Voice search is very important in the SEO Industry and it’s on the rise. Whether it’s coming from Google, Amazon Echo, Cortana, or Siri. Google is already estimating that the majority of queries it gets in 2020 will be done by voice search. That means you need to refresh how you approach SEO entirely.
Do You Know How To Optimize For Featured Snippets In Voice Search?
If you’re involved in the realm of search engine optimization, then you know that this industry is brutal in its pacing, especially when compared to other sectors and fields. At times, simply staying on top of imminent changes and the latest updates feels like full-time work all by itself.
One specific factor that’s having a profound impact on organic search is that of voice searching. The very way that people are looking for information online is changing quite rapidly. The development and growth in popularity of voice assistants is one driving force behind this, but the expansion of mobile searching is also having a profound influence too. Read more to find out how you can optimize for voice search using featured snippets.
Focus On Featured Snippets
Featured snippets play a crucial role in all of this, since these are the very results that get read in response aloud to the voice searcher. They’re direct-answer results which often float to the top of SERPS inside a box, where they usually incorporate a link back to the source providing the answer.
Stone Temple Consulting looked through nearly a million and a half Google queries. They found that almost a third of them were showing featured snippets already, so, the number of affected searches is already too substantial to ignore. Pete Meyers coined the phrase ‘Position Zero,’ which is another common name for featured snippets given where they appear on the page. It’s crucial that you update your search strategy to now include optimizing for these featured snippets. You simply have to prioritize this before it’s too late and you’re on a crowded bandwagon.
The central idea you need to keep in mind with featured snippets is that when searchers use voice with the expectation of a verbal reply, they’re not going to get a list of potential results. Rather, they only hear a single result read out. When a featured snippet is present, the voice assistant is going to choose it over everything else.
Your website might have an intriguing meta description and mind-boggling title tags. However, if you don’t claim that position zero everyone will eventually want, then it won’t matter how great your content is, because it’s not going to be verbalized. That means your content and site are not only unseen by the searcher, but also now unheard.
Find The Long-Tail Keywords
One huge difference separating standard search from voice search is people using more conversational language. They’re speaking naturally instead of typing a query. This is a younger kind of search, and so the newer query formats have to be factored into your updated strategy. This is where long-tail keywords come in. If you want exclusively featured snippets all your own, then you have to find the specific informational queries that are associated with your services or products. Obviously, use any and all keyword tools you have or like here, but it’s also fruitful to talk to your customers about this. Take into consideration any frequently asked questions you routinely face.
If you want to know a powerful tool for such conversational search queries, then look at Answer The Public. This tool gives you the power to dig deep into actual user intent, since you can separate results into different question starters, like how, why, and who. Use Google’s People Also Asked feature to expand on your research so that you can dig up other queries that are closely related.
You can test any questions you generate just by typing them yourself into Google before analyzing the featured snippet results. You can form a solid foundation here, but you can also decide what needs added or improved for even higher-caliber results. You might decide that the answer currently provided isn’t quite long enough, or you notice an article source doesn’t give much more detail.
Optimize Your Content
Once you know the questions you want to answer, then you need to actually answer them. You’ll typically do that in blog post format. It is true that Google’s only going to show a tiny slice of the article text inside a featured snippet. However, that’s not to say your answer should answer only the direct question.
Make sure the direct response is included, but also do what you can to expand on the question in-depth to provide the user with more content on the matter. Even with voice search and featured snippets growing so furiously, you already know from your other SEO work how much Google loves deep content that is informative and authoritative, and the benefits of providing this aren’t going to change anytime soon.
If you need a good article or blog formula, start with directly answering the question before venturing into answering similar or related search phrases and questions. You’ll definitely cover all of your bases in doing this, making it easier to achieve that featured snippet spot. You might even a land a few inadvertently along the way. In the end, it could still take testing across several iterations to find out what is most effective for you.
If you’re not already using Q&A formats in your content, then it’s worth doing so now, because this is exactly how voice search and featured snippets actually work. Don’t just limit this kind of format to your FAQ page. As a matter of fact, in a world of people asking verbal questions and hearing a computerized voice read them an answer, you should probably go back to all your older content and see if can be changed to incorporate a question and answer style. When you make it easy for Google to fetch a featured snippet out of your content, you’re making it easier for yourself to claim that coveted position zero for yourself. You’ll stand to gain quite a bit from the boom in voice search.
Another thing you want to look at is experimenting with various formats of graphs and tablets. That’s because more than one-third of current knowledge boxes and featured snippets have images with them. Voice searchers want easy and direct answers, and numbered points that break up your content into simpler steps is a great way to optimize your content for those doing voice searching.
On top of this, if you have so many steps that the featured snippet can’t show them all, Google’s going to give the user a Read More button linking back to your site. This is a very effective method of converting voice searchers into actual website users.
Cater To Local Searchers
Local searches done on mobile devices are a driving force behind voice search. This information is tremendously critical to any local search strategy. Remember, half of all mobile visitors that do a local search wind up going to that physical business in the 24 hours following their search.
These don’t yet involve featured snippets, but they do show profiles at Google My Business, where directions can be read aloud. Actually, directions to a place are among the more popular voice search queries, which isn’t all that surprising since people need to be hands-free when behind the wheel.
So, for local searches, your contact information has to be just as accessible as it can possibly be so people find you. You know Google will eventually crawl your site, or again and again. Make things easier for its bots, and you’re going to have better odds of shooting up their featured results. You can win the game of voice search. Just make sure you contact information isn’t only inside an image, since that can really backfire in an audio format that would never be able to read it.
Are you interested in something else that can keep Google bots happy? Use a schema markup to substantially boost your odds of garnering featured snippets.
There is one thing that should go without saying, but just to make sure you’re set, it’s going to get said anyway: keep your profile and information on Google My Business both accurate and up to date. Once more, you ought to be doing that with your larger SEO work in the first place, so this shouldn’t be much of a concern. Once you have your contact information up to date and in place, then speed things up by actually submitting your sitemap to Google directly. You can even expedite things more by submitting fresh content that is newly added to your website.
Be Ready For Mobile
Don’t neglect mobile users. They’re the driving force behind search engine queries and even most Internet growth. You need to have a mobile version of your website, and you need to optimize the mobile version just as much as the traditional version. In some cases of mobile searching, Google is actually not showing anything but mobile versions of sites, so if you don’t have them, you’re out of play entirely.
You might be thinking whether or not you need a detailed mobile website if voice search is only going to read the featured snippet. The truth is you do, because Google loves them and you want Google to love you. Consider the fact that the search engine giant is switching over to a mobile-first index of listings. Even in a world of voice search, the user always has the choice to dive into a query and answer if they want to read more about it. If that’s true, they’ll beeline for your site, but if it’s not up to par, your time as king of the hill will be a short reign.
User Intent Matters More Than Anything
In terms of landing featured snippets, things aren’t actually all that different from SEO work you’ve done in the past. To be blunt, if you’re taking user intent to heart like you have before, you’ll still win in this new age.
If you studied recent updates, such as Rankbrain and Hummingbird, then you already knew that user intent needed to be something you emphasized. As such, you might already have content partially or fully optimized for things like voice search and featured snippets.
The use of voice search with a commercial intent is definitely in its infancy at the time of writing. On the other hand, that’s very likely to evolve in the near future as more users grow comfortable with doing voice searches.
It’s best for you to be prepared for this, because it’s coming.
If you want to explore strategies for voice search optimization, we recommend you check out this (nearly) free book from Amazon:
