voice search

Apr 10 2020

Voice Search SEO for Ecommerce: 23-Point Checklist for Your Online Shop

Decades ago, the first mobile phone was invented to provide better and more accessible communication. Fast forward today, mobile phones have become predominant in people’s daily lives and are more than just a device for communication. These handy devices now play multiple roles to help users in various tasks like finding a restaurant nearby and shopping online with the aid of voice search technology.

Voice search tends to communicate beyond the basic level. They help users perform simple product queries as they depend on the technology to, for instance, order a pizza or buy a toilet paper.

Statistics show that over 30% of U.S. consumers have used voice-enabled devices to find product information or purchase products. Research also found that 22% of online consumers who purchase grocery products are using smart assistants. By 2022, revenue from voice shopping is expected to reach $40 billion in the U.S. alone.

With this, ecommerce marketers are finding ways to align their strategies for voice search shopping to stay ahead of the curve. If you’re an ecommerce business owner or a marketing manager of an online store, then you’re at the right place. Below is a rundown on how you can improve your ecommerce website’s voice search SEO—from finding the right market to conducting keyword research.

23-Point Voice Search SEO Checklist for Ecommerce Sites

Identify your target audience

Understanding and tapping into your ideal market is marketing 101. You need to know where to find them and how to capture their attention if you want them to buy your products.

1. Develop your buyer persona – This marketing basic has never been so vital in the effort to optimize for voice search. Customer research is an important methodical step to identify your target audience. Knowing your ideal customers and understanding their needs, habits, and behavior will help you develop a more targeted marketing approach.

2. Consider their own consumer journey – After clearly defining your target audience, identify the stages your customers will have to take to reach your desired goal, usually to make a purchase. Understanding what your customers have to go through will enable you to find the right keywords and phrases to use for each step of their journey—awareness, interest, evaluation, purchase, customer support, and advocacy.

Spy on your competitors

The ecommerce industry is a tough stage to dominate, especially when you have big competitors in your respective niche. If you want to be ahead of the game, you need to find out about your competition and see how they strategize. Once you have the data, use it to your advantage.

3. Create a list of your competitors – Evaluating your niche’s players in the field and conducting a competitor analysis will help you identify companies sharing the same target market with you. You can use SEMRush’s Smart Competitive Research tool to find your top competitors, and other additional information such as traffic sources, keywords, and backlinks, that can guide your next move.

4. Check the strategies of your competitors – Using a competitive research tool can also help you see what your competitors are doing right, how they’re doing it, and how you can overcome them. Find out what key phrases they’re focusing on and see if you could add the keywords to your voice search SEO strategy. This analysis can help you develop the necessary improvements for your ecommerce website over time.

Perform keyword research

Now that you have identified your target audience and seen what your close competitors are up to, you can start doing your keyword research. This gives you information about your market’s interests and intent—how and why they search for products your ecommerce site offers. It also gives you an idea about the qualified buyers’ top keyword searches.

5. Find long-tail keywords – In voice search, keyword queries contain more than three words and are targeted at a specific demographic. Identifying long-tail keywords in ecommerce isn’t easy. You can use a keyword research tool like Answer The Public, but it’s good to check ecommerce titan, Amazon, for this rich data. Try entering a general keyword on the search bar, and you’ll find the long-tail keyword suggestions below.

6. Use natural language – People who use voice search perform queries with natural and conversational language—as if they’re talking to a friend. This means they’re likely to ask questions or perform commands in full sentences. You can apply this tactic in your content marketing efforts like in your subheadings and your writing tone.

7. Find relevant keywords – Look for phrases related to the top search keywords in your industry. Then, look for other combinations of terms related to that, which your target consumers use to search for products that your ecommerce business offers.

8. Discover what keywords your competitors rank for – You can find this data during your competitor analysis. The objective is to see what organic and paid search keywords are sending traffic to your competitors. You can then update your strategy to target any keyword gaps or find any keyword opportunities based on the analysis.

9. Identify negatives – Negative keyword research is as important as regular keyword discovery opportunities because it prevents marketers from spending their PPC budget on irrelevant keywords. You can refer to WordStream’s Negative Keyword Tool to review negative keywords to avoid. This encourages you to bid on valuable keywords that will grow your click-through-rate.

Enhance your website speed

Yes, page speed matters even in voice search SEO because regardless of how consumers choose to make searches, search engines still favor websites that load faster.

10. Observe proper formatting – Accurate and proper formatting is not only helpful for making it more user-friendly for both text and voice search but also vital to reduce website load times. When your product page is appropriately formatted, your site will load faster, and search engines will find it easier to understand the context of your page.

