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Apr 09 2020

10 Voice Search Ranking Factors SEO Experts Must Know

Google works hard, but SEO practitioners work harder. Every year, these digital experts rake information from the search engine giant to uncover its ranking signals. These factors help webmasters know what they should tweak in their web strategy so they can rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and give their readers a better user experience.

Back in 2014, HTTPS or secure sites became the stars of the show. Many websites changed from HTTP to HTTPS to accommodate the search ranking factor. In 2015, mobile-friendly websites took the spotlight. Web pages that were deemed optimized and responsive on a handheld device outshined those that didn’t. Then RankBrain was introduced in 2016, and its effects are very much still influencing new ranking signals.

In 2017, John Mueller from Google answered a tweet from a user who asked what the best search ranking factor is, and he replied “awesomeness.” When it boils down to it, these search ranking factors are cultivated towards a better experience for both your prospect consumers and actual customers.

A lot of changes have happened in the last five years in the search engine landscape. For instance, one of the most recent players in the game is voice search. With the rise of Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana, plus hands-free information access, it’s not surprising to learn that about 3.25 billion voice assistants are in use today. Voice search SEO is giving practitioners new findings in keyword research, as they noticed that long-tail and natural language works best for this method.

Regardless if you will optimize for voice search or not, it’s critical to know the most influential ranking signals you should be aware of for a top-ranking website.

1. Mobile-friendliness

Is your website optimized for mobile? If your answer is no, then you have to take this seriously. Your webpages are losing to other sites just because they’re mobile-friendly and you are not. It’s important to note that 2.7 billion people are using mobile devices in 2019, and this number will continue to climb in the coming years—further establishing the dominance of mobile as the future of search.

If your answer is yes, on the other hand, then you’re off to a great start. However, don’t be too complacent. There are plenty of ways to keep tweaking your pages to consistently come out at the top of search engine results. Google is slowly rolling out its mobile-first indexing feature, which launched in 2018, to make sure that those sites that follow their guidelines are rewarded. This is regularly updated containing the latest information you need to prepare for this search engine update.

Google also has a simple test online where you can see if you’re meeting the standards of their recommended mobile-friendliness. It will also reveal page loading issues, if any, and give you a screenshot of your website on mobile. From here, you can take further actions to improve your mobile experience.

2. Page Speed

Your visitors hate slow load times. Remember, 53% of desktop surfers exit pages that take longer than three seconds to load. That’s automatically lost business, and they might always associate your brand with that kind of disappointing and frustrating experience. If you don’t want this to happen to you, you have to make sure that your pages (not just the homepage!) load in under three seconds.

But desktop loading times are not the only thing you should look into.

Page speed is now a critical mobile search ranking factor as well, in conjunction with the mobile-first index. Google has made it clear that going mobile is the future of search engines and access to information, so it’s only right for you to optimize your page speed on the mobile version of your site too. You’ll be shocked to know that the average mobile landing page takes 15.3 seconds to load!

There’s room for you to fix this issue. Review the current speed of your webpage and evaluate your on-page optimization techniques to rectify sources of the lag. Some best practices are reducing redirects, removing unnecessary pop-up windows, and optimizing your images.

3. User Experience

Delivering the best user experience for your audience is what every website and brand should be focusing on. If your users don’t feel valued, they will look elsewhere for what they need. Lucky for you, you don’t need to guess how to give them this experience as there are indicating factors.

A massive chunk of UX is having a responsive layout that is easy to navigate and a website structure that makes sense, along with relevant content that answers the questions they’re asking. This matters a lot: 38% of people will cease engagements with your business if your content isn’t helpful and the layout is unpleasant.

Simple actions like optimizing your call-to-action buttons, having bigger fonts for readability, and renaming your URLs. Search engines will be able to read these and reward you for essentially making your visitors’ lives easier when they visit your site.

4. Quality Content

As mentioned in creating good UX above, content plays a huge role in ensuring that your site is establishing its authority in your industry and giving your browsers the information that they came for. This is especially true for content that is optimized with vigorously researched keywords.

Articles with a considerable amount of length are also favored. Five years ago, the era of blog posts ranging around 200-500 words was the norm, but not anymore. Stats show that the average content length for websites on the first page of SERPs is around 1,900 words. Longer word count demonstrates thorough expertise on a topic, which in turn is positive exposure for your brand. Ideally, the longer your article is, the more information you can put there—much to your visitors’ delight.

If you do end up publishing content that’s around 200-300 words in length, be careful. Google penalizes thin content, and this can haunt the ranking of some of your webpages.

Focus on fleshing out evergreen topics and incorporating an intent to educate your readers. The most common types of articles are how-tos and list articles. Include credible sources and statistics when necessary as well.

5. Authoritative Domain

The domain rating (DR) is a score given to your website based on its quality and authority. The higher the quality of content you have, the more backlinks you gather, and the more boxes you tick under Google’s guidelines, the higher your DR will be. This takes a lot of time and consistent effort to achieve, but once you’re there, you will reap many benefits.

For instance, in the voice search world, websites with higher domain authority are usually one of the top candidates for the featured search result that the voice assistant will deliver to the user. The average DR of voice search results is 76.8 compared to only 21.1 on the web.

Working towards a higher DR should be part of your overall SEO strategy. It’s interwoven in your off-page and on-page optimization efforts, as the DR also reflects the number of domains that link to your page and the subsequent DR of those pages that link to you. If you’re consistently published on credible content in the industry, your DR will also rise.

6. HTTPS or Secure Websites

While HTTPS has been around for quite some time already, it wasn’t until July 2018 that Google announced it would start flagging all websites that don’t begin with HTTPS as “non-secure” on the Google Chrome browser. If you think that’s negligible, the stats will prove you otherwise: according to a 2019 survey, Chrome is the most popular web browser at 63%. It accounts for well over half of the world’s web traffic, with Safari trailing far behind at second place.

While there will technically be nothing wrong with your website if you’re not sporting the HTTPS on your URL, having a “not secure” label does send a quite ominous message to your visitors. Google is building a safer and more secure web, so they started to roll out these changes to the Chrome browser to send a message to webmasters to make the switch.

HTTPS is known as hypertext transfer protocol secure, which means having a variant of the standard web protocol with a layer of security via a secure socket layer (SSL). This is the protocol over which data is sent between a browser and a website.

