How to Optimize your Website content for Voice Search

Crawling Mondays. Today's edition of Crawling Mondays is going to be about a very hot topic, voice search. This is a topic that I have spoken about at a few conferences already, and then I realized that I didn't have a Crawling Mondays episode about it. Which I'm going to fix right now because it's a very important topic to clarify a few things and also to give you a few resources to start optimizing as much as possible for it. So yes, voice search or conversational search better is a little bit everywhere because it cannot only be found through the devices that got very popular since a couple of years ago, but realistically it's now everywhere. The web search, the app, there has been a little bit of a buzz about it because there was so predictions saying that half of the searches were going to be by voice by 2020 was taken out of context. It was based on some data, some predictions made in 2014 and it was not only going to be about voice or speech search but also about images search. Also, there's a few people who are scared about the effects on SEO and there are a few things to clarify about that. I actually did this little poll a few weeks ago before my presentation about this topic at SMX London a couple of weeks ago, and I asked my followers, very techie-oriented people, do you search in Google via voice at the moment? The answers that I got is like 58% of the people from 1,100, a little bit more than 1,100 people who answered, they never search through voice, 2 to 3% only once in a while, and 9%, yes, all the time. And then I got a few plus clarifications about it saying like easy as meat, like my Google Home device is only used for setting cookie timers and song requests. And then sure, say I'll use it for the map apps like twice a year. And then James Crawford answered like the only time that I use it now is for entertainment. And realistically, even Google shared a little bit of data about it like also a year ago or so saying that voice is about action and most of the requests that they are getting at the moment are on one hand very action-oriented for simple type of requests that are not necessarily related to actual web search, and then on the other hand, screens change everything. And again, these are 5 insights about voice technology that Google shared a few months ago, and they mentioned that nearly half of the interactions with the assistant today include voice and touch input. Most of our queries are complex, for example, about, about reserving a hotel in London or about buying new clothes. You are not very likely going to be satisfied by a voice answer. So yes, I can understand how there is a trend requesting in a very natural way to voice many times because we are on the go a lot and we have the access to all of these devices. But realistically, in order to be satisfied from these answers, we need the visual output. And that is why also Google, for example, has released smart displays. And I think it's much reasonable to speak about conversational search era that we're entering, where many of the input, the requests, the searches can be done via voice, but for the output, a high share of this needs to be visual in order to satisfy the customer need and connect, because at the end of the day, it is about this, right? Connect our content to satisfy their needs, whatever the medium it is. Let's take a look how. So how can you start optimizing your content and focusing on this conversational type of queries. These are natural questions now. The 6 W's are being used by your users to research for content. The what, when, who, where, why, how, and you can start gathering this data from your own content actually. You can go to your Google Search Console and use any of these terms, for example, how here, to identify how many queries are you getting right now with how, and I can see here in this case for remoters, for my own website, how to get remote jobs in India, how to make money as a digital nomad, how to use Revolut abroad, how to become a digital nomad, right? And you can see the performance that these queries are providing you at the moment, the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, positions. Of course you can take a look at what is the content, what are the pages that are ranking for these terms, for this conversational type of queries, if it is relevant, if it is meaningful enough. Of course you can do this by using other tools, keyword tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Sistrix, not only with your own website but the one of your competitors so you can go and take a look at how your competitors are already leveraging conversational queries, if they are ranking for the same that you are or any other queries. So for example here FlexJobs and I'm looking here for the how query. I can see how many hours is part-time, how to fill out a resume, how to be successful without college, how to follow up on a job application. So many queries, conversational queries for which they are already ranking. I can see their position, I can see an estimate of the traffic that these are bringing for them, I can see the pages they are ranking with, I can see the search volume that is non-trivial at all. So this gives me a lot of ideas already of the type of conversational queries that that my audience is using to search for my content. And of course I can use this as an input for a bigger keyword research. So as a next step to identify even further opportunities to target this conversational type of queries, you can use also your relevant topics as an input and go to the questions filter in any of the keyword tools that exist nowadays, pretty much all of them. Whether in Ahrefs or in Semrush Keyword Magic Tools and Keyword Finder tool, most of the keyword tools nowadays they will have