11. Optimize for mobile – One way to ensure your site speed is by optimizing it for mobile. When a site loads quick and smooth on mobile gadgets, that means it will load just as nicely (if not better) on other more comprehensive platforms.

Improve your on-site content

Now that you’ve determined the relevant keywords for each page of your ecommerce site, it’s time to optimize your on-page elements for each page of your site. Furthermore, a well-rounded on-page SEO can help boost your website speed.

12. Designate a primary keyword for every page – Assign and target one keyword for each page of your website. Make sure that the keyword isn’t used for your other pages for because this will only confuse search engines as to which page should rank high on the SERPs.

13. Designate two to four LSI keywords for each page – LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords are phrases and terms that are related to a page’s primary keyword. Assigning LSI keywords for your product pages help search engines understand the extra context, based on search patterns, and connect it to the target keyword. LSIKeywords is a nifty tool that can help you find similar or related terms to your primary key phrase.

14. Produce content for product pages – Your product pages have higher chances to rank if a) they contain 300 or more words on the page and b) the content is high quality and helpful to readers. Include a brief summary that details the features, specifications, and benefits of the product to assist your consumers as well as search engines in understanding and ranking that page.

15. Add Schema Markup to every page – Schema markup language is a form of categorized micro-data that is encrypted into your page’s HTML code. The structured data boosts your content’s visibility and helps search engines decipher the page content.

The markup fleshes out your page content’s relevancy signals through context clues (i.e., title tags, headings elements, meta, etc.) for voice search SEO. You can use Google’s free tools:Structured Data Testing Tool to check your markup works correspondingly, and Structured Data Markup Helper to help you write the markup elements in your site.

16. Use unique title tags – Title tags are key elements for ecommerce stores. Since you’re hosting potentially hundreds or thousands of product pages, it’s important to use distinct title tags for every product page and category. Use key phrases and observe an organized structure (e.g., brand + model + item + type).

17. Write concise meta descriptions – Voice search results may not read meta descriptions as a direct answer, but it is displayed in the results. These snippets provide a brief yet concise (up to 230 characters) summary of a page. As much as possible, include your primary and secondary keywords on meta descriptions for your optimization efforts.

Make your site mobile-friendly

Around 20% of searches on mobile devices are voice-based. This implies that a significant amount of voice search traffic is coming from mobile and tablet devices, and the search volume will only grow from here. This is why it’s vital to make your site more responsive on mobile gadgets.

18. Make it easy to navigate – Do bear in mind user experience when optimizing your site’s mobile version. Make your text easy to read and place the links at a good distance. Least you want is to make it hard for your visitors to click the right link. When visitors find your site far from mobile-ready, chances are they’ll leave immediately. This may increase your bounce rate, which can then negatively impact your page rankings.

Integrate local SEO tactics

Some ecommerce stores operate a physical shop; this is where local SEO strategies come in handy. About 46% of people who use voice search look for local business information daily. Moreover, “near me” and other localized queries are often answered aloud by a voice-enabled device.

19. Add local citations – Local citations are mentions or references of your ecommerce business on citation websites or online directories.The more citations your site gets, the higher the chances you get at topping the search engine results. You can build your local citations through online “yellow pages” such as Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, and Google My Business (GMB).

Make sure that you include the basic information: business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across all directories for consistency as well as easy identification and indexing by search engines.

20. Optimize and verify your Google My Business – A Google My Business listing is arguably the most important listing your business can claim online. Claiming your GMB boosts your chances of appearing in Google’s Local Pack, Google Maps, and organic rankings. This means increasing your store’s chances of being read aloud as the answer to voice search queries.

Perform an ecommerce audit

It’s important to conduct an ecommerce SEO audit once you’ve done everything else in this checklist. This lets you see if you’ve missed any step in your voice search optimization strategy.

21. Check for any duplicate keywords – With ecommerce sites, your goal is to assign a unique keyword for each page on your site. This makes it easier for search engines to understand the context and category of your page content and rank them accordingly on the SERPs. If you optimize two pages for one keyword, search engines will get confused at identifying which one is more important.

22. Scan your site for duplicate content issues – Much like with duplicate keywords, duplicate content on your ecommerce site will contribute nothing good. Search engines will have a hard time ranking your content if it’s been used several times throughout your website.

Additionally, we all know how much Google hates duplicate content—you can get penalized for it. Using the same content more than once may not be intentional, that’s why it’s best to double-check your website to ensure that there are no cases like this.

23. Examine if there are crawl errors – Meta tag SEO refers to the process of inserting meta tags to the code of a webpage to help search engines better understand the context of the page. If they find it relevant and valuable to readers, they will place it high up the search ranks.