Stats from Google Chrome usage show that there are currently more than 70% of Chrome users who are visiting HTTPS websites, meaning that browsing via this server is becoming standard. The non-secure tag is presumably to convince the remaining 30% to follow suit.

7. Social signals

Your performance on social media also says a lot to search engines about your credibility and authority. Social signals are defined as the number of shares, likes, and reposts of your content on various social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Since search engines want to provide high-quality and relevant content to users, they consider the media visibility and impact specific posts have online. If you’re getting shared frequently, the URL of your post will appear around Google more, and this tells them that you most likely have relevant and helpful information on your website.

Social signals aren’t only a share or retweet. They can also pertain to mentions on community sites such as Reddit, Tumblr, and Quora. This action has had an increased impact on search rankings, according to a study by Search Engine Journal.

Creating shareable content doesn’t always have to be viral or comedic. You’ll be surprised that your readers are more in favor of straightforward information versus incredibly funny delivery. If you can inject humor naturally and create an entertaining experience for your readers, then, by all means, do so—but don’t forget the main reason why you’re doing it. You want to spread information and show your users that your website can provide them the answers they’re looking for.

8. Site Architecture

Website architecture is a bit different from the layout of your website. This refers to the arrangement of your pages and subcategories on your website’s menu, and if you’ve assigned them the proper hierarchy so that your readers find the information they need at a faster pace.

This also includes tagging your subpages with the proper URL so that the search engine can read where the origin or parent menu of the subcategory. Generally, when creating URLs, shorter is better. You may use one or two keywords for higher relevancy but ensure that they’re easily read. This will improve user experience and lead to better rankings.

Besides the fact that it’s logical to do this, you’ll help search engines crawl your website faster if you fix your website structure. When search engines crawl your site, they look at all other links they can explore further and add this to their index, which is essentially a library of all the websites on the web. This crawl checks for duplicates of your webpage on other sites, its page speeds, mobile-friendliness, and more.

9. Quality Links

Backlinks have long been known to increase the search rankings of websites, but it’s not an easy feat to accomplish. You have to prove to various sites that you have content resources worthy of citation. This boosts your credibility and authority in your industry, and as previously mentioned, improves your domain authority.

There are various strategies that can fast track your link building efforts, such as guest posting, content outreach, and press releases. You can contact websites who would be willing to republish your content that’s relevant to their website. You can also build links internally so that you can create a library of your content related to your posts.

10. Local SEO

97% of users type queries to find a local business, and Google is aware of this. If you fill up your Google My Business Listing and provide your address on your website, your business will have a listing snippet at the upper right-hand corner of SERPs. This will encourage users to click on your website and help in your brand visibility in your neighborhood. Remember: Google is all about connecting users to brands that make it easy for their prospective customers to find what they need. Providing this information will increase your ranking.

The impact of practicing local SEO also translates well to sales, as a recent study showed that 78% of local mobile search results result in an in-store purchase.

The Takeaway

Learning the voice search ranking signals of search engines gives you a better idea of what you can improve on your website to serve the needs of your target audience better. These are not one-time steps but a series of interlinked strategies that aim to give the best user experience.

There are a lot of resources on optimizing your site for desktop and mobile search, but not so much for voice. Voice SEO can help your business stay on top of its game by offering voice search optimization services so that you can adapt to the future of information access. The voice search takeover is already happening—it’s time to catch up.

Apr 09 2020

Ultimate Guide to SEO Keyword Research for Voice Search

Technology has become a massive influence in every process across many industries. It has sparked many changes as advancements help streamline these processes to make them easier to do, cover more complex tasks, or introduce a new one altogether.

In the field of digital marketing, one of the most effective tactics for success is with search engine optimization (SEO), and a huge part of what makes this work is a good keyword research strategy. It’s one of the bases of how your website or perhaps a piece of content can easily be found on the web. While this has been made possible by the wonders of technology and the internet, it doesn’t stop there; the process has evolved further.

The integration of virtual assistants in smart devices has introduced a far more convenient method to search the web: voice search. This adds a new dynamic to the digital marketing process, altering the SEO landscape through a change in user behavior. To adapt, you’ll need to update your keyword research strategy too.

SEO Then and Now

During the pre-voice search era, SEO was focused on keyword research for ranking websites through crawling algorithms. It followed a pretty straightforward formula: publish content based on keyword density, optimize on-page, and build links. Now, modern SEO involves churning out authoritative content that puts users first, and the same goes for voice search SEO.

Voice search is a growing trend and is set to revolutionize how users look for answers to queries they launch on search engines. This comes as no surprise since it’s far more convenient to state your query instead of typing it in the search box. In fact, voice search is 3.7 times faster than typing. To put things in perspective, there are individuals who can speak 110-150 words per minute compared to the average typing rate going for 38-40 words per minute.

This level of convenience has led to a whopping 3,004% rise in voice search queries from 2008 to 2017. In January 2018 alone, an estimated one billion voice searches were conducted by users. By 2019, the voice recognition market is expected to reach the $601 billion mark. It’s undeniable that voice search is going to be the new norm in looking up information on the internet, so it’s only prudent to get your voice SEO game on point

How to Do Keyword Research for Voice Search

Since queries are done differently in voice search, you’ll need a different strategy in doing your keyword research. It’s important to keep in mind that the differences in spoken and typed queries may produce varied SERPs. This means that if a website is voice search optimized, it has better chances of engaging potential customers or subscribers compared to standard optimization.

If you want your website to rank high for voice queries as with the typed ones, here are a few things you need to do when doing keyword research:

Autocomplete

Autocomplete, or Google Suggest, is a free tool that has been around for 14 years and counting. The feature can be found across many applications, providing some form of entertainment and causing controversy in other instances, but most importantly, it’s a great research tool when conducting searches.

To help remedy these amusing autocorrect suggestions, there are in-house tools that can be installed. However, this is also an action you can carry out manually by adding your keyword in the search box and selecting the right suggestions.

It’s important to note that search volumes per month and cost per click (CPC) estimates are all generated by the Keywords Everywhere tool, which you need to have a way to get instant feedback regarding the number of people searching for a specific keyword and the commercial intent that follows it.