the questions filter. So for example, for remote jobs, I can see here only the questions regarding this topic and I can see here even more ideas and opportunities of conversational queries that I can target with my content. How to find remote job, how to get a remote job, and like this I will be able to see not only which are the terms, the conversational type of queries that are providing me and my competitors already good rankings, but also even further queries that I can target with my content and structure my content in a way that we are going to see we can optimize in order to maximize the chances to rank well as the answer through the Google Assistant. So how do we become the answer for these conversational queries that we have identified? Identify and find relevant to rank for. It's about becoming also the first result because we are going to see that there's a high correlation between them. One, there are more factual type of questions will be satisfied and answered by Google Knowledge Graph through the answer boxes. Here I asked through the Google app, the assistant, what's the name of Prince Harry's son? And I got the name which is exactly the way that it works in desktop search as we can see here. So for this factual type of queries that are satisfied by the Google Knowledge Graph and for which there is an answer box provided, this is going to be pretty much it, the answer through the Google Assistant. On the other hand, there are also these queries like for example localized queries for which Google will provide the Maps result, their own services feature that we are going to obtain as the answer through the assistant. We get it here in the desktop search results and we get it also here as the answer. On the other hand, there are these much more complex type of queries, more transactional-driven, customer-oriented-driven, that are not satisfied by the answer boxes but for which feature snippets are provided in many occasions. We are going to likely want to target these ones because these are the ones that we can use to connect with our customer within the customer journey. For these other more complex type of questions for which a featured snippet is provided, we can optimize our content to become the featured snippet and there's going to be a high correlation because we can see that this is the one selected as the answer by the Google Assistant. So for example, in this case I asked, what are the best neighborhoods to live in London? And a featured snippet is shown here and the same is provided here as the answer by the assistant, right? And there has been many researches and this is taken from one done by Semrush. 40.7% of all voice search answers came from a featured snippet and we can see that many of these are questions, prepositions, comparisons, Mostly these are targeted by FAQs, guides, resources addressing informational type of queries in the customer journey. So for example, the best flat prices in London. This generates a featured snippet like this and the content is taken from the different areas of this blog post that has been published in this real estate website. We can also not only target though. Informational type of queries but also transactional ones more and more. So for example, best prices for tires in the UK or buy cheap laptops for students too. So how we can optimize our content for them? First, already be ranking well for them because the featured snippets are generated by the first results already. There's a high share of them that are already ranking in the first 3 positions, so this is the first step that we need to do. Then the content should be organized in a very well-structured way, in a very concise way so Google can easily highlight the most prominent areas that actually answer the query, the conversational query from our users and that these are areas that are going to be spoken to. So we can see many examples here of how this content is well-structured, it's mobile-friendly of course, it's already secure, it's already optimized, and it's also written in a way that can be easily spoken. And this is the other thing. A year and a half ago or so, Google published these best practices for evaluation of speech for the Google Assistant. These are actually the criteria that Google takes into consideration to evaluate the content for voice. Besides the typical information satisfaction type of criteria that we will take into consideration for search results in general, we find information about the length, the formulation, the elocution, how this content is spoken, like spoken answers must have a proper pronunciation and prosody, even with examples. That is not only the usefulness of the response, of the answer, but also the quality of the speech, the length, the formulation, the elocution again, and we can have even examples here, so I will say it's definitely important to, for every content that we now write, that we read it out loud, that we hear how it sounds, that if it is short enough, concise enough, if it is well-formed, if this content can be easily spoken on one hand, so definitely take a look at this resource here. Then we can also use the how-to structure data for rich results and this will also generate how-to actions for the Google Assistant. This was something that was announced in Google I/O a few weeks ago. So again, this is a win-win in this other case and we can see many examples of this in websites like Instructable. For example, they have implemented the how-to structure data for most of their pages and they are already generating the results for many of the queries that they target like this. If you're a media site in the US, you can also use the speakable structured data. Search Engine Roundtable is already doing by using the speakable structured data. And this is the thing, right? Even if you're not a media