Technology

Apr 07 2020

The Ultimate SEO Audit Checklist for Voice Search SEO

Digital assistants have changed the way people search. It’s evident in the way consumers have adapted to AI’s accessibility on mobile and home devices. You see it in the form of different names such as Siri, Alexa, Bixby, Cortana, and Google Assistant. They make life easier by minimizing the need to type queries and by providing answers more efficiently .

Voice search essentially changes the game for SEO and digital marketers. According to a 2018 local business study in the US, 58% of consumers use voice search to find local businesses on a near-regular basis. ComScore predicts that by 2020, voice search will contribute to 50% of all search engine queries. That’s a significantly sizeable amount of users who you won’t want to miss visiting your website.

What does this mean for optimization? Because searchers are increasingly using more conversational phrases when interacting with digital assistants, the construction of queries have also changed. Gone is the need to skimp out on keywords as a means to lessen the effort in typing.

A question can be asked as candidly and as long as desired because the more specific they are, the better the chance of getting a relevant answer. In effect, SERPs now also feature richer results ranging from Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs, video carousels, and many more—making it even more challenging to stand out in search results.

The rapidly growing presence of voice search only makes things like mobile-friendly pages, site speed, and linking structures crucial aspects to optimization. A thorough SEO audit will allow you to see where your site currently stands and how much you’ll need to prepare for voice search optimization. It might seem overwhelming with all that needs to be considered, but with the right audit checklist, it’ll be a cinch nailing everything you need.

Below is a foolproof list every SEO and digital marketer needs to include during an SEO audit prior to optimizing for voice search, to hit better rankings and engagement.

SEO Audit Checklist for Voice Search

1. Check your Organic Traffic

The first and most important task in starting your audit is taking a look at your organic traffic. From here, you’ll have a good idea of where you’re currently at in terms of your optimization success and how you can drive it even further. This point of reference will be able to help you identify your plan of action based on what to improve and how best to enhance the different parts of your website.

When checking your organic traffic on Google Analytics, make sure to set the right filters on your results. You’ll want to remove the irrelevant data, which includes yourself and your coworkers. Your best bet for this is to use IP address filters.

Ideally, your traffic within half a year or more should be going in an upward trend. Don’t worry if it’s flat or declining as there’s been a 37% drop in organic clicks because of richer results on both text and voice search. The good news is, you can always optimize through a variety of means to improve your site’s success.

Some key metrics you’ll be able to look further into from organic traffic analysis on Google Analytics:

Devices. It’s a good way to measure what percent of your visitors are on desktop or mobile, so you know if you need to adjust your strategies.

User location. Identify where the concentration of your traffic comes from. From here, you can also see if there’s potential to expand your business to other locations.

User site navigation. You’ll be able to know if their behavior is going as planned and then determine if you need to adjust.

2. Asses if your site is mobile-friendly

Almost 60% of queries on Google are made via mobile devices. It was also found that smartphones are the most used device for voice search.

If that isn’t enough to strengthen the need to ensure that your site is mobile-friendly, Google has also started implementing mobile-first indexing. This effort is primarily made to address the growing rate of mobile searches, surfacing pages that’s ready with mobile-friendly content.

Assess your site’s mobile friendliness with these tools:

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test. It views your site just like Googlebot and gives you a straightforward answer as to whether or not you need to make improvements on your site.
HubSpot’s Website Grader. It conducts a thorough check of your website, showing your page on mobile view and determines if it’s responsive enough.
BrowserStack. It allows you to view how your website looks on different kinds of mobile devices.

3. Evaluate your site speed, then find and fix indexing problems

In 2018, Google announced that page speed would be included in the ranking algorithm for mobile searches. This implies the necessity to double check your site speed and boost its performance by fixing any indexing problems. You can do this a number of ways.

A free and recommended platform for checking your site speed is Google PageSpeed Insights. Through it, you’ll be able to identify your page performance directly with a general score and get actionable tips to improve your current position.
Run speed tests with tools like GTMetrix and Webpagetest.org. You’ll be able to identify what exactly is slowing down your page.
Run crawling programs like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, DeepCrawl, and Ahrefs to see if you’re accidentally blocking pages you don’t want to be blocked with robots.txt file.

4. Improve on-page SEO

Beefing up your on-page SEO is good practice for boosting relevant traffic on your site. Luckily, you don’t necessarily have to apply on-page SEO to all your pages. Choosing a handful of key pages will be able to do the trick.

Ideas for selecting pages to improve:

Pages that rank well but hold potential for bigger success
Pages that target specific keywords
Pages that get significantly less traffic than other pages on your site

Some key points to kickstart this part of your audit:

Are you maximizing your keywords? Implement your keywords well. They should be on on your URLs, title tag, headline tag, and description?
Are you using modifiers to your titles? Add modifiers on your headlines. This helps your site rank for long tail keywords.
Are you applying LSI keywords to your content? Use Latent Semantic Indexing keywords on your page. These keywords help Google identify the main topic and attribute it to the relevance and legitimacy of your site.
How is your site’s link profile? Add internal and external links to your content. This strengthens your pages’ relevance as well as your own website’s relevance to other sites.

