How do you plan keywords and create and optimize content for voice search?

For voice search, start by identifying long-tail keywords from conversational questions related to your business, then filter them by search intent, search volume, and ranking difficulty. Use questions as headings, give a clear answer first, and follow with necessary details. Focus on making content natural, easy to understand, and suitable for reading aloud, while ensuring voice assistants can access your website. These approaches do not guarantee that voice assistants will select your content, and general search performance should not be treated as voice search performance.

Build a keyword list from questions users would ask

Semrush’s voice search guide (2023) recommends starting with business-related terms and expanding them into questions using “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.” Rather than simply listing product names, focus on what users want to accomplish. For example, “Where can I buy hair dye?” and “Should my hair be dry or wet when I dye it?” concern purchasing and usage needs, respectively, and should not be answered with the same generic introduction.

• List products, services, and related usage questions, then find natural variations of those questions.
• Use question filters in keyword tools and consult the “People also ask” section in search results.
• Remove phrases that are unrelated to your business, that you cannot provide relevant content for, or that do not sound like something a person would say aloud.

At Procrustes, our content services also start with questions: we turn the questions that matter to clients into articles, with ongoing planning, writing, and updates.

Select questions worth answering, not just those with high search volume

The same guide recommends considering search intent, estimated search volume, trends, and ranking difficulty together when choosing keywords. Search volume can help prioritize them, but you still need to check whether the page can meet the need behind the question. Someone asking where to buy a product needs to know where it is available. Someone asking how to use it needs instructions, not just a list of product features.

The guide also suggests a rule-of-thumb threshold of at least 100 searches per month and keyword difficulty below 50%, but this is not an official search engine requirement and should not be treated as a universal cutoff for every website. Planning should still depend on whether you can create relevant content.

Write in a question-and-answer format, then check how it sounds aloud

Semrush recommends using simple sentences, providing clear answers, minimizing jargon, and favoring the active voice. Common questions can serve as subheadings, with concise answers that retain enough detail to help readers. Do not remove conditions that affect the answer just to shorten the text.

• If there are only a few questions, add an FAQ section to a relevant article.
• If there are many questions, group them by topics such as products, payments, shipping, and returns to help readers find what they need.
• Check whether the text sounds natural when read aloud, and revise sentences that are overly formal or packed with jargon.

FAQs match the format of spoken questions and may increase the chances of content being used in voice search, but adding questions and answers alone does not guarantee visibility.

Check website access and measurement limits before revising content

Another Semrush article from 2023 recommends conducting an SEO audit first to ensure that digital assistants can easily access the website, then creating content that answers questions.

When measuring results, check whether your tools distinguish between voice and text searches. Forum author MikeFriedman questions whether voice search can be optimized independently, arguing that analytics tools do not distinguish between the two. This is a forum opinion, not a general rule about current tools. Still, if your reports cannot distinguish between the two, you should not directly attribute changes in rankings or traffic to voice search optimization.