site in the US, you can use the rules, the guidelines that are provided by the speakable structured data, again, to format your content in a way that is very easy to be read, to be spoken. So content that might sound confusing in voice-only and voice-forward, don't add the speakable structured data to it. Rather than highlighting an entire article with speakable structured data, focus on key points, concise headlines, and/or summaries that provide users with comprehensible and useful information. Break up information into individual sentences so that it reads more clearly for TTS. So this is fantastic again because it gives you very specific guidelines to follow to structure your content. And you can use all of these criteria and structured data also to optimize your content to be concise, easy to read aloud, and well-structured. As for example, again, this is another example of Instructables for which they are generating this snippet, also provided as an answer by the Google Assistant. And you can of course identify if you are triggering already this type of featured snippet results very easily actually by using again Semrush, Ahrefs, or even Sistrix here. As you can see, any of these tools have a filter here for featured snippet and I can see all the type of featured snippets that in this case FlexJobs is generating, like in text, the list, the the videos here and I can see which are this query. Something additional that you can do of course is to track this with your own rank trackers. Most of rank trackers nowadays also have the support to track SERP features in general. So for example here with SEO Monitor for one of the terms that I am ranking with, I am shown that this is included as a featured snippet here because of the quotes and I can see even further not only the ranking but the actual click-through rate, the visits that are generated through these results and the behavior, the conversion, the bounce rate, so I can also assess the impact being provided or being shown as a featured snippet. To additionally expand your presence through the Google Assistant, you can use Google Actions. Google Actions are conversational applications for which Google will find a matching intent with the queries that their customers ask or search for and they will provide them as an answer if there's a match. And you can see actually a really good list here in the Google Assistant directory listing a lot of actions from calculators to quizzes to news actions, etc. A lot of websites use them as an additional support for users or just to interact in in a fun way with users and to better provide answers to many of their queries. And realistically, until now, the most popular way to generate or develop these actions were through platforms like Dialogflow, right, that are used to develop a little bit of more complex type of conversational experiences, not only for the Google Assistant but also for Amazon Alexa, for even for bots. However, I understand that Google wants to facilitate the process and What they have done is that they have informed that they will now generate also actions when we use structured data. So they will identify the usage of the FAQ structured data, the how-to structured data, recipes, the news, and they will generate automatically actions when they find this information that is marked up. However, we can of course make sure that we properly generate our own actions to have much, far more control over them. And we don't necessarily need to develop them by coding from scratch. There are easy ways to generate them now with templates. Actually, I created an action with a template last year for my website, Why My Web Traffic Dropped, which is a checklist to identify the reasons for losing traffic, and I created this quiz at the end, and you can check this quiz actually in the actions directory over here, and the way that you can invoke the action here, the reviews of a few people, and this is the Google Docs, the template that I have needed to fill to generate the quiz, which is actually a flashcard here. So here are the questions, these are the answers, this is the follow-up to generate the conversation with the assistant, with the users, and this is the configuration. I just had to fill this template and now actually Google is providing a way not only to generate quizzes or actions like this, but also to generate how-tos, which I have to say, I can see that might be much more meaningful and useful to generate, for example, FAQs type of experiences, support type of experiences to expand your current one. And you can see in a very similar way, it's just to fill this Google Docs, then you will connect with the actions on Google So you can monitor your actions, you can upload your actions, do changes to your actions, etc. And you can specify how it will invoke over here, how your action is built, the personality, the voice of your action. You can test it with a simulator here, and you will get also data about the usage of your actions, which I think is super useful in order to better understand the type of interaction and behavior that your audience is having over the assistant. I would highly recommend you to check it out, to give it a go, generate games, flashcards, how-to guides, trivia, or quizzes. I hope that this has been useful for you and that with the information that I have provided in today's episode, now you are not only a little bit more aware of what is happening with voice search and conversational search, but the actual opportunities that you have to optimize your already existing content, how to expand your content to be provided as the answer by one of these devices. If you have any question, if you have any doubt, please leave it in the comments and I'm looking forward to see you in the next Crawling Mondays. Have a great week. Bye-bye. Chronic Mondays!