If you happen to insert meta tag SEO errors, the affected pages will be difficult for search engines to crawl and index.

You can use Alexa’s SEO Audit Tool to evaluate your website copy for any duplicate content. It also scans your site and provides a crawler status report to help you make improvements for your site’s grade.

Build an Effective Top to Bottom Voice SEO Strategy for Your Online Shop

With more and more people using the voice search function for their online shopping needs, you need to adopt and level up your optimization techniques to cater to this audience. Adding voice search optimization tactics to your pre-existing SEO strategies can place your ecommerce site more frequently at a better position in the search engine results pages.

Go through this checklist and make sure that you implement these steps on your online store’s SEO strategies to boost your brand’s visibility, traffic, conversions, and revenue.

Don’t know where to get started with your online site’s voice search optimization? Check us out at Voice SEO for all your voice search optimization needs!

Apr 10 2020

How to Optimize Around User Intent for Voice Search

Search engines exist to provide the best and most relevant answers to users who are looking for information. This specifically means that your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies should be built around the intent behind these queries.

A study by the University of Hong Kong discovered that web search intention can be divided into two means: one, a user may be looking for results to a more specific query (specificity); and two, a user may wish to check out more general information related to the keyword queried (exhaustivity).

Today, a new age of search is on the rise, giving much focus to user intent and voice search optimization. Thanks to new algorithm updates, Google now analyzes the intent behind each query to deliver the most relevant and accurate results that solve problems, not just match with the keywords.

With this, voice search optimization attempts to understand the intent behind the combination of long-tail keyphrases used. Voice SEO does this to deliver the best results and meet the searcher’s expectations in order to gain better search rankings in SERPs.

Google Hummingbird’s Job

As a way to deliver more accurate search results, Google released Google Hummingbird, which features a semantic search and knowledge graph. The algorithm update allows the search engine to have a more advanced understanding of a user’s search intent in order to display more relevant results to corresponding search queries.

This is a long shot from the traditional SEO practice of keyword stuffing. The Google Hummingbird update paved the way for more helpful search matches, finally putting into the register the criticality of user intent. As a result, digital marketers and brands now have the opportunity to produce more useful and valuable content for searchers, helping them rank better on SERPs.

What is User Intent?

Every time users pick up their mobile devices to get immediate answers to their problems or look for information about a brand or product, that action expresses user intent. The crux is that each user who conducts an Internet search has a particular intent. They have specific wants and expect the search results to meet that intent. This is the jump-off point for successful optimization for conversion.

There are four main categories of User Intent searches. This determines the type of results that Google provides to its searchers. The first three can be broken down as Do – Know – Go, and the fourth one being a commercial investigation.

Do (Transactional Queries)

Transactional queries are when users go on the web to perform specific actions such as buying a specific brand or product or availing a particular service. This search intent implies that the user is prepared to make a purchase. Example queries under this intent is “How to start a Netflix subscription?”

However, “Do” queries aren’t always about making a purchase. Some users perform queries that are not explicitly transactional in intent, but search engines still suggest pricing in case the user actually wants to buy (e.g., “Flight prices from New York to Hawaii.”).

Know (Informational Queries)

Informational queries are when users perform a search to find more information and learn about a certain topic or product. Queries like “How to make homemade hot chocolate?” or “What is the thirteenth zodiac?” fall under this category.

“Know” queries are tied to micro-moments. These micro-moments happens when a user acts upon fulfilling a specific query. Since users can pick up their smart devices to quickly look something up, brands and marketing experts are expected to deliver accessible, relevant, and real-time information anytime, anywhere.

Queries in this category of user intent can be simple or complex, but always informational in intent. While some queries may require product research, the action is neither commercial nor transactional.

Go (Navigational Queries)

Navigational queries are when users go on the web to find a specific website or location, usually a known brand or entity. “Go” queries skip going to the navigation bar or bookmark pages. An example of this is when a searcher says “Log in on Spotify” or “Find Taylor Swift’s “ME!” official video on Youtube.” When users perform these queries, they expect to get directed to a particular location. If the search results deliver a competitor brand result (eg. suggesting Apple Music instead of Spotify), then it fails to satisfy the searcher’s needs.

Commercial Investigation

Commercial investigation queries are when users have the intention to purchase a product or service in the future, but they go online to do research first. For instance, they would ask “What is the best shampoo for curly hair?” or “What’s the best movie streaming service?”

These users have an intention to buy a product or avail a service, but they’ll need more time for examining their options and conducting product research. These users need a bit of convincing.

