seo

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.

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!

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