5. Set Up Keyword Rank Tracking

Monitor how your pages are performing for a variety of keywords. Once you know which pages aren’t performing well, you’ll be able to look into keyword targeting and improve the credibility of your page as needed.

SEMrush is a handy tool for getting the job done. It finds keywords your site ranks for. It’s a great way to figure out if you should refresh your keywords with new additions or drop any old ones.

6. Analyze Your Backlinks

Google’s top 3 search ranking factors include links. In a Google Search results analysis by Backlinko, it was found that backlinks do play a significant role in rankings. These external links, after all, are basically other sites vouching for your website’s authority and relevance to related content. The more websites there are that “vote” for you by linking to your pages, the better your ranking will be.

This, however, doesn’t mean that just any link from any other site will work. These external links still need to come from quality sources, which is why you still need to analyze your backlinks. Here’s what you can do:

Run a quick analysis with backlink tools. Some great tools are Ahrefs or Moz.
Monitor your domain authority. This tells you whether your site is credible based on the amount and quality of your backlinks.
Check for quality links. Are anchor texts valid and relevant to your domain, or are they simply spam keywords? Do these come from real websites that have content related to yours, or is it irrelevant?
Disavow links that you see unfit.

7. Check for and Fix Broken Links

Broken links are generally bad for your site. If a user clicks on a link to your site and sees an Error 404, you lose a visitor and essentially prompt them to look for an answer elsewhere. When search engines crawl your website and come across a broken link, it can stop the spiders from indexing. You, therefore, lose both ranking potential and site visitors who could’ve become paying clients.

Find broken links on your site with tools like Broken Link Check or Ahrefs. These can help you determine which pages are broken. If there are pages you want to rank that are affected, get around to fixing them ASAP.

8. Optimize For UX Signals

UX affects the way a user finds v a lue in your website. When a page is created with a user’s experience in mind, they’ll be able to see content relevant to their direct concern as well as intuitively find related content on your other pages.

Some UX signals you must optimize for:

Organic CTR. Make sure that your title tags, descriptions, and URLs employ your targeted keywords.
Dwell time. Enrich your page with content such as text, videos, and images that are relevant to the user’s intent.
Intent Optimization. It’s important to match your content based on your target audience’s intent. Review your main and long tail keywords to see that your content answers users’ questions.

9. Check and Fix Internal Linking Structure

Having a solid internal linking structure can set you up for success. Through it, you’ll be able to help both visitors and search engines better understand the relevance and relationships of your pages as well as their value. You can build up your internal linking structure a number of ways:

Link to cornerstone content. When your content mentions related terms that are fully explained in other pages (cornerstone content), take it as an opportunity to link to them.
Mention related posts. Similar to linking cornerstone content, having a list of related posts below your page content would also be able to let users find more value in your site. This will let them find useful resources they can also refer to.
Add navigation links. Strengthen your cornerstone content with direct links to them from your navigation bar or homepage.

10. Use a Site Audit Tool

Check the overall health of your website with SEO audit tools. They give you a more thorough look at what you might be missing in your own checks. You’ll also get a list of recommendations to optimize your site better, which proves tremendously helpful when there are frequent algorithm updates you need to be cautious of. Neil Patel recommends full SEO audits every quarter with mini-audits at least once a month.

Some good site audit tools are Seobility and SEMrush. With these, you’ll get a full sweep of your site and figure out actionable plans to improve your pages. Remember that while tools provide a wide variety of functions that can help you audit and optimize your SEO strategies for voice search, tools are only as good as its user.

11. Content Audit, Content Gap Analysis

Conducting a content audit and analysis evaluates the quality of your pages, accounting for the indexed content on your website. It focuses on which pages perform best, which topics are missing key supplementary articles, which needs updating, retention, and removal. This ultimately helps you better strategize the way you manage and produce your content to build value and authority for your site.

Perform Content Audits for Effective Voice SEO

With the entrance of voice search in the form of digital assistants seen mostly on mobile devices, the way people search on platforms like Google has changed. Factors like longer searches, colloquial terms used in search, and location make optimizing a bit more of a challenge. Add to the fact that search engine algorithms go through a motion of frequent changes, the importance of conducting regular SEO audits comes to light in an effort to keep abreast of everything.

An SEO audit gives you the rundown of your website’s overall performance. It’s an essential part of optimization that lets you see if everything is running smoothly or if there are things on your site that are affecting your ranking and user satisfaction. These are things you can only find with a thorough analysis of your site’s organic traffic, mobile adaptability, user path, content, architectural structure, and internal and external linking.

Insights from an audit also give you a better understanding of how best to approach your SEO strategy to build your site up for success. You may find the need to retarget with your keywords, adjust your site navigation, or do some kind of overhaul to boost authority, traffic, engagement, and eventually a strong following.

Likewise, an SEO audit serves as a great point of reference for your website’s current status, which will help in the long run. The benchmark will allow you to see just how much change there needs to be before you adapt to voice search optimization, which is likely where the future of search is headed.

