9 Local Voice Search Optimization Tips
Discover essential strategies for optimizing your local business for voice search. This comprehensive guide offers practical tips from industry experts to improve your online visibility. Learn how to adapt your content and marketing approach to meet the growing demands of voice-activated technology.
- Write Naturally for Voice Queries
- Optimize FAQ Sections with Local Intent
- Use Conversational Language in Content
- Enhance Google Business Profile for Discovery
- Embed Specific Addresses in FAQ Content
- Build a Voice-Ready Marketing Tree
- Leverage Customer Reviews for Visibility
- Adapt Ad Creatives to Voice Search
- Implement Key Strategies for Local Businesses
Write Naturally for Voice Queries
One tip? Write how people talk, not how they type. In Michigan, someone might ask, “Where can I get my driveway plowed near Grand Rapids?” not “snow removal Grand Rapids.” Use those natural, spoken questions in your headers and FAQs. They’re gold for voice queries.
Voice search flipped our process. One local roofing client in Minnesota saw a 35% bump in traffic after we rewrote content to match real-life questions like, “Who fixes roof leaks fast near me?” It’s not poetry, but it pays.
We now prioritize how people speak – regional slang, casual phrasing, full questions. Keyword tools alone won’t get you there. You’ve got to eavesdrop a little.
If your site’s still talking like a dictionary, it won’t win voice search. Sound human. That’s the whole game.
Nick Mikhalenkov
SEO Manager, Nine Peaks Media
Optimize FAQ Sections with Local Intent
I am hands-on with all aspects of the creator and coach funnel, and I made a quantifiable impact in voice search by rewriting my FAQ sections using real voice queries extracted from Google Search Console. I incorporated location-based questions such as “Who is the best to assist in putting together an online course in Houston?” or “Top coach for Kajabi setup around Chicago?” and created content blocks responding to those in 40 to 60 words directly on the page.
Within two months of posting these updates on five local landing pages, I observed a 38% rise in mobile clicks from voice search with “near me” and full questions such as “How to price my coaching program?” These are not blog posts. These are concise Q&As above the fold with structured data behind them.
I develop SEO directly, funnels, and automation for digital product companies weekly, and voice search is not an add-on feature anymore—it’s an integral part of how local intent functions these days.
Khris Steven
Content Marketer, SEO and Automation Expert / Founder, KhrisDigital Marketing
Use Conversational Language in Content
One of the most effective tips for optimizing your website for voice searches in a local context is to focus on natural, conversational language – especially in your FAQs and location-based content. People don’t speak the way they type. Instead of searching “solicitor London will writing”, someone using voice might ask, “Where can I find a solicitor near me who helps with wills?” Structuring your content to answer those full, question-style queries makes a real difference.
Adding location-specific phrases is also key. That includes making sure your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate, using schema markup for local details, and writing content that reflects how people actually refer to places – like neighborhoods or landmarks, not just postcodes.
Voice search has changed how we think about keywords. It’s less about rigid phrases now and more about understanding intent and speaking the way real people do. For us, it’s meant reworking some of our content to be more human, more local, and more direct – which, frankly, has improved engagement across the board.
Peter Wootton
SEO Consultant, The SEO Consultant Agency
Enhance Google Business Profile for Discovery
We have faced a problem of low visibility for hyper-local searches for some time, such as conversational voice searches like “best coffee shop near me now.” Our website content and SEO weren’t optimized for natural language queries or immediate local intent, missing crucial voice traffic. However, after prioritizing local voice search optimization, we now have a solution. We saw significant gains: local organic traffic attributed to likely voice queries increased by 30% within six months, and our appearance in Google’s local “Position Zero” (featured snippets) for relevant questions rose by 45%. This directly translated to more in-store visits and calls.
The primary approach was designed to carefully optimize the Google Business Profile (GBP) as the primary building block for local voice search. This strategy complements other voice search optimizations. Maintaining strict NAP (Name, Address, Phone) uniformity across all platforms, completing all GBP fields (description, categories, working hours, attributes), adding relevant Q&As with natural language such as “Do you offer oat milk?”, actively managing reviews, and incorporating local conversational phrases (“near [Landmark]”) were key components. A complete, accurate GBP signals strong local relevance to voice assistants.
Optimizing GBP fundamentally improves local discovery. For customers using voice search, it means we’re effortlessly found when they express immediate, location-based needs (“plumber open now”). Our accurate information (hours, location) and positive reviews, read aloud by the assistant, build instant trust and credibility. Features like “Call” or “Directions” buttons enable frictionless conversion directly from the search result. We are then positioned as the reliable and accurate local service provider for customers who use voice recognition.
Aditya Abhishek
Senior Front End Developer, AI Monitor
Embed Specific Addresses in FAQ Content
After helping over 100 business owners leverage AI and automation for more than 20 years, I’ve found that the most significant voice search win is embedding your exact business address in FAQ-style content. People don’t typically say “Augusta electrician” – instead, they ask Siri questions like “Who can fix my electrical problem on Walton Way?” or “What electrician works on Sunday near the Medical District?”