This method will work well for some industries but not all of them. Take down all of the keyword suggestions you find and put them in your list of ideas you’ve generated from Google Search Console. Once this has been established, you can start looking at voice search in greater detail.

Voice search is mainly used for asking questions, which mainly involve the Whos, Whats, and Wheres of the world. Having a list of these question modifiers can make you take the Google Suggest keyword data even further.

What	Does
Where	Can
When	Have
How	Was
Why	Will
Should	Are
Which	Who
Do	Is

All these question modifiers can help you dig deep into the questions people are asking since these may not always have a huge search volume and be easily searchable. To expand the keyword set even further, use wildcards in the search queries with the main subject.
Some of your questions may not make sense and may include keywords that you don’t want to go after, but doing this for all the modified questions and your key subjects will give you a good starting point for your voice-focused keyword search.

Negative Keyword List

Negative keywords play an important part in search engine optimization by preventing your website from appearing on search queries for specific keywords that you don’t want to be associated with. This is crucial in fine-tuning your keyword research, particularly in cases where you don’t want your website to appear in keywords that can have a negative impact on your business.

Trim your existing list by creating another list of negative keywords you don’t want your site to appear for.
Look over your list and single out queries that have nothing to do with what you offer.
If you run an e-commerce website that sells luxury bags, add queries that have words such as “affordable,” “bargain,” “cheap,” and “inexpensive” to your negative keyword list.

Conduct a Competitor Benchmark

In running a business, it’s essential to know what’s going on with the competition, so you can find out how you stack up against them. This isn’t anything new, but you’ll still need to take the necessary steps in making your data set as unfailing as possible and not miss anything the competition is doing.

Enter your competitors’ information into Ahrefs or SEMrush
Filter down by their informational areas
Find new ideas from the competition
Use your question-related modifiers and add them to your list

Expand on Your Keyword Set Using Questions

Let’s assume you’re running a website that’s already ranking on search engines. This is a great baseline that will help you start optimizing for voice search. As you all know, conducting voice searches are all about questions, making Ahrefs’s question tool invaluable.

Since this is going to be one of the most important parts of your keyword research, it may be worth inputting the main categories in this section to find questions around those, since Ahrefs only takes the first ten keywords from the keyword list. You can then gradually dig deeper after having the main questions.
Depending on the niche, there will be many long-tail questions with very little search volume. You should filter through these to see if they are useful. If they are, keep them; if not, it would be better to simply get rid of them.
There are other instruments you can use for keyword research, so you can find questions that people are trying to ask when they conduct searches. Keep in mind that depending on your niche, this option may or may not be helpful. You can check out Quora, where you can find voice-based questions that people use to seek assistance.
When you have the first results of queries in your list, you can include them in your Excel sheet, keyword set, or Ahref data. The same can be said about Pinterest since it can also help in looking for questions in the retail and lifestyle sectors.
If you wish to go the extra mile in broadening your keyword set, you can use the associated queries tool. This can help you improve on what you already have on your list. And if you combine all that you have from search console with the ones you’ve obtained from associated queries, you’ll have plenty of relevant questions to begin your voice search strategy.

Tips When Doing Keyword Research for Voice Search

Voice search delivers a big and important change in the world of SEO. In this regard, there are best practices that you need to know, so your keyword research for voice search SEO can become easier and more effective in execution.

Know your buyer persona

Before you even begin shifting your focus on keywords, it’s important to understand your buyers to know what they need so that you can address it properly. If you still haven’t done any research on this, it would be best to spend some time conducting interviews with your customers to understand their goals, pain points, and issues. Make sure you pay attention to the phrases and words they use, which may be useful in your keyword research strategy.

Study and use the best tools in the market

You can’t execute tasks the proper way if you’re not equipped with the right tools for the job. Understanding keywords and common phrases is crucial in your voice search optimization efforts, so you’ll need to utilize the many tools and software that are available to help you acquire more data and do this better. Tools like Ahrefs, HubSpot, Keywords Everywhere, Moz, SERPS, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner all have specific features to help you become a smarter researcher with the keywords you’re targeting.

Review your website authority

Website or domain authority is a point system scaled from 1 to 100. A brand website starts with a score of 1, and the closer it gets to 100, the tougher it gets to earn more points. While there isn’t a good or bad number, it’s important to consider this when you start focusing on your keyword strategy.

To know what your website’s domain authority is, you can use tools such as Moz’s Open Site Explorer or the SEO Review Tools Website Authority Checker.

Analyze data to find opportunities

Taking the time to study the data trends is a great way to better understand how your target audience uses search terms and phrases. This is where you can determine if they conduct their searches via questions or just short phrases.

You can then sort your keywords by difficulty, starting from lowest to highest. Find keyword opportunities that have low difficulty but deliver high monthly searches. It’s recommended to go after keywords with a difficulty score of below 50, but if your website has a high domain authority, you can go after more difficult keywords right away.

Use long-tail conversational keywords

In voice search optimization, keywords are not just keywords anymore. In the world of voice search, you’ll need to use long-tail+, with the plus referring to the conversational phrases that you need to include when optimizing for conversational voice search.

The change involving your keyword strategy will now be focused on being more conversational in nature and follow how people talk and how they verbally ask questions in real life. You can start by thinking about the kinds of questions customers call when they ask about anything revolving around your business and documenting the exact words they use when they engage your team in customer service.

Once you have a list of statements and questions your customers frequently speak about over the phone, you can begin the creation of content based on those longer, more conversational search terms.

Review and repeat

Rounding everything up is an important move that will make sure you’ve done it right: take a step back, wait, review, and repeat. First, you take a step back and gather enough data to accurately gauge how your new list of voice search optimized keywords will perform.

With that data in your hands, you can review the performance of all your keywords and figure out if they are helping you capture voice search traffic. If they’re good, keep them and come up with keywords similar to them including other variations. If not, remove them from your list and repeat the process until you’ve come up with a list of keywords that brings the optimal traffic for your brand.

Final Thoughts

Voice search offers a host of advantages following its emergence as an alternative to the standard search. For one, it makes going on websites or accessing an app quicker and easier, which could be crucial when driving or being in the middle of an activity where you can’t directly use your smartphone. Perhaps, it’s just more fun to interact with virtual assistants rather than type queries on search engines. Regardless of the reason, people are increasingly more inclined to use voice search, so as a marketer, you’ll need to adapt to this change and up your voice SEO game. It’s the only way you’ll be able to grow your business in this rapidly changing digital environment.