Apr 06 2020

Siri vs. Alexa vs. Google: Comparing Voice Assistants for Search Marketers

When the world’s biggest tech giants introduced their respective voice assistants not even a decade ago, people were equal parts in awe and skeptical. It seemed like such a futuristic thing to have your devices perform actions via voice commands, yet it also felt a bit silly doing it.

Fast forward to now, and it seems like voice search is all the rage—and it will continue to be in the next few years. Smart speaker shipments grew by almost 200% in the third quarter of 2018, suggesting that the people have adapted, and the tech has gotten better since its initial release. Projections are forecasting that 50% of all online searches will be done via voice by 2020 and that the channel is expected to grow to be a $40 billion industry.

That being said, there is a battle between the top three voice assistants in the market: Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa. By putting all three head-to-head, marketers will have a better understanding of how they work and how they can use this knowledge to benefit their business.

Battle of the Voice Assistants

General Overview

Each assistant operates in different ecosystems and software, most especially Siri. This means that Siri is accessible to any Apple user, regardless if they have a home device. However, Siri’s actions are limited on the HomePod versus the iPhone or MacBook. For instance, it can’t dial in or out on the smart speaker.

Google Assistant, on the other hand, is available on all Android and iOS devices—including Chromebooks. They offer a wide variety of home speakers, but the voice assistant can be accessed on some third-party Google AI-enabled speakers as well. This puts out a wide margin in terms of accessibility compared to Apple’s Siri.

To experience Alexa, a user would need to have Amazon Echo, Fire TV, or any of their Fire tablets. Even though it’s the youngest digital assistant of the bunch and is limited to purchasing smart devices for the home, it has made quite a buzz since its release and has been a popular choice in the smart speaker industry.

Voice Recognition

To call the voice assistants’ attention, users have to say a different phrase. Of the three, Siri on the HomePod is the only voice assistant who responds to any “Hey, Siri” without further personalization. In comparison, calling Alexa or saying “Ok, Google” to the Google Assistant will trigger these assistants’ voice training. This enables them to identify which user they are speaking to—especially on home devices. It also creates a customized experience for the user in question. It’s not perfect though, as some reviewers have been able to trick the Amazon and Google assistants by pretending to be their co-workers.

Understanding the Context of Queries

Voice assistants picking up your voice is excellent—but it’s the bare minimum. How well does each of the three understand what users are asking?

Generally speaking, all three can catch a user’s voice and understand basic commands such as the weather, the date, or simple “near me” queries like “What’s the nearest Japanese restaurant?” They do, however, struggle when there is background noise or when you’re playing music from the speakers or device itself.

However, two of the three assistants do have an edge when responding to answers. While all three will give you what you’re after, Alexa and Google Assistant would often describe and say the answers out loud. Siri, on the other hand, would show links and allow the user to peruse through answers that were pulled up. This sort of defeats the purpose of going hands-free, but it depends on the user if they enjoy this kind of experience for getting query results.

When it comes to follow-up questions, Siri performs best without the user having to repeat or reference the initial question asked. For instance, if one were to say, “Tell me about Coldplay,” they could follow up with “What’s their newest album?” and Siri would be able to keep up. Google Assistant shows the same aptitude for understanding conversationalist queries; unfortunately, the case is not the same with Alexa.

Online Shopping

Shopping via voice commands sounds exciting and easy in theory. But with the current state of voice search assistants in the market, it’s a long way from being the preferred method for transactions. Alexa has an edge here since it’s tied in with Amazon—this feature truly shines in the United States and major countries that the online shopping catalog services.

Google performs similarly well but doesn’t direct to the Amazon catalog. Instead, they usually direct to Target. Siri, on the other hand, doesn’t support this feature flawlessly yet as it doesn’t have an in-app online shopping partner. The most it can do for now is to direct the user to the nearest physical store where they can find what they are looking for. This assumes that the user is headed out or will be hitting the road to the shop versus being able to do it in the comfort of their home.

Music and Entertainment

When it comes to asking the assistants to belt out your favorite tunes, all three perform to the same outstanding capacity—so long as you’re subscribed to the music streaming platform unique to each. For Siri, there’s Apple Music or merely having the song in your iTunes library; Alexa has Amazon’s Music Unlimited streaming service, and Google Assistant anchors on Google Play Music.

So, what happens if you’re not subscribed to any of these? The Google Assistant pulls up an internet radio station containing the result. Meanwhile, Siri won’t play anything if it can’t find the song on your library or if you’re not subscribed to Apple Music.

Both Google Home and Amazon Echo smart speakers offer multiroom audio, which creates a group of speakers via your smartphone. This means you don’t get to miss a beat and seamlessly connect your listening experience inside the house if you have more than one Google or Amazon-AI enabled speaker.

Siri can do that as well, as long as speakers support AirPlay2, along those that connect to an Apple TV. However, if you want Siri on a home speaker, your only option is to purchase a HomePod (or several).

When it comes to entertainment, such as watching television shows or movies, Alexa can control Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick or Fire TV Edition, as well as a myriad of actions from pause and play and volume control to opening apps. Likewise, Google Assistant can control Chromecast-connected devices like a smart TV. On the other hand, Siri can only control music and podcast playback on AirPlay speakers, the HomePod, and Apple TV. It doesn’t support opening apps or video playback.