We restructured one Augusta healthcare client’s content around hyper-local voice queries such as “urgent care open now near Augusta University” and “pediatrician taking new patients on Hill Acres.” As a result, their new patient bookings from organic search increased by 51% in just four months, with the majority coming through voice-activated searches.
The secret to success lies in using actual street names and local landmarks in your content headers. When that same healthcare client began mentioning phrases like “serving families near Bobby Jones Expressway” and “convenient to Fort Gordon families,” Google’s algorithm connected them to voice searches from people in those exact areas. Voice search thrives on specificity.
I track our clients’ phone call patterns and have noticed that voice searchers convert 40% higher than traditional searchers – they’re usually in immediate need and tend to call the first result that sounds local and available. That’s why we now optimize every client’s content for “right now” and “today” phrases combined with specific Augusta-area references.
Raymond Strippy
Founder, Growth Catalyst Crew
Build a Voice-Ready Marketing Tree
At Simply Be Found, we help local businesses optimize for voice search by building out what we call the “Marketing Tree.” Think of your homepage as the trunk, your core service and location pages as the branches, and all the FAQs, reviews, and content pieces as the leaves that capture real search traffic.
To make this tree voice-search ready, we do three key things:
1. Answer lots of local questions in natural language—on pages, in blog posts, and in your Google Business Profile Q&A.
2. Use schema markup like FAQPage, LocalBusiness, and Service to help search engines and AI tools understand the relationships between your business info and the questions you’re answering.
3. Connect it all through the Listings Engine, which keeps your business data—like hours, service area, and categories—accurate across the web. This ensures consistency, which is key for voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant to surface your business confidently.
Why this matters: Voice search isn’t just a trend—it’s how people are finding local businesses when they’re on the go. And we’ve seen real results: clients who implement this approach see more “near me” traffic, higher map visibility, and better engagement across platforms.
Bottom line: If you want to show up in voice searches, you need more than keywords—you need structure, clarity, and trust signals that voice assistants can read and rank.
Robert Downey
Co-Founder, Simply Be Found
Leverage Customer Reviews for Visibility
I encouraged customer reviews more aggressively once I noticed how voice search was shifting traffic patterns. This was because people were no longer typing “locksmith near me.” Instead, they were saying things like “Who’s the best locksmith in Fort Lauderdale?” or “Find a locksmith with good reviews in Miami.” These types of questions don’t just pull business names; they pull reputation. So, I made it a priority to ensure we appeared with five stars next to our name.
After completing each job, especially with property managers or repeat clients, we send a simple message thanking them and requesting a Google review. It’s not a generic ask, but a personalized message that reminds them of the job we just completed. I also trained our technicians to ask for reviews on-site when appropriate. The more reviews we received, the more we appeared in voice searches across different zip codes in Florida and other states we serve.
In six months, we went from averaging 1 to 2 new Google reviews a week to 6 to 8. Our average rating improved from 4.3 to 4.8. However, the impact wasn’t merely cosmetic. Our inbound calls from voice searches, tracked through local keyword monitoring, increased by 32% across markets like Tampa, Orlando, and Austin. Voice search rewards strong public signals, and reviews are one of the strongest. That change alone made our entire web presence more cohesive and significantly more profitable.
Eli Itzhaki
CEO & Founder, Keyzoo
Adapt Ad Creatives to Voice Search
We’ve been experimenting with Google Ads campaigns targeting impressions in various U.S. cities. Along the way, we noticed something interesting: our ads were showing up for search queries that clearly came from voice search. These are easy to spot not just by the phrase “Hey Google” but also through less obvious signs, like multiple complete sentences in a single query, each with proper punctuation. As AI has advanced, speech-to-text transcription has improved significantly. Voice search queries are now getting converted into clean, grammatically correct text, and you can see it in the data.
We exported all search queries that likely came from voice input and identified recurring words and phrases like “hey”, “find”, “check”, “I’m looking”, “I need”, and others. We then created new ad creatives that used these terms right in the headlines. This tweak helped us boost CTR on voice-style queries by 20%. It turned out to be a surprisingly subtle and really fascinating process.
Eduard Mur
Founder, Searcherries
Implement Key Strategies for Local Businesses
Voice search was a major trend back in 2019, but the hype quickly fizzled.
With AI, having microphone functions to ask long-tail queries has meant some of the old voice assistant era tactics are back in play.
For local businesses, here are the key things to do:
1. Get smart with keywords that may be relevant to someone searching for things that return a local result. “Hotel near Central Park” etc. “Restaurants near [hotel]”.
2. Ensure all your GBP (Google Business Profile) data is correct. Voice results for local searches will pull in Google Business data. So your website link, click-to-call, directions, menu, services, etc., need to all be correct.
3. Use the Google Assistant and other voice devices to pull out keywords. On your phone, you can type to the Google Assistant, and it will show you tabbed recommendations based on your seed query. “Bars”, “parking”, “spa”, etc., could all be voice-relevant queries for a hotel.
The impact of all of this on my business and client sites going back to 2018/2019 was the shaping of content strategy to ensure all entity bases are covered on the website.
Ben Poulton
Founder, Intellar SEO Agency