Voice Search SEO

Apr 08 2020

Voice Search SEO for B2B Marketing: A Complete Guide

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

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

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

What B2B Marketers Need to Know About Voice Search

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

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

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

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

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

How B2B Companies Can Optimize Their Website for Voice Search

Have a strong presence on mobile

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

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

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

Build an FAQ page

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

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

Aim to rank for the featured snippet

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

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

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

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

Target voice search queries

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

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

Prioritize long-tail keywords

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

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

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

Use conversational language for your content strategy

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

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

Get your business listed

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

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

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

Develop your brand voice

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

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

Make Voice Search a Priority Today

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

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

Apr 07 2020

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

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

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

Alexa: Amazon’s Foray into Voice Tech

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

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

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

The Influence of Amazon’s Choice in Alexa SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

In conclusion, Amazon’s Choice heavily relies on:

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

7 Ways to Optimize for Amazon’s Alexa

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

1. Do keyword optimization for your Alexa SEO

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

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

Primary

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

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

Secondary

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

2. Be present on Amazon Prime

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

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

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

3. Be proactive in managing product reviews

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

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

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

4. Optimize your product pages

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

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

Images

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

Title/Product name

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

Bullets and descriptions

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

Keywords

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

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

Structured data

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

Other standard keyword optimization techniques that you can follow are:

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

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

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

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

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

6. Improve your social media visibility

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

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

7. Partner with Alexa SEO experts

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

Help Alexa Find You Now

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

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

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 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.

Apr 01 2020

Ask Yourself These Questions Before Getting Started with Voice Search SEO

What is my goal for doing voice search SEO?

A crucial step to setting up for optimization is determining your goal for doing voice search SEO. To find this, it’s ideal to get a full evaluation of your website. Look into the current status of where you currently are, where you should be, and what you need to do to get there. Finding the direction you need to be going will be able to shape what your goals are for integrating voice search SEO into your site.

The purpose of voice search SEO is to provide users with direct answers to questions they may have. Here are some great goals to aim for with voice search SEO:

Drive better website traffic with compelling content
Boost site engagement with mobile-friendly pages
Stay a beat above competitors in SERPs

Am I patient?

There is no one clear path to seeing significant changes in your voice search SEO performance. There are many factors that contribute to your ranking, and each of them can bring in varying effects to your position in search engines. Even then, there is no guaranteed amount of time for your optimization efforts to come to fruition.

At the center of it all, to hit your voice search SEO goals and ultimately gain fantastic rankings, it matters that you do the necessary keyword research, strategizing, optimizing, and analysis. This becomes the cycle at which you can positively impact your website.

Who is my target audience?

In order to market your product, service or website properly, you need to establish who your target audience is. It’s one thing to churn out pages, and it’s another thing to be able to make an impact on the people you want to engage, after all.

Recognizing your target audience lets you dig deeper into what their interests are so you better understand what kind of content would and wouldn’t work with them. This, in turn, enables you to create better-targeted voice search SEO strategies that capture what they need to see and what else they might want to see, at the same time learning to filter out what wouldn’t work.

These can affect two very crucial points in creating content:

Keyword research

When you know who exactly you’re trying to engage, you’ll be able to get in some pretty specific research. For example, when your target audience is mothers balancing their career with parenting, you’ll be able to set up the appropriate research that finds the kinds of terms they use.

You can research a number of ways—through keyword research tools, social media trends, focus groups, and surveys.

Content Strategy

Based on the insight collected from your keyword research you’ll be able to better plan the content you need to create. Following the target audience of mothers balancing work with parenting, let’s say top searches include easy kids meal prep, time management, and quick home organizing hacks. You’ll now know to prioritize information on these subjects in particular to better cater to their interests.

If your content isn’t meeting your target audience’s needs, then you may be sacrificing more than just a couple of missed marks in exchange for faster content production.

Who are my competitors? And what’s their voice search SEO strategy?

Your SEO competitors don’t have to be in the same field or business as you. So long as you target the same keywords, regardless of niche, you’re all gunning for that same top spot in the SERP.

The good news is that it’s easy to monitor their strategy. Try searching for a keyword you use and see what content others are providing right off the results. Check out their pages to see if what they’re producing is something you can use or if their site structure is something you can take inspirational cues from.

With the help of a competitive analysis tool like Ahrefs and SEMRush, you’ll be able to do even more. You can deep dive into their domain strength, content, backlinking, and more. The information you find can serve as the benchmark for changes you need to make to your site and see how to build on them.

What are the metrics and KPI?

There are many ways to measure success in SEO. With regards to voice search SEO however, there are a few specific metrics and KPIs you’ll want to keep an eye out for considering the implementation of Rankbrain in page evaluation.

Here are some metrics worth tracking for voice search SEO:

Ranking

It’s important to keep track of rankings primarily because this is what drives organic search. Having a good position in search results boosts the clicks to your content. It should be noted, however, that tracking rankings matters the most when you factor in other metrics such as CTRs and organic traffic.

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic is a crucial metric to keep an eye on for voice search SEO. Seeing the number of people on your page gives you an idea of how much potential there is to turn visits into conversions.

Organic Bounce Rate

It’s not enough that you’re aware of the number of visits. Recognize the length of time users are on your page. Are they there long enough to look at your content or do they navigate out of it too soon?