Communication and Making Calls

As mentioned earlier, Siri’s capabilities are quite limited on the HomePod. However, you can send new messages, reply, make calls, and answer them on iPhones and CarPlay. This does make for a great communication device when the user is on-the-go.

Meanwhile, both Alexa and Google Assistant operate differently. First off, both can make calls with simple voice commands. However, Alexa can only receive calls from other Echo speakers—other smartphones or landlines are not supported. Google Assistant can’t receive calls. However, you can send text messages from all three.

Navigation and Giving Directions

Navigation is probably one of the essential uses for voice search, as people who have a busy day ahead of themselves would greatly appreciate detailed information about the routes they are taking.

Following the trend in this comparison post, Siri seems to do very well when it comes to giving directions as it assumes the person is out and about. It also integrates Siri with CarPlay, which makes for hands-free navigation on the fly. So, if a user were to rely on Siri for GPS, it would fair well. The only thing it might fall a bit behind on is on the iPhone, it doesn’t give real-time updates about traffic and instead redirects the user to the Maps app. However, it has these capabilities on the HomePod.

The Google Assistant works well with both Google Home and Android devices with the Google Assistant app. It was able to give accurate public transit suggestions and an overview of traffic. It also fires up Google Maps, Apple Maps, or Waze when you’re ready to start your trip.

Alexa isn’t doing well in this category as it’s not integrated with any navigation or map app that can provide information related to your request. It also doesn’t display public transit suggestions.

What It Means for Search Marketers

Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa may perform in different capacities, but the bottom line is, consumers are getting more heavily invested with voice assistants. The primary goal of this tech is to help users with their daily tasks and access information from the web hands-free. This points to the rise of voice search—and it’s well worth to note that it is starkly different from text search.

Learning the differences between the three is an excellent opportunity to start thinking about ways to optimize your SEO strategy for these voice assistants. Here are some essential things you should know about:

1. Voice search queries use natural language

If the trend for text searches is “the shorter, the better,” the opposite is true for voice search. Speaking is much faster than typing, and this allows users to exert less effort and be more specific when doing voice search. The average length of a voice search is between 4-20 words. For instance, one would type “Iron Man actor,” but would voice search “Who plays Iron Man?” or “Which actor plays Iron Man?”

In this case, it would be helpful for you to insert and optimize long-tail keywords in your content and work in more natural language with your posts so that search engines would present your result in a voice search query.

2. Mobile voice-related searches ask for local results

Mobile voice queries are said to be thrice more likely to be local-based vs. text searches. This follows the trend of voice assistants for shopping and navigation, such as directing you to a restaurant or grocery store nearby.

Setting up your SEO for Google Assistant (and other voice assistants, for that matter) would mean fixing your Google My Business page and updating your contact information for anyone who would want to drop by your shop or restaurant. This is particularly useful for searchers who would ask queries similar to “coffee shop near me.” Improving your local SEO will boost your chances in appearing on voice search results.

3. The competition for the top rank is even tighter

When doing a voice search, you don’t usually get a page filled with links you can browse through. Instead, the voice assistant will give you one answer, and that’s it.

This doesn’t mean you have to forget all about ranking for desktop or mobile searches though. They are closely linked. A study from Backlinko says that 75% of voice search results are pulled from the top three desktop search results for the search query. Therefore, you have to work to be the best result for your industry, and not necessarily the first. Google will always take location, past search history, and other factors when producing results for users. Doing voice SEO for Siri and the others is taking a look at your strategy holistically too.

Better yet, it will do you right if you also consider aiming for the featured snippet or “Position 0” so that you can ensure that you’re one of the top candidates for the results of that voice search query. 40.7% of voice search responses came from a featured snippet. Hit two birds with one stone as you optimize both typed and voice searches with this tactic.

4. Optimize for all search engines

While Google currently holds the largest search engine market share to date at 89.95%, don’t forget about other search engines, specifically Bing. Doing voice SEO for Alexa includes Bing because that’s the search engine the voice assistant uses to deliver results. This is a huge point to factor in, especially when you consider the smart home circulation in the world.

The Amazon Echo and Google Home are the top two players in the smart speaker scene, with the former taking the lead. Sources show that Alexa has over 39 million units in circulation (69% of the market), while Google Home currently has 14 million units (31% of the market). You won’t be reaching a lot of people who own Alexa if you primarily focus on Google.

5. Study your consumer’s user intent

In 2015, Google released an in-depth consumer study about consumer behavior online and aptly dubbed it as micro-moments:

I-want-to-know moments, or general searches for information
I-want-to-go moments, commonly referred to as the “near me” and local searches
I-want-to-do moments, for ideas when executing a task or planning an event, travel, etc.
I-want-to-buy moments, for online shopping or suggestions on what to buy

Modeling your content around these micro-moments and optimizing the keywords you include to answer these specific consumer needs can boost the relevance of your pages for voice search queries. You should also be mindful of the top three keywords included in searches done by voice—how (8.64%), what (5.01%), and best (2.63%).