How User Intent is Changing Marketing

User intent is reshaping the way people go through the buyer’s journey. Consumers today no longer follow a linear approach to purchasing. With online shopping and the convenience of search engines, customers can now enter the sales funnel at any point of the journey.

This change also allows brands and marketing experts to create their content to match the points in which searchers or buyers enter the funnel. In short, it’s become all about aligning the funnel to correspond with user intent. It’s all about giving people what they want and need. This helps refine your content development and research on relevant queries and topics.

Tips For Doing Voice Search Optimization Around User Intent

Aim for Position Zero

When you ask Siri or Google Assistant a question, they usually provide one answer. This answer usually comes from the featured snippet. About 40% of voice search results are pulled from Featured Snippets—the segment above the fold on page one of SERPs that is coined “Position 0”.

This means that you shouldn’t be just focusing on being on the first page, but also ranking for position 0. This can increase your website traffic which could result in introducing new customers to your brand. Moreover, featured snippets in position 0 generate an 8.6% click-through-rate.

Project “Position 0” tip: Structure your content with proper formatting by using subheaders and bullet points. Search engines like organized content which they and the readers can easily digest.

Optimize your Google My Business listing

A study shows that roughly 58% of searchers have utilized voice search to look for local business information. Optimizing your Google My Business (GMB) listing and updating it with the latest information can boost your chances of ranking locally for voice search.

Here’s a basic checklist to guide you when completing your GMB profile:

Include complete necessary information such as name, address, and phone number (NAP).
Indicate the area code along with your phone number.
Use a professional business name associated with your website (e.g., [email protected])
Ensure that your business location is consistent between your website, GMB, and other local business listings.
Select the relevant categories for your business industry.
Use high-quality images to make your listing more credible and attractive.
Take the opportunity to describe your business, products, and services in the introduction field.

Many people are using voice assistants to ask for business opening hours, contact details, addresses, directions, and other queries that need direct answers. Make it easier for your local audience to find you.

Local and vocal

Speaking of optimizing for local search, Google found that “near me now” searches have increased by 150% over the past years. People trigger queries like “Show me the top Korean restaurants nearby in [specific city]” unless they’re within the vicinity and ready to head out for lunch or dinner.

They want to eat, they want results, and they want them now. Local voice search is all about urgency and delivering value immediately.

Given this, your local optimization strategy for voice search should focus on all the touchpoints. Create a FAQ segment on your website which provides in-depth answers to all common questions. You can also optimize your subheadings to correspond with such search questions, write list articles, or include tables in your site content. This will help you rank higher for local searches and increase your chances of turning queries into leads.

Keep the user’s own journey in mind

Since its introduction, the buyer’s journey has been the staple in mapping and developing campaigns and strategies for marketing and sales professionals. Fast forward to today, the evolution of online search and shopping has transformed the way people go through each stage of this journey. The customer journey is no longer linear.

Before, consumers follow a linear path when searching online: landing page > homepage or form > product page > form. But the inception of mobile and voice search dramatically transformed consumers’ purchasing decisions and their path towards that final stage.

As marketers, you can identify which part of the stage the customer is at the moment based on search results analysis and insights from tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

Consider developing your SEO and content strategy for voice search through mapping questions as per the various stages of the customer journey:

Awareness: “What’s the best smartphone?”
Interest: “Can you do voice searches on Apple’s iPhone XS?”
Evaluation: “Which is better: Apple or Samsung?”
Purchase: “How much does the iPhone XS cost?”
Customer Support: “Why does the iPhone XS sometimes glitch after the iOS update?”
Loyalty: “What smart wearables work with iPhone XS?”

Focus on content that solves problems

Most people who use voice search are on-the-go and seeking for immediate answers. If you fail to deliver, it’s likely that you’ll fail to rank on the SERPs for voice search.

Most questions start with H + 5W questions: how, who, what, when, where, and why. Google and other search engines tend to prioritize voice search answers that are concise and within 29 words. This doesn’t mean you should only write 29-word blog posts. Instead, you can use your FAQ page for this purpose.

As a guide, you can research questions in their conversational context through Reddit, Twitter comments, and other discussion threads to have an idea of what and how people craft their queries using voice search. You can also use some tools to optimize and segmentation of niche questions.

Complete the keyword query

“OK Google, find an in-depth article that explains what user intent is and how to optimize it around voice search.”

With voice search, keyword queries are longer and more conversational in nature. People are more likely to ask full questions rather than command one or two keyphrases as they would normally type in a search bar. And frankly, it’s easier and more convenient to speak than type. This implies big changes to how you should write the title of your blog post or your content in general.

