. As experts note, voice search for local SEO thrives by combining mobile-first performance with other SEO tactics. Run your site through Ahrefs’ Site Audit to catch any mobile usability issues. Ensure your design is responsive, text is readable without zooming, and buttons are easy to tap. A mobile-friendly site isn’t just a suggestion; it’s a requirement for modern SEO.
Add Structured Data
Structured data, also known as schema markup, is a type of code that helps search engines understand your content’s context. It’s essential for helping search engines understand your content better, making it more likely to appear as a rich snippet or featured snippet—the exact spots voice assistants pull answers from. By adding schema markup for FAQs, how-to guides, or local business details, you’re essentially formatting your information for easy consumption by Google. Ahrefs’ Site Audit can help you find pages that are missing structured data, giving you a clear list of opportunities to implement it.
Monitor Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) are specific Google metrics that measure user experience, focusing on loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability. A good user experience is a confirmed ranking signal, and since only about 33% of websites pass the CWV threshold, optimizing for it gives you a competitive edge. You can monitor your CWV scores in the Performance report within Ahrefs’ Site Audit. Addressing these technical elements can be complex, which is why tools that offer automated SEO improvements can be a lifesaver for busy teams, ensuring your site stays technically sound without constant manual effort.
How to Measure and Improve Performance
Optimizing for voice search isn’t a one-time task; it’s a continuous cycle of measuring, analyzing, and refining your strategy. Once you’ve identified your keywords and structured your content, you need to track your performance to see what’s working and where you can improve. Using a tool like Ahrefs is essential for gathering the right data, but the real value comes from turning that data into actionable insights.
Think of it as a feedback loop. You track your rankings for key terms, see how your content performs on mobile, and monitor your visibility in local search. This information tells you exactly where to focus your efforts, whether it’s updating an old blog post to recapture a featured snippet or fixing a technical issue that’s slowing down your site. This ongoing process ensures your voice search strategy adapts to algorithm changes and evolving user behavior. While manual tracking is effective, platforms like MEGA AI can automate the optimization process, making it easier to maintain and improve your content over time.
Track Featured Snippets
Since about 40.7% of voice search answers come directly from a featured snippet, tracking them is non-negotiable. These snippets, also known as “position zero,” are the answer boxes that appear at the very top of search results, and they are prime real estate for voice assistants.
You can use Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker to see which of your target keywords currently own a featured snippet. Set up a project for your website and add your voice search keywords. The tool will show you a SERP features report, highlighting every keyword that has earned a snippet. If you see a competitor has taken over one of your snippets, it’s a clear signal to revisit and improve your content for that query.
Monitor Keyword Positions
While featured snippets are the top prize, ranking in the top five results is still critical. In fact, almost 91% of voice search answers are pulled from the top five organic positions. This means you need to monitor your overall keyword rankings, not just your snippets.
Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker lets you monitor your positions for your entire list of voice search keywords. By checking your rankings regularly, you can spot downward trends before they become a major problem and identify pages that may need a content refresh. This also gives you insight into which competitors are climbing the ranks for your target terms, allowing you to analyze their strategy and adjust your own accordingly.
Review Mobile Performance Metrics
Most voice searches happen on mobile devices, so your site’s mobile performance is a major ranking factor. Pages that perform well in voice search tend to load 52% faster than the average page. A slow, clunky mobile experience can quickly disqualify your content from being used as a voice search answer.
Use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to run a comprehensive crawl of your website. Pay close attention to the Performance report, which flags issues related to page speed and Core Web Vitals. The audit will identify specific problems like large image files, slow server response times, or render-blocking resources that you can fix to improve your site’s speed and overall mobile-friendliness.
Analyze Local Rankings
If you run a local business, your performance in location-based searches is what matters most. With nearly 58% of consumers using voice search to find local business information, you can’t afford to ignore it. National rankings won’t tell you how visible you are to a customer searching for “pizza near me” or “best coffee shop in Brooklyn.”
In Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker, you can set up tracking for specific geographic locations, from countries down to cities. Add your local keywords (e.g., “plumber in Austin”) and set the location to your service area. This gives you an accurate picture of your local search visibility and helps you understand how you stack up against nearby competitors.
Create a Continuous Optimization Plan
Ultimately, optimizing for voice search is not a separate project but a core component of a strong overall SEO strategy. The data you gather from tracking snippets, keyword positions, and mobile performance should all feed into a continuous cycle of improvement. This means regularly revisiting your content, updating it with fresh information, and fixing any technical issues that arise.