Voice Search Matters

As previously mentioned, half of all searches will be done via voice in 2020—but you don’t have to wait for next year before you can start reevaluating your SEO strategy. As early as now, there’s a lot of changes you can do to make sure you stay on top of the game, including local SEO, the incorporation of long-tail keywords, and optimizing for Bing. The first step to creating a solid SEO strategy is understanding the current state of voice assistants today. Voice SEO can help you bridge the gaps between your data and become a front runner in this young industry. Drop us a line to see how we can optimize voice search for your business.

Apr 02 2020

How to Boost Your Domain Authority for Voice Search SEO

According to a study by Backlinko, the average Domain Authority (DA) of voice search results is almost 77. The reason is simple: voice search results must be accurate, coming from a source trusted by users and search engines alike—and more often than not, these sources have high DAs. This makes DA rating essential for voice search SEO.

SEO software company Moz developed this rating system. DA can be described as a search engine ranking score that predicts a website’s ability to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). The score ranges from one to 100, with a higher rating meaning better chances of ranking high.

Is Domain Authority Important for Voice SEO?

From a search engine perspective, DA is like a measurement of a website’s reputation as a thought leader. While DA is not a ranking factor per se, it is a good way to gauge how your site measures up and what its chances of ranking are. According to Moz, there are over 40 factors in determining the DA, including root domains and several inbound links.

DA improvement is often used by sites as a complementary effort for their SEO strategy. It can be utilized as a comparison between your website and your competitors’. You want your site to have better DA because it means better SERPs ranking, and therefore, better visibility. If you’re lucky—and with a bit more effort—you can even hit Feature Snippets and own voice search.

How to Boost Your Domain Authority

Even though DA does not heavily influence rankings, you’d want to explore different ways on how you can pull up your SERP rankings even higher, until such time that you have optimized your content to meet the position zero requirements.

Audit your site’s internal and external links to get rid of bad links

Backlinks gathered from your link building strategy is still one of the leading ranking factors, but it only works if you have quality links. Backlinks from high domain or page authority sites help your overall trustworthiness. Both internal and external links are essential to Google, as it prefers a variety of link profiles from high-authority sites.

A link profile is an overall assessment of all your inbound links. It looks at the total number of links, quality (or spamminess), assortment, and many others. Search engines will look at your link profile to understand how it relates to other websites. That is why you should audit your link profile now and then, and search for broken, harmful, or toxic backlinks that are hurting your domain authority.

A few SEO tools can help you analyze your link profile and understand its overall makeup. There’s SEMrush Backlink Checker and Moz’s Link Explorer which both measure your link profile’s health. Meanwhile, Google’s Disavow Tool can help you get rid of poor or undesirable links from your website to strengthen link profile.

Manually, you can also choose to control where to place your internal links. Never automate this step. It’s better to go through all of your old content and add links between pages on the site if needed. Don’t mix up your anchor text, as well.

Speed up your site

Internet speeds are already lightning fast in many parts of the globe, that’s why most users now have become more impatient, especially when the page they are visiting is loading too slowly. Poor loading speeds can result in your visitor leaving the site, increasing bounce rate and affecting conversions.

The ideal page load time for websites is around 3 seconds, and there are many ways that you can optimize loading speeds like being picky with your hosting service or getting a server with quicker response time. Google also has a PageSpeed tool that you can use to not only analyze your site speed but also help identify ways you can make it faster to improve user experience.

Create linkable content

Engagement metrics like total traffic, time on site, bounce rate, and return visits are also essential to your search engine ranking and, in turn, DA. To boost your engagement, you must attract and engage with your audience.This can easily be done with high-quality content. Compelling content can also attract organic backlinks.

You need to publish high-value content regularly and consistently. High-quality content simply means one that is informative, well-written, and relevant to your brand and target audience. When you have good content, authoritative sites would be inclined to link to it, and people would start sharing your post around−helping increase its exposure. Here are a few ways to do it.

Produce extensive resource articles

Resource articles cover everything you need to know about a particular topic. Lengthy pieces of content like these are packed with information that is usually linked out to other useful content. Meanwhile, you can do link building by reaching out to industry blogs, which is significant in this case because you’d want other authoritative sites to link your resource articles, too.

Create how-to articles

Aside from resource articles, another informative type of content that you can utilize to build links is the how-tos. Not only are they useful in earning inbound links, but they are also more likely to appear as a result of voice search.

If your content is easily discoverable (or is ranking high, thanks to your SEO efforts), other sites can link the site on their own content as reference. You’d also want your content to be the Featured Snippet that smart assistants would push to its user, especially since there are no pages 2 or 3 in voice search.

Creating how-tos require research on voice keywords, producing helpful content that is inspired by other top-ranking pages, and doing outreach to subject matter experts.

Implement the skyscraper method

The skyscraper method is a content production and SEO practice in one. Start with finding well-ranking and relevant voice search keywords that you want to rank for, creating content around those keywords, and looking for authoritative sites that will link to your piece as a reference.

Along the way, you may encounter authoritative sites that are linking to your competitors. What you want to happen is for these sites to replace the competitors’ links with your own. But, you’d have to be able to produce content that is so much better than theirs, so you can effectively steal high-quality backlinks away from them.