Apr 08 2020

Voice Search SEO for B2B Marketing: A Complete Guide

It’s well-known that voice search is making waves in B2C marketing, especially when it comes to online shopping, navigation, product discovery, and more. It’s improving the quality of customers’ lives and revolutionizing the way companies market their goods and services. The tech is smart, too. As of 2017, Google’s speech recognition was already 95% accurate for the English language.

While voice search is more commonly linked with B2C, its impact on B2B can sometimes get overlooked. You’ve probably heard the popular Comscore figure where half of all internet searches will be done via voice in 2020. Or, you may or may not be aware that usage of voice assistants will triple to 8 billion by 2023.

These various statistics that talk about the rising ownership of smart speakers include business owners as well, which means as a B2B marketer, you should shape your online and SEO strategy to accommodate this portion of your audience.

What B2B Marketers Need to Know About Voice Search

Since B2B buyers are part of the demographic of voice search users, the tech will soon infiltrate and help them in their professional lives as well. Because of the rising popularity of the platform, there’s no doubt that the B2B industry will see voice search as a tool they can leverage in their respective organizations.

As it stands, the tech is evolving, and there’s not always a need for a smart speaker to begin. Figures say more than 50% of consumers already use voice search, with 81% accessing it via their smartphones.

Mobile is incredibly important in the B2B industry. Over 60% of B2B buyers say that mobile did play a role in their purchases. Moreover, it’s estimated that 70% of B2B searches will be made on smartphones by 2020. That’s less than a year away. Why is this tidbit important? You must get to know your audience’s behavior and find the channels they’re using to perform everyday tasks. Knowing their preferred platform is just the first step, which will be touched on again in a bit.

It’s worthy to note that voice search hinges on what already exists online. The tech may be relatively new, but it depends on the information you make available, such as your website. If you truly want to maximize the power that this tool can offer your business, you must have a solid content strategy in place and work closely with your team’s search engine optimization experts. Although voice search SEO for B2B is an entirely different game, a lot of their foundation remains the same.

Voice search is diverse and can be used to your advantage in many ways. Below are tips on how to optimize your content and get your company set up for voice search.

How B2B Companies Can Optimize Their Website for Voice Search

Have a strong presence on mobile

Since mobile is an essential platform for B2B buyers, it only makes sense to boost your efforts in this channel. Get into the frame of mind of your target audience: B2B customers are always on the go, becoming increasingly dependent on mobile devices to perform certain functions in their work.

How do you do this? You have to start by improving your mobile UX and UI. While it’s not explicitly related to voice search only, it does impact your overall SEO strategy. Google prioritizes websites that are optimized for mobile since it’s now a ranking factor. It signals them that this particular website took time to fix its structure to be more helpful for visitors.

First, do a checkup. Google has a free mobile-friendly test that gives suggestions and points out errors on your site. Next, address any issues stated. If all seems to be working fine, do some speed loading tests and see if your website is up to par with customer expectations. Remember: B2B buyers are looking for professionalism and information right at their fingertips. If you keep them waiting long or have a disorganized page, they won’t think twice to look elsewhere.

Build an FAQ page

In line with providing as much information as you can on your website, creating an FAQ page will help ease the worries of your B2B audience and get what they need without having to contact your reps. Anything that can save them time is a great thing. This will shorten the dialogue and decision-making process for them if they want to hire your services or not.

FAQ pages also allow you to mirror the queries that your audience may be asking their voice assistants. The key here is to make sure you’re writing them in the first-person perspective and making them sound as natural as possible as if you’re speaking to a colleague. 70% of voice searches are conversational, which is why this tactic works. Give short, direct answers that provide just the right amount of information you can share, and use internal links to redirect them to in-depth discussions.

Aim to rank for the featured snippet

SEO used to focus so much on getting the first position on search engine results pages, but now, Position Zero is aiming to disrupt that goal. Targeting the featured snippet for your service pages or blog is one of the fastest ways to get your audience to notice you.

Featured snippets are what voice assistants read aloud to a user in response to their query. That’s a big deal and tremendous opportunity. In the voice search universe, you’re not competing with other blue links for your buyer’s attention—it’s all or nothing. If you don’t have the top spot, you risk the reputation and sales of your business.

Ranking for the featured snippet takes time, which is why you have to get right down to optimizing your content as early as now. Here are a few pointers on how to get the coveted spot:

Be specific and answer a query thoroughly. Focus on who, what, and why questions that will allow you to explain the answer with enough context thoroughly. Don’t throw in unnecessarily fillers; stick to the facts.
Format your content properly. Let search engines crawl through your page faster and clue them in that your page has the most complete and organized answer to a specific query.
Always churn out high-quality content. This tip won’t let you down. You can’t come up with thin material or trick your way to getting recognized by Google. Focus on quality rather than quantity.

Target voice search queries

What are your web visitors asking that lead them to your website? Focus on those queries and make sure you have pages or articles that will answer those questions or mention specific keywords that were in the question. You can use your insights as a springboard for future content or promotion so that you can increase your visibility online.

With the proper SEO analysis tools, you’ll be able to uncover the top questions asked about your brand. Voice search queries usually start with “what” or “how,” and contain the words “best” and “top.” Focus on educational pieces and showcase how your services come out to the top. Creating articles with these in your title also works, even if it’s a list that includes yourself and your competitors. The brand recall will be much higher, as they consider you to be the expert of the field.

Prioritize long-tail keywords

Even if people are speaking to (invisible) voice assistants when they make queries, they will be inclined to use natural language instead of shorter keywords they’re used to type. This means complete sentences versus phrases, making the keywords specific to voice search longer.

The good news is, it’s much easier to rank for long tail keywords versus shorter ones. Take the query “voice search,” for instance. At the time of writing, there are over 1.7 billion search results relating to the topic. However, if you narrow it down to “best practices for voice search SEO,” results narrow down to about 16.5 million. Yes, that’s still a lot—but you’ve significantly reduced your competition by focusing on more specific keywords that your voice searching audience would be using more of anyway.