Your plan should involve scheduling regular content reviews and technical audits. Based on your findings, you can prioritize tasks like rewriting a section to better match user intent or compressing images to improve load times. For businesses looking to streamline this process, MEGA AI’s Maintenance Agent automates content updates, helping you continuously re-optimize articles to improve rankings and CTR without the manual workload.
Your Voice Search Optimization Checklist
To keep your voice search strategy on track, it helps to have a clear checklist. Here are the core areas to focus on, from the technical foundation of your site to the content you create and the local signals you send.
Technical Requirements
Your site’s technical health is the foundation for voice search performance. Faster page speed, mobile-first indexing, and structured data are key factors that search engines use to select voice answers. Before you focus on content, confirm that your technical SEO is solid. Key items to check include your site’s crawlability, its structure, and whether you have a valid SSL certificate (HTTPS). A technically sound website is more likely to be trusted by search engines and served up as a voice result. You can use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to get a comprehensive report on your site’s technical SEO health and identify areas for improvement.
Content Guidelines
Voice queries are naturally conversational, which makes long-tail keywords essential for your content strategy. These longer, more specific phrases often take the form of questions. Your goal is to understand the user’s search intent behind these questions and answer them directly in your content. Strategically place these long-tail keywords in your headings, subheadings, and body copy to improve relevance. Think about how a person would actually ask a question out loud and structure your content to provide a clear, concise answer. This approach makes your content a perfect match for voice assistants looking for quick solutions.
Local SEO Elements
For businesses serving a specific area, local voice search is a major opportunity. Success here depends on combining mobile-friendly performance with strong local signals. The most important step is to claim and fully optimize your Google Business Profile. Make sure your business name, address, phone number, and hours are accurate and consistent everywhere they appear online. When a user asks for “pizza near me,” Google relies on this information to provide the most relevant local result. A complete and updated profile is your best tool for showing up in these valuable local voice searches.
Monitoring Steps
Voice search optimization isn’t a one-time task; it requires ongoing attention. Regularly use tools to find and fix issues that slow down your website, as faster sites are prioritized for voice answers. It’s also important to periodically check that all your business information is correct across your website, Google Business Profile, and other online directories. Set a recurring reminder to review your keyword rankings for question-based terms and track how many featured snippets you own. Consistent monitoring helps you adapt to changes and maintain your visibility in voice search results.
Related Articles
- Optimizing Your Website for Voice Search: A Comprehensive SEO Guide – MEGA SEO | Blog
- How to Optimize Your Website for Voice Search in 2024
- Master Majestic for Voice Search Optimization
- How to Rank Higher with Google Hummingbird in 2024
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the biggest difference between optimizing for voice search and traditional text search? The main difference is the language used. When people type, they often use short keyword fragments, but when they speak, they ask full, conversational questions. Your strategy needs to shift from targeting simple keywords to answering these specific questions directly and concisely. The goal is to become the single, spoken answer, not just one of ten blue links on a results page.
How do I find the kinds of questions people are actually asking with their voice? You can start by using a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find phrases that begin with words like “how,” “what,” and “where.” Focus on long-tail keywords, which are longer and more specific phrases that mimic how people naturally speak. Analyzing these questions gives you a clear roadmap for creating content that directly addresses what your audience wants to know.
What is a featured snippet, and why is it so important for voice search? A featured snippet is the answer box that appears at the very top of Google’s search results, often called “position zero.” It’s critical for voice search because digital assistants like Siri and Alexa frequently pull their spoken answers directly from this spot. Winning the featured snippet is one of the most effective ways to ensure your content is the one that gets read aloud.
My business is local. How should my voice search strategy be different? For local businesses, voice search is often about immediacy, with users asking for things “near me.” Your primary focus should be on claiming and thoroughly optimizing your Google Business Profile. Ensure your business name, address, phone number, and hours are accurate and consistent across all online directories, as this is the information voice assistants rely on to provide local recommendations.
Besides content, what’s the most important technical factor for voice search? Your website’s speed and mobile-friendliness are crucial. Most voice searches are performed on mobile devices, and users expect instant answers. A slow or difficult-to-use mobile site will likely be passed over by search engines. Ensuring your site loads quickly and provides a smooth experience on a phone is a foundational requirement for any voice search strategy.