Create visual assets

Visual assets like images, diagrams, illustrations, infographics, charts, and other data visualization aides are highly linkable because every site wants to make their content easy on the eyes of their visitors. But since creating visual content can eat up resources, some sites rely on third-party visual content. You want to be the one producing that highly visual content that other sites can use. Make it available for other users and sites and ask for a link back to your site when they do decide to use it.

Build high-quality links

As you may have already noticed, links are essential in earning a high DA rating and ultimately, a chance at position zero. This makes link building an integral part in improving your site’s authority and relevance. However, links from mediocre sites won’t suffice—you need to earn high-quality inbound links from pages with high DA, too. Here are a few suggestions on how you can do this.

Find customer and partner links

You can leverage the good relationship you have with your partners and customers to earn links. One way is by sending out partnership badges or icons that your users can put on their pages, or by asking customers to write up testimonials about your products and services or their overall experience with working with your company. They can display these with links back to your site.

Guest posting or contributing articles to high-authority industry sites

Another link building tactic is guest posting, wherein links may be placed on your author bio or the content itself. It starts with researching industry sites that you can guest blog on, which can be done with Ahrefs’ Context Explorer Tool. Remember to only reach out to websites that are relevant to your business. You, then, have to come up with the topic for your post.

After which, you can start reaching out to the sites you have selected and pitch your ideas. You can contact as many blogs as you like (since there’s no guarantee that all of them will respond) or pitch one idea to various sites. If more than one respond, give the topic to the site with the highest authority and provide other ideas to the rest. Once you’ve written the post, wait for it to get published.

Despite being a prominent link building practice, guest blogging doesn’t work as well as it used to now because Google has devalued links from guest posts. However, many marketers still do this, with a few caveats:

Choose sites that are picky about what they publish and are relevant to your topics. You don’t want to submit to those that will accept anything.
Don’t use exact anchor text in external links.
Avoid sites that explicitly state they accept guest posts because they are most likely swamped with pitches.

Broken link building

Earn back the links you lost by fixing broken or dead links. This usually happens when you move pages around or the site that linked back to you made a mistake in the URL. Find broken backlinks by going to Ahrefs > Backlinks > Broken. You can also do this with competing sites (Ahrefs > Best by links report > filter “404 not found”).

Check your competitors’ broken backlinks and make a request to the webmaster to replace it with links to your site. Make sure that you have already created content that can replace the broken links. This can also be applied to links bearing information that are may already be outdated. This works best in an industry that often goes through changes like SEO.

You can even apply this strategy on Wikipedia pages, which you’d want to leverage considering its high DA and trust level from Google. There are two types of links you can look for: information with citation needed and details that previously link to a source that has since been taken down. You can use the WikiGrabber tool to get a list of articles that have either or both kinds of links, or you can just Google it (site:wikipedia.org “Keyword/phrase” “dead link”).

If you choose to fix broken links on Wikipedia, make sure not to sign up as an editor or with a company email address. Otherwise, your edits may be considered as spam.

Monitor brand mentions

If your brand is mentioned on other pages without a link back to you, you’ve got an easy link opportunity. Simply email the webmaster and ask them nicely to put a link on your brand name back to your site. You can also do this with competing products. Find sites where your competitors are getting mentioned and contact the authors so you can introduce your brand to them.

You can monitor brand mentions by setting up alerts for your products or those in your niche, by using Ahrefs’ Content/Site Explorer. Search for your brand name; choose “highlight unlinked domains;” filter with DA, organic traffic, or any other details you want. Then, export the unlinked pages so you can start pursuing the site owners of those mentions without a backlink to you.

Still using Ahrefs, search for spelling errors of your domain name by entering a misspelling into Ahrefs Site Explorer or by using a Domain Typo Generator. Place the list of misspelled domain names into the Ahrefs Batch Analysis Tool and click Domain as the Target mode.

You can also use Google Alerts to monitor brand mentions easily.

Niche-specific directories

You can submit your blog to both general and niche directories. However, if you want to stay relevant, go for niche directories as they only accept sites that cover a specific topic. If you want to do better for voice search, you can also submit to local listings, especially those that focus on your city or state.

Offer your linkable assets

A linkable asset is a high-value page on your website that you can utilize for links over and over again because of how informative or useful it is for people. It’s essential in making your link-focused content marketing campaign successful. Linkable assets may also refer to images, infographics, illustrations, and charts.

This means that you need to start looking for or producing linkable assets that you can exploit. According to studies by Backlinko, attractive charts and graphs can give you two or three times more links compared to content that is not considered linkable mainly due to authors embedding them on their own content with a backlink.

Some bloggers struggle to find relevant images for their posts. When you’re particular with your linkable assets (and even hire a graphic designer to do them for you), not only would you have a relevant and well-crafted imagery to go along with your post, but you’re also opening an opportunity to be linked to by sites that may find your assets useful for them, too.

Whatever It Takes

In traditional SEO, DA is better off used to compare your score against your competition. However, with the surge of voice search, you need to learn and explore different methods that can help your site appear as a Featured Snippet, ultimately making it the first choice of smart assistants for voice search results.