Long-tail keywords make up 70% of all keywords, so make sure to include these longer terms for higher chances in appearing on voice search results.

Use conversational language for your content strategy

Why stop at long-tail keywords? You can adopt the conversational technique across all of your marketing and content channels. As long as it’s on-brand, make it a habit to talk to your B2B audience like a professional colleague, where they can learn from you but not feel too intimidated by the content you’re putting out.

The more you train yourself to churn out content using natural language, the more your website will rank higher in voice search. You might be unintentionally including strong keywords you didn’t know you could be ranking for, as you get deeper into the headspace of a customer who uses voice search to locate your business.

Get your business listed

Google My Business is a great way to help your company appear in the global directory of millions of businesses worldwide. It provides your address, lists your operating hours, and can also include your contact information. When your business is listed, you will earn a snippet in SERPs containing all of that information. If a customer is interested in looking for professional services in a specific location, your company will appear in that shortlist too, maximizing your reach.

Local SEO is an integral part of voice search. Stats show that 46% of voice search users look for local businesses every day. Plus, mobile voice searches are thrice more likely to be local-based than text. If you’re not hooked up on Google My Business, you’re losing a fair amount of money to users who have no idea where you are. Including location information gives your visitors some peace of mind of where you’re operating too, versus some company that can disappear into cyberspace.

If you have a brick and mortar store, local SEO can help point voice search users to your place. This is relevant for shops like restaurants, malls, convenience stores, and the like.

Develop your brand voice

While there’s a lot of suggestions here on how to structure your content and which keywords to focus on, your business won’t fly well if you don’t develop your unique voice. Every company out there will struggle to be original, and that’s a good thing. Imagine a user coming across content written the same way among three different websites—no one wants to read the same thing online.

Users look for your unique selling point (USP), so give them that. Study your competitors, see what’s working for them, but don’t stop there. Take a look at what’s not been done before and aim to see how you can spice things up. Make things uniform, too. It’s crucial to sound consistent across all pages so that your branding looks and sounds solid—bonus points to your audience.

Make Voice Search a Priority Today

Voice search is bound to become an invaluable lead generation tool in the B2B industry. It’s up to your company to learn how to harness its potential and make the necessary steps to get ahead of the game. The voice search craze is not going to happen in the future, as it already exists today. Numbers will continue to grow, users will multiply, and it’s only a matter of time before all searches are done via voice.

If you’re looking for direction on where to start, doing the steps mentioned above will already put you in a better place versus the rest. If you’re aiming for the top, it would be better to tap experts to help you out on this journey. Voice search is a diverse field, and a lot can happen in a short period. The Voice SEO team can help break down the process for you and work with your business to dominate your B2B industry.

Apr 08 2020

Top 7 Skills to Upgrade for the Voice Search Revolution

The Voice Search Revolution

Remember when Siri first came out and no one took her seriously? We’d ask questions like “Hey Siri! Do you love me?” or “Hey Siri, what is the meaning of life?” hoping for a funny answer to come along. Things have changed A LOT since then.

When voice search first arrived, not everyone could truly value its potential. But now, speaking to an inanimate object isn’t so bad after all! With recent developments in technology, the current trends suggest that the evolution of voice search will cause the digital industry to shift in its direction.

By 2020 it is estimated that 50% of online searches will be coming from voice search. The convenience that voice assistants such as Siri and Cortana provide works both ways. Not only does it make life easier for users by providing quick and concise results for their inquiries, but it also makes it easier for marketers to get their brands out there.

As advanced and stable as voice search may seem, it will always be in the development stage. Preparing for these changes are crucial for optimization. With an ever-changing digital marketing landscape, keeping up with the change will allow you to remain ahead of the curve.

How Does Voice Search Change the Way People Gather Information?

When one uses a text-based search, the tendency is that the words inputted in the search engine are often unspecified, vague, and robotic. Let’s say you want to know more about the piano by typing the word “piano info” in the search engine. The results are out, but did you get the information you were looking for? What about pianos are you looking for exactly? Is it just a picture of a piano, a list of piano prices, or a piano tutorial? Typed searches often lack keywords, making it difficult for search engines to provide you with the right information.

Before we dive deeper into voice search, we need to ask the question: Why do people use voice search in the first place? Simple! Everyone needs an assistant to lighten up the load. Voice search changes the way we gather information. Speaking to your mobile device or gadget is a quicker way to help you find your answer, and it also requires less effort.

It is reported that 70% of searches on Google Assistant use natural language. Voice search keywords are significantly longer than text-based searches because it causes us to be more specific. In voice search, the user will ask, “What are the best pianos to buy this year?” Instead of just typing in two to three words, using voice search unconsciously alters our behavior by causing us to use natural language and longer queries.

With voice search, the context and intent of the queries are clearer. Thus, it becomes easier for search engines to understand and provide the most relevant results.

Location and Intent

Let’s say you were walking around the city one afternoon and you suddenly wanted to try a new restaurant near you. You take out your phone and use voice search to help you out. Your assistant (may it be Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, or Alexa) will automatically use your location and perhaps even the weather to help you navigate. In just a minute, you were able to find restaurants near you, all with the information you need, such as the address, contact number, and operating hours.

Google reports that “near me now” searches have grown by 150% over the last two years. More than just providing your current whereabouts, the phrase “near me” is a crucial bit of information for businesses because it expresses one’s intention. Note that this is not only limited to services such as restaurants, hotels, or gas stations.

Searchers are starting to become more specific with the things they want to buy. Whether someone’s looking for a cute dress or a nice pair of boots, marketers need to take advantage of these micro-moments when the intent to purchase is strong. Make sure that the content you are producing is optimized for queries expressing high purchasing intent, such as “near me” voice search.

Maximizing Results

Compared to before, simple and mediocre content doesn’t come up as easily as it used to. Google’s algorithms are getting smarter and smarter, and at the same time, the competition is getting tighter than ever before. Sadly, the first page of the results section won’t get any bigger despite the growing number of competitors. You wouldn’t want your site to get moved to page 2.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page) features such as Knowledge Graph and Featured Snippets (also known as Position Zero) has affected the number of organic clicks websites, which has dropped by 37%. SERP features remove the need to visit a page to get your answer. By inputting the right keywords, you can find your answer immediately in the search results.