So, instead of writing around one or two keywords, try experimenting with long-tail keywords (complete, conversational sentences) in your on-page content. Imagine you’re sitting face-to-face with a customer or your readers, think about how they would construct their question related to your business, industry, products, and services. Chances are it sounds conversational in nature.

Additionally, if you type your keyphrases on Google, you can check out the “People Also Ask” box to get a better understanding of other question ideas. You can see that the suggested queries are complete sentences and sound conversational—just as how someone would ask it using voice search.

Use structured data

Producing relevant content is an excellent voice search optimization tactic. Structured data, also known as schema markup language, can help augment your content for better visibility.

Structured data is a form of organized micro-data that you can insert into your site’s HTML code so that search engines can decipher and further understand your site content. Full disclosure: this doesn’t directly affect your site’s ranking. However, it does help Google contextualize and index your data.

The markup sets up your web content’s relevancy signals for voice search SEO through context cues (i.e., title, tags, meta, headings elements, etc.) that correspond with specific keyword queries. Below are some resources you can start with:

Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool – Google’s free tool that allows you to see if your markup works appropriately.
Schema.org – An online database of schema vocabularies you can use to make it easier for webmasters to construct their schema. You can also find FAQs, latest updates, and guides on how you can schema it to your site.
Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper – Another free tool that helps you markup elements in your website content to improve the search engine to comprehend your page data better.

A famous example of where structured data are seen and maximized is when searching for recipes. When results highlight images, calories, cooking duration, cooking steps, and other information, that’s structured language in action.

Summing up

People don’t just search online for no reason. There’s always a reason for it.

Users search online with a purpose; with an intent to find immediate answers for their queries—specific or general information. To optimize your voice search with user intent in mind, stop thinking like a marketer for one moment. Stand in your target audience’s shoes and think how they would: short, simple, and conversational.

At Voice SEO, we offer voice search optimization services that focus on getting your content in front of your target audience. If you want to drive valuable website traffic, grow conversions, generate revenue, and grow your business, consider voice search optimization tactics. Get in touch with Voice SEO now to optimize your website today!

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

How to Design Your Content Marketing Strategy for Voice Search

Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Assistant—nowadays, accessibility is made simple with the use of your voice. One of the most utilized ways for voice-activated digital assistants is for search. In 2016, voice search on Google was at 20% of the total queries on a mobile app, while over at Baidu, one in 10 searches was reportedly made through speech.

These percentages are only expected to go up, as the technologies mentioned above continue to improve in terms of accuracy and reliability—thanks to natural language processing and machine learning. The more people use these assistants, the more training data they acquire, which makes them more powerful with every use. Google Assistant reportedly now has an accuracy of 92%.

According to MindMeld’s 2016 Intelligent Voice Assistants Research Report, people use voice for the following reasons:

61%: hands and vision are occupied
30%: to get results faster
24%: when typing is awkward on the device
22%: because it is trendy and fun
12%: to avoid convoluted menus
1%: other reasons

Despite the prominence of voice search, content marketers haven’t completely embraced it, perhaps due to a lack of understanding of its implications to search optimization. However, it is true that voice search is influencing SEO, and since content marketing is highly connected to SEO, it is also changing the rules of content production in some way.

SEO aims to put your page on the first page of SERPs, but with the advent of voice search, search engines have been profoundly dictating how content should be structured, and this is evident in the appearance of featured snippets. In voice search, content ranking within the featured snippet often gets a more significant share of the traffic compared to relevant but not on featured snippet results.

The Launch of Hummingbird

Changes to how search engines process and evaluate content have always been drastic; that is why some of the older metrics of success aren’t as reliable anymore. When Google launched the Hummingbird update in 2013, it became apparent that the company believes that the future of search is voice. The update focused on semantic analysis to determine the intent behind the search, laying the foundation for voice search.

However, not only did it work to understand what was being asked based on the words and phrases, but it learned the speech patterns and accent, as well. By understanding user intent, it is now possible to search using the language—words and syntax—that is natural to the user.

In addition to Hummingbird, Google also launched the Rankbrain system in 2015. This system helped it better understand and respond to queries and index and rank content. Rankbrain also uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to think like how a person would and comprehend the intent behind the queries without search explicitly stating them. This allowed Google to provide more relevant results.

Both systems also allowed Google to look beyond the keyword strings and instead evaluate context, understand search intent, and deliver results that actually answer questions, not just match keywords to webpages.

Prepare for the Future of Search Today!

Technology will keep on evolving for years to come. In terms of SEO, nothing is set in stone. Keeping up with the voice search revolution is not just about updating your SEO strategy, but as part of it, businesses should also be updating their content marketing strategy. Make sure to monitor trends and updates, so you can make the necessary adjustments that will benefit your company.