At the end of the day, DA can still be pertinent to your end goal of being part of voice search results because only relevant, trusted, and accurate answers deserve the position zero spot. Provide high-quality content and earn backlinks from authoritative sources. Acquire the right voice search SEO services so you can learn more tips and recommendations on how to optimize your site for better DA.

Mar 29 2020

7 Voice Search SEO Mistakes That Are Hurting Your Bottomline

As long as new digital marketing tools and trends surface, search engine optimization (SEO) practices will continue to evolve. The case is true with all the historical algorithm updates that keep on challenging experts to go for white hat tactics and provide value to their target audience.

Besides these search guidelines that get regularly refined, one of the most significant changes to hit SEO is what you’ve come to know as the voice search revolution. People have entered the era where they no longer have to type in their queries via touch screens or tactile keyboards; there is now an option to talk to your gadgets.

In this day and age, it’s not uncommon to own a device pre-installed with a voice assistant. As of 2018, there were already 2.5 billion assistants in use, and this figure is projected to go up to 8 billion in 2023.

These intelligent robots live inside smartphones and smart speakers, promising to make life easier and more manageable for the users who choose to engage with their features. The most popular ones in the game so far are Siri for iOS users and Alexa or Google Assistant for Android users.

Back in the day, they were mostly used to play music, set reminders, or maybe call someone from your phonebook. Now, they’re being used to search for pertinent information online or navigate the way to the nearest establishment of your choice—features that can help businesses maximize their digital marketing efforts.

That said, if you’re not in on the voice search phenomenon, you could be severely hurting your bottom line! If you’ve already begun to optimize your business for voice search, you’re on the right track, but your work is far from over. It pays to familiarize yourself with the most common VoiceSEO mistakes businesses can make.

The voice search industry is new, and there are many things to consider. Thankfully, this post will help you identify and avoid said mistakes to make sure you can maximize your business growth without worry.

Top Voice Search SEO Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Mistake #1: Not optimizing for local search

Local SEO is a critical ingredient in voice search. BrightLocal conducted a 2018 study that shows that 75% of smart speaker owners perform searches for local businesses weekly, and an astounding 53% say they perform these searches every day. If you’re not giving out your location information online, you could be robbing people of the chance to discover your business.

The frequency for these types of search shows that voice search tech is relevant for businesses with physical stores that customers can visit.

Solution: Invest in Local SEO

One of the easiest ways to invest in local SEO is to claim your Google My Business page. It shows all the info people would want from your sites such as an address, operating hours, contact number, website, and reviews, if any. Other tactics include optimizing your website by adding your location as one of your main keywords. You can incorporate this on your home page, metadata, and even service or product pages.

Mistake #2: Poor internal link structure

You’ve probably heard about backlinks being king, but internal links serve a significant purpose, too. Its most essential function is creating a clear path for users to navigate your pages, makes your site easier to crawl, and defines your website architecture, to name a few. Additionally, proper internal linking helps search engines understand your content better.

Solution: Observe consistency in internal linking

As much as possible, it would be wise to have at least five internal links in one long blog post. This won’t only ensure that you’re referencing a lot of resource material you’ve written in the past, but also aid in the crawling process that bots do. It should go without saying that you should link intelligently, too. Use anchor texts and links that would be natural for the reader to click on, such as citing a topic with a much more in-depth explanation in another post.

Solution: Submit an XML sitemap to search engines

Your XML sitemap is essentially a blueprint of your website. It will contain all pages, posts, links and where they redirect to, as well as how often each page is updated when they were last changed, and the degree of relevance each page has to another. Having a sitemap is vital if you have over thousands of pages of content that are not linked together and you’re falling behind on your backlinks. This will help search engines understand the content of your site better and assess where your ranking should be.

Solution: Go for structured data

Structured data or schema markup is a type of code or tag that you can add to your HTML so search engines can understand and skim your page better. There are many examples of this, such as the site navigation shown below your main homepage URL on search results or the star ratings, price, and availability on your product results. This is another backend process that will help search engines better understand what content you’re putting out online, to better rank your relevance on SERPs.

Mistake #3: Not tailoring content for voice search

Online content production is increasing every year. In 2018, there were over 4 million blog posts published daily. That means it’s getting more and more challenging to be discovered by your audience, much less by voice assistants. Poor body copy will not get you anywhere, and so your articles and landing pages should be one of the first things you should fix when it comes to the voice search revolution. The good news is, there are ways to tailor your content creation to voice search that will enrich your content further.

Solution: Perform strategic voice keyword research

What are your users saying to their digital assistants to find your website? These keywords are essential to include in future or existing content so your chances of getting picked as the top search result increases. Voice search results don’t show ten or so blue links, but rather speak out the top result that the assistant finds. Similar to how you would conduct text keyword research for SEO, voice keyword research is essential for voice search.

Solution: Use natural language

Another critical thing to note is that voice search queries are longer than text since people use natural language when asking voice assistants. It would then make sense to incorporate conversational words in your posts, all the while not delving away from your brand voice. Write for your audience and not for search engines.