While this dip in click-through rate may seem discouraging, take it as an indication that Google’s answer-focused technology has truly advanced so much in terms of accuracy and relevancy. This builds searchers’ trust in search engine; the same trust will trickle down to your brand’s content if it appears as a Featured Snippet. The more you rank for Position Zero, the more searchers trust and rely on your content for answers.

Optimizing for voice search SEO requires you to create reliable content that is readily available. By providing timely and relevant answers through your content, trust between you and your target audience will get stronger. Regardless of what industry your business is in, acquiring high-quality SEO services will help keep your website on top of the results page.

Skills to Improve for Voice Search

By now you should know that voice search isn’t just a fad. If you haven’t incorporated it into your company’s SEO strategy, DO IT NOW. If you’ve already done so, then good for you. However, you should continuously learn about current trends to prepare for the changes to come. Here are some key areas you can improve on to acquire optimal voice search SEO results.

Voice Keyword Research

Research for high performing keywords. As mentioned previously, compared to text-based searches, voice searches provide better results by providing answers that use natural language. Keywords such as “best” and “beaches” will slowly get replaced with long and natural keywords such as “best beaches in Asia to go to for the month of April.” In a nutshell, natural sounding keywords are going to get a boost in volume as voice search grows.

Let’s not get off the wrong foot here. Bigger doesn’t always mean better. This is not to say that you should only optimize your page around long keywords; you can get creative and find ways to spread them out in the content you are creating. Regardless of where your keyword is placed, once Google finds it, they’ll immediately use it as a voice search result.

Considering how the changes in keywords affect how search engines operate, always take the time to update your keyword research and analysis skill. Additionally, explore tools that can help you perform keyword research!

Local SEO

“Near me” searches are at an all-time high. As such, it’s also high time you reassess and refresh your Local SEO know-how. You don’t want to miss the opportunity to get your business out there.

Don’t ignore the importance of a well-crafted My Business Page. Make sure that your Google My Business Page is up to date with the right address, store hours, and contact number.

Creating your own Google My Business page will make it easier for your customers to reach you. Not only do you provide your rankings, location, and contact details, you immediately make a good first impression.

SEO Audit Specifically on Site Speed

Page speed has always been a crucial factor in SEO, but with voice search, it is even more important now more than ever. Users of voice search are always on the go and don’t have the time to waste. If your site speed isn’t optimized, they won’t hesitate to leave and look for answers elsewhere.

Indeed, the loading speed of a voice search result is 3.8x faster than the average website speed. Learn how to use and analyze your current website speed with PageSpeed Insights and other SEO audit tools. Knowing how to audit your themes, plugins, and other site integrations that may be affecting your site speed is a key skill to develop for voice SEO.

Various tools tell you whether your site’s current loading time and give recommendations on how to make it even faster. However, tools are only as good as the user. Fully understanding what kind of data you’re getting makes all the difference in optimizing your site speed.

Content Optimization

Producing Voice Search FAQ Pages

In a previous study by Backlinko, one of their findings suggested that Google tends to answer queries with 29-word results. An example used in“Near me” searches“Near me” searches their study would be the results for the query “Are figs good for you?” Google responded with: “Figs are high in fiber and a good source of several essential minerals, including magnesium, manganese, calcium, copper, and potassium, as well as vitamins, principally K and B6.” The result ended up with only 28 words.

When addressing questions by consumers, the results of the study implies that we should always try to answer queries in 30 words or less. Google prefers giving short answers; this is probably the reason why voice search results are more likely to come from FAQ pages.

For the record, this doesn’t mean that you should only write 30-word blog posts. Aligned with the skills mentioned above, the voice search revolution should encourage you to re-hone your writing skills to be short and sweet.

Optimizing For Featured Snippets

Almost half (40.7%) of voice search results come from the featured snippet. Nowadays, consumers don’t necessarily have to dive in the bottom of the article just to get the answers they want. Optimizing for featured snippets provides convenience for voice search users because they immediately have their answers and follow up questions in the first page.

Note that for Google Home and Alexa, search results will only give you one answer, making it more crucial to get in the featured snippet. To get your content in a featured snippet, you must learn how to create “snippable” content. For starters, practice producing content that directly answers your chosen keyword phrase and formatting it into either a paragraph, list, or table.

Writing Content with Natural Language

When searching for information via your phone’s voice assistant, people speak as if they’re talking to a normal human. Just like the Piano example above, voice searches are more natural and organic as compared to keyboard searches. When someone asks a question like, “Is feeding chicken bones to dogs safe?” Google will immediately look for a match in a site’s content. Natural questions require natural answers.

Study the conversationally-phrased queries your target audience is using and exercise writing your content using natural, and casual language.

Embedding Long Tail Keywords Into Long Form Content

Voice searches are significantly longer than keyboard searches. Using long tail keywords & questions is a good practice for both traditional and voice search SEO. Long key phrases have less competition and provide an opportunity for your site to gain higher rankings.

Content that answers explicit questions like who, what, how, where, and why have featured snippets. Thus, choose the right questions you want to address and add them to pages around your site.

Learn how to gauge which long-tail keyword has the most potential and incorporate these in the headers; then provide answers for the main question and other related questions in the body.

Video SEO

Aside from featured snippets, Google has recently developed what they would call “Video Featured Snippets.” It’s a quick video result, but instead of linking a whole YouTube video, Google only shows you the clip that is relevant to your needs. Often, these types of videos tend to pop up more for natural language queries.

Let’s say someone would like to find out how to increase your views on YouTube. The regular desktop searcher would type something like “YouTube SEO” as compared to the voice search user that will say, “How do I rank my YouTube videos?”

Video is one of the ways that Google answers voice search queries. When inquiring about something, most people would rather watch a video than read an article. Assess if your existing videos are optimized and add web video optimization to your list of skills to update. If you have yet to create video content, get to it!

Link Building

Sites with lots of links appear more often in voice searches. Voice search results are just a single result, so Google wants to make sure that they’re giving you the information you need from a trusted source. This causes them to lean towards domain authority over page authority. When you focus on building up your Domain Authority, Google will want to use different pages of your site as a source.

Like citing references on a research paper, having different links on your site is a way to assure Google that the information your page provides is well researched and valid. Having a lot of high authority sites linking to your page is a signal that you are a trusted source of information.

