Back in October of 2016 I wrote a blog about the advance of voice searching in relation to search engine optimization. It may be obvious to you that people are using mobile and voice search more and more and with the easy and instant access of user’s mobile phones and voice devices such as Amazon’s Alexa App and Echo or Google Home for in-home use, this is not likely to change and in fact will probably eventually replace web surfing. Search Engine Watch points to (click here for the full article) the following list of data points that clearly show the trend:
- Voice-enabled personal assistants are installed by default on all smartphones
- Google has revealed that more than 20% of searches on an Android device are voice searches
- The Amazon Alexa app recently topped the app store charts. The Google Home app occupied second position
- The Amazon Echo was once again the best-selling item on Amazon this holiday season
- Speech recognition accuracy is now north of 95% for all of the major technology providers
- Google’s mobile-first index is rolling out and will soon be applied to all sites
- comScore predicts that 50% of all searches will be by voice in 2020.
And yet, Search Engine Watch says, according to a study by BrightEdge 62% of marketers are unlikely to use strategies that integrate with voice searching algorithms. These devices are becoming more and more intrinsic to our lifestyle and the way we search using them is completely different. Voice search gives only one answer, so the search engines look for the best answer. In order to come up your website must have fresh, relevant and current answers. People often use their voice search to find specific things, locations or quick answers. Depending on where they are when they’re using the device also determines what kinds of questions they ask.
An SEO consulting site, BacklinkO, did an analysis to discover the criteria that seemed to work best for SEO rankings based on voice searches. The article goes into greater detail and I recommend that you read it (linked here), but in a nutshell, what they found was that sites tended to rank higher if they already had a high ranking on desktop, were fast and hold security certificates (HTTPS), provided short answers (within over 2,000 words on the sourced page), were easy to read, provided simple content (9th grade level is best), were authoritative domains, were not using schema, but were appearing in featured snippits and were socially engaged (the more your content is shared, the better). Interestingly they found that adding keywords to the url does NOT help.
Simply put, basic good SEO practices will work well for most of us, keeping a few things in mind. Don’t just add keywords, provide answers to potential questions, questions about your product or service and questions related to your product or service. I found that the easiest way to do that was to step back and pretend I am looking for web design or graphic art and think about what I would ask. That can work for you as well.
If SEO, even after this, seems too daunting or scary, contact us. We can help take the scary out of SEO.
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