Solution: Create long-form content

The average content length for websites that’s great for SEO is around 1,600 words. The longer you discuss a topic, the more search engines will recognize you as an expert or authority on a subject. This won’t only help you for voice search ranking but desktop search ranking as well.

Mistake #4: Not investing in linkable content

As mentioned earlier, backlinks are critical in SEO. If you’re not creating content that’s credible or exciting enough for other websites to link to, it will be difficult for you to raise your domain rating and rank higher on SERPs naturally. Creating linkable content also helps your content promotion tactics. The more people see your name online, the more they are likely to believe you are credible.

Voice search technology relies on the performance of desktop search as well, which is why you would naturally want to increase your desktop SERP ranking to get noticed by Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.

Solution: Create link-worthy content

One of the most popular ways of creating linkable content is to include relevant images, videos, and even create infographics that will support what you’re trying to say. Visuals are a great way to keep readers interested and hooked on your piece, especially if you want to create something upwards of 1,500 words.

Another tactic is including statistics and survey results in your piece. Data is fascinating to readers, and many other websites love collating research or case studies as abundant resources for others who are learning about a specific topic.

Adding to this, you may also want to include interview snippets or quotes from interviews that other websites won’t necessarily be able to produce anywhere else. You want your content to contain a wealth of resources yet still be organized and engaging, so people also won’t be overwhelmed with the amount of information packed into one space.

Mistake #5: Not having a mobile-friendly website

It’s 2019, and if you haven’t hopped on the mobile-friendly train, then your digital marketing efforts have been suffering for quite some time now. Mobile-friendly websites are not a new concept, but a few years ago, they were more of a novelty than a necessity. Now, things have changed. Beginning July 2019, all new sites will be indexed using Google’s mobile-first indexing by default. There’s also a global rollout for this algorithm update to existing websites, and as of December 2018, half of all Google searches are powered by this new ranking factor.

Majority of voice searches happen on mobile phones since assistants are pre-installed on there. The chances of your website getting picked as a top result reduce if your mobile site won’t load since the assistant will have trouble crawling through the information on your site.

Solution: Mobile Optimization

The first thing you should do is test your current performance using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Tool. Enter your website and wait for the assessment. You’ll know right then and there if your website is optimized for mobile, as well as any issues you should address (error in loading images, small fonts, and more).

One of the most significant factors for having a mobile-friendly website is choosing a reliable web host and responsive website theme before installation. Having a responsive design can already take away much of the work in ensuring your website looks good across any device your content gets viewed or accessed on like smartphones, desktops, and tablets.

Mistake #6: Ignoring site speed or page load times

The digital age has created a culture of instant gratification and consumers wanting everything in a snap. This is no exception for website loading times—and this is a real issue that could affect your bottom line. The slower your page loads, the more your audience loses interest in what you have to offer. They’ll exit and search for something else that can operate on the speed they want.

So, how fast is fast enough?

If your site loads in 2.9 seconds, you’re only faster than half of all websites online. This in itself is a feat, but you also have to remember that there are one billion websites. So, you’re competing with 500,000 million others at this rate. On the other hand, if your page load time drops to 1.7 seconds, it will be faster than 75% of all websites, leaving you with 250,000 million competitors.

If you want to be part of the top, make sure your site loads in 0.8 seconds—you’ll then be faster than 94% of the worldwide web or just 60 million rivals.

Solution: Thorough SEO audit

Investigate the overall framework of your site to know which ones are potentially slowing it down. A thorough SEO audit can help you identify the loose parts. For one, you can implement caching so your website files can be saved on your visitor’s local device versus having it to load whenever accessed.

You can also simplify your CSS or HTML codes so that it can become more efficient and reduce waiting time. Lastly, you can also compress those HD images. Yes, it’s nice to have high-quality photos on your site. However, if it’s going to load after ten years, no one’s going to stick around enough to see it.

Mistake #7: Not having optimized images and videos

As mentioned earlier, high definition visuals matter—but they can hurt your site performance if you don’t know how to optimize them. In the case of voice search, you also need to give voice assistants context on what your visuals are portraying. This creates a much more thorough understanding of what message your webpage is trying to convey.

Solution: Optimize the alt text

When uploading your images and videos, don’t forget to add alternative text. You can use this to position your images to rank in a targeted keyword image search. The alt text is what’s displayed when the site fails to load and display the image. It’s used to tell search engines the content of your photos and describe the visuals to desktops users, as well as voice assistants.

Be Part of the Voice Search Revolution

Just like how it’s imperative to reassess your SEO efforts frequently, it’s equally essential to review if your current practices follow voice search SEO best practices. All the mistakes mentioned above prevent you from reaching your goal: making a sale.

If your readers don’t find value in your content or have a hard time loading your website, they’ll most likely look somewhere else. Since voice assistants don’t automatically read the top spot on desktop SERPs, the playing field is much more exciting.

Navigating through this new industry may feel overwhelming in the beginning, but that’s why there are experts who dedicate their time to study trends and help other companies grow their business. Voice Search can help you find your footing in the voice search revolution by offering intelligent voice search SEO services relevant to your company’s needs. Contact us now!