Aside from assessing the backlinks you’ve earned, evaluate your current link building arsenal. Are your tactics up to date? You’ll know that you need to update it if your outreach emails are no longer getting opened and you’re no longer getting new backlinks; tell-tale signs that you need to explore new link building tactics!

Schema markup

You can control how search engines provide information about your brand. The content on your website will most likely get indexed in the results, but with schema markup, you can decide on what content gets indexed.

Let’s say your site name appears on an article. By optimizing with schema markup, you’re already telling Google what your site is all about making it easier for relevant and related information to be linked to your site. Having structured data give your pages a higher chance to appear in featured snippets and voice search results.

That said, learning how to add structured data to your page will pay off generously. Structuring your data with schema markup will make the process a whole lot easier for users and search engines to understand your site.

Conclusion

The digital industry is taking steps towards the direction voice search is heading. With its development in recent years, we can already expect that more improvements and changes are to be made. With the number of voice search users increasing constantly, marketers need to understand how their audience is using this technology and what they can do to utilize it.

The best way to secure your business’ future is to learn about the trends and methods that will help your site boost its traditional and voice search SEO. The best way to be prepared for the future is to never stop learning. Constantly improving your skill set is the best way to maintain your position at the head of the curve. Hopefully, our tips were able to help you take the next step in developing your site’s voice search SEO.

Apr 07 2020

Voice Search SEO for Alexa: How to Optimize for Amazon’s Smart Assistant

Much like the evolution of voice-recognition technology that paved the way for smart assistants, e-commerce giant Amazon went through similar progress that allowed them to become one of the businesses to reach $1 trillion in market value. Not bad for a company that started as a humble bookstore.

However, Amazon isn’t content with innovating e-commerce. Products and services like e-book reader Kindle and digital content platform Amazon Video have proven that the Seattle-based company is also trying to influence other aspects of the consumers’ digital experience. With the continuing surge of voice-enabled software and tech, it’s no surprise that Amazon has also dipped their toes into it.

Alexa: Amazon’s Foray into Voice Tech

In 2014, Amazon launched Alexa, its first smart assistant, integrated into their smart home speaker Echo. Alexa does what other voice-enabled assistants do—look up information to answer to queries, play songs, order food, call, and many other tasks. One of the major differences is that it wasn’t initially integrated into a smartphone (though it now has an app), so it can be used completely hands-free.

It’s also no surprise that Amazon’s voice-recognition software places particular importance on shopping, allowing users to order products by asking it to search for an item off Amazon. Alexa will reply with the item and its price, and then ask a 4-digit security code to validate the order.

One caveat to this is, for now, Amazon Prime members are the only ones who can shop through Alexa, and only select Prime-eligible products, as well as specific product types, can be purchased.

The Influence of Amazon’s Choice in Alexa SEO

For Amazon sellers, being awarded the Amazon’s Choice badge can significantly influence their optimization and how they appear to consumers looking to buy something off the platform.

Amazon’s Choice is given to “highly rated, well-priced products available to ship immediately.” Essentially, this means that an item has been bought many times, and customers were satisfied with it based on Amazon’s reviews data. More importantly, when shopping using Alexa, the badge means that the smart assistant would recommend a particular item when a specific keyword is used.

It was created for a seamless voice-shopping experience, where consumers can’t see all their options. It also helps buyers maze through millions of listings easily, especially when they are searching for something relatively generic, and is a way to combat choice overload when choosing through a range of almost identical products.

One of the problems, though, is that for many categories, several options fit Amazon’s Choice generic description. It doesn’t help that the company isn’t as transparent about how products can land the coveted badge. However, there are a few clues left on Seller Forums that sellers can incorporate to maximize their chances of landing the award. According to a response from the company:

“We don’t offer Amazon’s Choice for all searches. Amazon’s Choice recommendations are selected by taking a variety of factors into account including popularity, rating, and reviews, availability, shipping speed, amongst other factors….’

‘There is not currently a means of requesting that your product be selected as Amazon’s Choice for a given search (keyword). Selections are constantly updated, so continuing to offer high quality, well-priced products to your buyers will give you the best chance to be selected as Amazon’s Choice.”

In conclusion, Amazon’s Choice heavily relies on:

High customer rating
Availability to ship via Prime or by Amazon itself, if not always sold by Amazon
Low return rate
Competitiveness of price

7 Ways to Optimize for Amazon’s Alexa

If you’re peddling your products on this e-commerce site, you’d definitely want to be part of the few chosen for Amazon’s Choice. But since this isn’t the only prerequisite for Alexa to reply your items to consumers who would use the smart assistant when buying, you’d also want to look at other techniques that would help you win Alexa’s favor.

1. Do keyword optimization for your Alexa SEO

Several Amazon sellers believe that keyword is significant in voice-enabled purchases; that adding or removing a word can result in different recommendations. For instance, “toothpaste” may turn up Crest 3D White, but “best toothpaste” may show Cali White, a lesser-known toothpaste brand.

Keyword optimization has always been a necessary tactic in SEO, and for Alexa SEO, it’s no different as it helps search engines understand what your content (in this case, your product and the product page) is about. Obviously, the first step in keyword optimization is finding the best ones. There are two types of keywords you need to look for:

Primary

A primary keyword is one that is highly relevant to your product, brand, or industry. To find this, enter a topic or term into Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool, then use the Relevance filter. Make sure that the keyword is also popular with users, so look for those that have a high popularity score.

It may also be best to go for low-competition keywords that are within your range and easy to rank for. Alexa’s Marketing Stack assigns a competitive power score that also indicates keyword difficulty depending on its competitiveness. Keywords highlighted are those within your competitive range.

Secondary

Once you have a primary keyword, perform new research to find 4–5 relevant secondary keywords. These are terms closely related to the primary keyword that add context and send signals to search engines. A simple way to find these is to enter the primary keyword on Google search and look at the list of related searches. After which, you can start creating your content.

2. Be present on Amazon Prime

As earlier mentioned, voice-powered purchases with Alexa is only possible for Prime members for now. That is why you need to make sure that your products are available here. Prime subscriptions (with fees payable monthly or yearly) mean that customers can enjoy two-day shipping for their purchases. Items labeled Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) are part of this program.

