– What does this mean for your business?
If your business depends on getting customers through your bricks-and-mortar door, you'll need to make sure Google knows it (see "Tip 2" below). Additionally, your voice search content should specifically target long-tail, question-based keywords (see "Tip 4") and provide the answers in a way that a real human might actually speak.
Also, because Google's voice results often verbally dictate the answer from the featured snippet, we recommend you follow all the best practices for winning position zero.
– What if your business isn't specific to an area?
Skip Tip 2 and jump straight to Tip 3.
Tip 2: Claim your My Business listingWe know that local listings rank highly in voice search, which means if your business is specific to an area, it's recommended that you claim so in Google. Local results show up in Google search pages and Google Maps, and give customers vital details about a company such as location, hours and so on.
– How to claim your My Business listing
Pop on over to the Google My Business support page to find helpful information on claiming your business. This is a largely step-by-step process and shouldn't be too difficult.
You're going to need to include a lot of details about your company, and the more the merrier. Make sure you update your listing to include all of the following (where relevant):
– Secure your local listing with AdWords
Running an AdWords campaign? Make sure you use the AdWords Location Extension to add a geotag to your advertisements. These will appear beneath your ad on a search results page, showing where your business is located.
You can also start campaigns within Google Maps itself, using Local Search Ads.
Tip 3: Use schema markup and submit a sitemapOK, this one is a little bit more complicated, but tap your IT people on the shoulder and make sure they help you out – it's vitally important, but few people do this (which means it could be the differentiating factor between you and your competitors).
"Schema" is a standardised coding language that speaks to Google's crawlers and helps them figure out what your page is about. It's more accurate than plain HTML, and makes Google more confident in showing a schema-marked page as a top result (in certain instances).
– How does schema work?
To use an example from schema.org (the community body behind this language, founded by Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex), if you were creating a page about the movie "Avatar", your competitors would have HTML info that gives the director's name, a cast list, and whatever else is relevant, but that leaves the crawlers to figure out what these actually mean.
With a schema markup, you could tell Google, "This page is about a science-fiction movie", that "James Cameron is the director of this movie", and the web page is "specifically the trailer for said movie."
– What does this mean for your business?
Don't just rely on the crawlers understanding your website naturally – point and scream at the information they need to know.
If you're our aforementioned pizza restaurant, tell Google "this is a food establishment", "these are our delivery charges", "we are a local business" and anything else you can think of that's relevant to your customers' queries.
– You said something about submitting a sitemap?
Yeah, we did. Let's do it next!
Submit a sitemap of your website through Search Console in either XML, RSS or TXT format. This will help the crawlers find all of your pages faster, especially if your site is large, new, or has an extensive archive.
It can also establish you as the content's original publisher (if it's ever copied), showcase how frequently content is updated, and tell Google how important a page is, relative to the rest of the site. All of these details are taken into consideration by Google's ranking factors.
Tip 4: Optimise content for long-tail questionsAs we discussed in Tip 1, people are asking Google Voice Search niche questions, and expecting human answers. So, any voice search SEO content you're going to produce should accommodate:
– What are long-tail keywords?
A long-tail keyword is a phrase entered into Google that contains a significant amount of detail. Think "where can I find a vegetarian pizza restaurant near me?" versus "pizza restaurant".
– How do I find and use long-tail keywords?
Pull up your existing keyword strategy and carefully consider it in comparison with your FAQs, user personas and customer journey from Tip 1. All you need to do is figure out which specific questions real people are asking that are relevant to your target keywords.
When you have a list of viable long-tail questions, turn them into articles that specifically answer those questions. Go into detail, provide examples and key takeaways, and above all, ensure that your content is more valuable than your competitors. You can use our 2X tactics to this end.
– Important final point about the featured snippet
Remember what we said about Google dictating the answer to users. Voice search is designed for the device to provide an answer, not you as the content provider. More often than not, users will only listen to the featured snippet's answer, then move on.
Because of this, it's vitally important that you target all content to position zero, and work hard to earn these coveted results.
Tip 5: Optimise your site for mobileLast but certainly not least, your site must must must be optimised for mobile, as this is where the majority of voice search queries will come from.
– How to optimise your site for mobile
The first step in good mobile optimisation – and this includes for voice search SEO, too – is to ensure that your website meets general best-practice SEO standards. Good foundational SEO is important no matter what strategy you are attempting.
Next, run through this checklist and tick off each item to keep your website easy-to-use even on a small screen:
If you aren't sure about any of the finicky web stuff, talk to your IT people or an SEO professional for help.
In summaryVoice search SEO in 2018 doesn't have to be complicated. While there are a few steps to getting it right, if you really think about it, it isn't that far departed from a typical organic SEO strategy – all the same foundations are there.
Just remember your user questions, optimise all content to suit Google crawlers and user's devices, and nab that My Business listing!
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