Organic Conversion Rate

This refers to the percentage of visitors acting upon a goal you’ve set for them to pursue. It could be to sign up for an account or newsletter or simply purchase something from your site. Tracking this allows you to see how performance fairs on a page compared to other pages on your website. You’ll be able to better understand where to focus efforts on when improving pages and content.

Do I have a keyword list?

As mentioned earlier, determining your target audience affects the way you create content. Using the question of who you’re speaking with, you can then determine what you’ll be talking about.

A monthly keyword research should suffice in keeping you on top of current trends and relevant searches at the same time, ensuring that what you’ll be producing is well-targeted and will bring in the right visitors that will turn into customers. This additionally helps make content strategizing a much easier task as you’ll be able to immediately recognize which topics you can build on and which to reconsider deprioritizing.

Do I have quality content?

Content plays a key factor in voice search SEO. It’s the very reason any user would click on your website from SERPs and the same reason they would stay on your site and eventually explore. But of course, it isn’t enough to just have a block of keyword-stuffed text sitting on a page of your website. It needs to hold a standard of quality that users would come back to.

Circling back to your audience and every search engine’s inevitable core of putting user experience first, your content needs to be of value. Quality content means what’s on your page matches the user’s intent with the information they’re looking for and the language they actually use. Present it in a way that keeps them engaged without missing a beat on being informative.

For businesses that market products and services, FAQ pages are great for ranking. It’s a platform where you can address all the questions about your business in one compact landscape. Not only will you be able to nail a question, but you also gain more trust from your user and directly establish how you’re able to help them. To make sure that users stay on your FAQ page you should make sure that each question has its own page with succinct answers.

Here are other types of content you can consider creating:

Viral content, which can come in the form of text, images, or videos
Guides to a subject related to your website
Product reviews you can pull from your client pool
Infographics for a more informal approach

Am I a local business or an enterprise?

Voice search is used because of its convenience and speed in providing answers to queries. A quick search of a target keyword will pull up results that show you who your competitors are. Regardless of whether or not you’re in the same industry or subject specialty, everyone included in that SERP is considered a competitor.

Forty-six percent of voice search users look for local businesses which they can visit easily. That’s a considerably big chunk of people who are looking for locations within the vicinity, which is good news for local businesses. The best way to compete against big enterprises with multiple branches, as well as other unrelated competitors, is to establish authority in your industry.

For enterprises, on the other hand, if you’re looking to compete against local businesses, you’re going to want to focus on localizing your content in a similar way. Think of growing at ground level, asserting that you are locally available, offering the kind of products or services that a user might be looking for.

This means when optimizing, you need to make sure you’re getting your business on the map. To do this you need to:

Be aware of your local competitors. Knowing who you’re up against in the market gives you the advantage of planning better location-specific strategies.
Filter your competitor accuracy. Look out for who may be providing outdated information. This is the perfect opportunity to boost your business.
Get your business on the map. Part of establishing authority in your industry is getting a business listing, adding your location address, implementing star ratings and customer reviews. You can do this with Googl e My Business.
Be active on social media. Showing your audience that you’re active and easy to contact makes your business a better prospect to visit. Google has also confirmed that this will get you better rankings in local searches.

Do I have a link building strategy?

Link building is important in SEO for two main reasons:

Boosted rankings

Links contribute to the ranking of a site on SERPs. Each website that links to your page counts as a “vote” for relevance and credibility, so long as the page linking to you is one that has an equally if not more credible setup. The more quality links you have, the better chances of your domain authority will improve.

Relevant subject discovery

Sites who have linked to you potentially offer traffic from their page to yours. The more links you have, the better chances there are of more users coming in to view your site aside from accessing it through results pages.

To realize your site’s potential, you can implement your link building strategy with outreach:

You can interact with influential personalities or businesses that can help promote your website.
You can also offer to contribute a guest post to their blog, which will contain a link to your website.

After successfully getting a link from their own page, the exposure follows. These referral links are great for gathering more curious potential customers, underscoring the need to create engaging content on your page.

How much will it cost me to do voice search SEO?

As a responsible SEO or digital marketer, you should be financially aware of how much you’ll be shelling out to optimize your website for voice search. Your budget would, of course, be dependent on what process you choose to go with. Will you be hiring an agency or are you building your own team?

Pricing varies depending on the kind of service you’ll be availing or the agency you’re considering. Building your own team, on the other hand, would have a different cost since you’ll be hiring instead of outsourcing.

Your basic SEO team roles would require a project manager, data analyst, content creator, link builder, and web development. It’s considerably more expensive since this would be a continuous expense than outsourcing. However, you can also choose to upskill existing employees to cut through the hiring process.

Conclusion

Digital assistants have made a significant impact on the way search. Voice search has enabled a stronger culture of multitasking and a bigger demand for efficiency on both offline and online habits.

From an SEO and digital marketer’s perspective, its influence is something that can’t be missed primarily because of the way algorithms have changed and adjusted to suit the new tech. Many factors now play key roles in better rankings. Mobile-friendly pages, faster page load, more complex keywords, improved UX, and linking are just a few things to keep on the list of priorities.

Taking a quick assessment of your website’s current status and your business’s goals is imperative to see whether or not you’re in the right position to be optimizing for voice search. Asking yourself the right questions with the full scope of what you’re getting into should make the decision-making process an easier one.

If you’ve decided to start optimizing for voice search, you can get in touch with Voice SEO. You’ll be well on your way to seeing your site rise through the ranks in no time.