FBA means that sellers send their products to Amazon warehouses to let the company handle its delivery, returns, and customer service. Being available on Prime comes with a price, though, which you should be familiar with before you apply for it. Amazon has a calculator that can help you with that.

If you’re a merchant that sells large, expensive, or hard-to-ship items, FBA may not be useful for you, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t be part of it, considering how valuable it is for your bottom-line. For that, Amazon has another program called Seller-Fulfilled Prime, which allows products to get the Prime badge, making it eligible for Alexa orders, and still ship from the merchant’s location.

3. Be proactive in managing product reviews

You should be aware of what people are saying about your products and services; even more so if you’re trying to earn the Amazon’s Choice grant. Manage your buyers’ ratings and reviews through follow-up emails. Encourage them to leave positive feedback on your page if they are satisfied with it.

Don’t neglect the unhappy ones, though. Forward their concerns to your customer service department so you can help solve whatever problems they had about your product or service. Customers can remove old negative reviews, so there’s value in reaching out to them.

However, do be cautious about offering promos in exchange for positive reviews. Amazon is aware of such practices and believes that it has a damaging effect on customers’ trust in the review system. Because of this, they have started fighting back against low-quality reviews and removing reviews that look fake. Offenses like these may put your seller account in danger of suspension.

4. Optimize your product pages

Despite most of the steps being almost similar to your standard optimization techniques, Amazon is not Google. They do not care about CTRs, dwell time, or fresh content—the only thing that matters is if presenting your product as a search result leads to a transaction. One thing Amazon and Google may agree on is banning black hat techniques such as review and rank manipulation.

Here are the best, legitimate ways to optimize a product for Amazon searches:

Images

Amazon has photo guidelines for each category; make sure to follow them. You can use as many photos as allowed, but make sure that they are all high quality and high-resolution. A picture with 1000 x 1000 pixels will enable desktop users to zoom in and look at details. Providing the zoom feature is a proven way to increase sales. Use lifestyle shots or show scale only for secondary images. Don’t forget to use your primary keywords in the file name and alt tag, as well.

Title/Product name

This is one of the most critical factors in ranking for particular searches and helping the buyers understand the product they are looking to buy. Amazon has a title formula for every category. For example, a particular type may require the product color, brand name, model, and size, all in the title. Focus on readability, include vital information, and avoid marketing phrases.

Bullets and descriptions

Amazon’s terms of service state that bullet points and description aren’t necessarily significant in ranking organically on the site. However, with m-commerce becoming the norm today, you may want to focus on the description, which appears above the fold, and bulleted lists are a more organized way of constructing your product descriptions. This way, your customers can instantly view the specifications of the product without having to scroll down for too long.

Keywords

In Amazon, you don’t need to repeat words to increase page relevance for the term. There’s also less emphasis on the sequence of words in a phrase. It understands each word in the phrase and considers all combinations that may be derived from it. For your part, you can put words in the order that makes logical sense.

You should also utilize every keyword possible in the structured keyword area. It can fit seven words per text box, allowing you to stuff them with every possible relevant keyword.

Structured data

This will help buyers filtering their searches. Make sure that your listings have all the relevant filter items, such as color, size, organic, BPA-free, and others. Utilizing filter terms will help your products appear in relevant search results. Supplying these data could help your product become Amazon’s Choice for a set of filters. Of course, you’re helping buyers narrow down their search, too.

Other standard keyword optimization techniques that you can follow are:

Use primary keywords
- Ideally near the beginning of the meta title and SEO meta description
- In at least one subheading
- In the first paragraph of the copy
- Near the end of the page
- In the permalink
Primary keyword density is at 2%
Use semantic search phrases to reinforce topic and primary keyword
Use all secondary keywords at least once
Have between 300 and 10,000 words of content
Permalink is less than 128 characters
Meta title is unique with less than 66 characters
Only one meta title tag on a page
Meta description is less than 320 characters
Put high-quality outbound links that lead to related content

5. Make sure your website loads fast—on desktop and mobile

During the 2017 Prime Day, it was found that the average loading time of Amazon pages for desktop was 2.3 seconds and 1.14 for mobile. There’s no denying the impact of fast page speeds in the conversion process, especially considering that the modern consumer isn’t too keen on waiting on slow-loading pages and will quickly move on to the next.

Some of the steps you can take to make sure that your product pages load quickly is to (a) cut a few bytes from it to make it lighter to download on the browser; (b) minimize third-party hosts or other elements; (c) use content delivery networks, and; (d) design it in a way that core content loads first than the non-essential items. More importantly, you can let professionals run a speed test to advise you on other techniques.

Another thing to consider is mobile adoption. The total m-commerce sales in 2018 were at $1.80 trillion and are still expected to grow over the next few years. Many voice-powered searches are done through mobile, and not having a responsive mobile site could mean lost sales. Work with an experienced web developer and get things going.

6. Improve your social media visibility

Since Alexa can be used to do many things, including making voice search queries, it can reply with different kinds of results, too, such as editorial content. Human-made recommendations can “help customers on Amazon with product research and discovery, by bringing them helpful content from third-parties,” according to a spokesperson for the company.

These third-party publishers may also include social media sites. When your business is active on social media, not just in Amazon, you may eventually help your prospects find your products and services and increase your sales. Post useful content on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other sites you prefer daily. Not only will this help attract voice searchers, but it can also make you look more credible.

7. Partner with Alexa SEO experts

Learning how to optimize your Amazon product pages, as well as other websites, is easier when you’re working with professionals that can offer the best Alexa SEO services. It’s a lot safer when you get a third-party to do SEO for you, instead of doing it yourself, especially since voice search is new territory. Having a voice search SEO partner is a wise investment that can help you improve conversions and, eventually, grow your business.

Help Alexa Find You Now

Amazon may have kick-started the dominance of e-commerce, but even outside of the website it’s apparent that the industry will continue to grow especially with the rapid advancement and adoption of voice tech. You can expect more e-commerce platforms in the future, but it’s foolish to overlook Amazon’s current winning streak and not take advantage of it for your business.

Continually optimize your Amazon pages and aim to be the top recommendation for your chosen keyword. In time, you may be deemed worthy of being Amazon’s Choice and become the answer picked by Alexa.