“Hey Siri, how many Alexa devices are out there?”
“Larry, have I not given you whatever you wanted?”
Fortunately personal voice assistants do not harbor jealousy. If th
ey did, we are doomed. That’s because they are being used wherever you look. And you may well end up using more than one type.
Look at the players. Apple’s Siri has been answering our questions since 2011. Google Assistant runs on most of the 2 billion Android phones and devices out there, in addition to smart speaker Google Home. Microsoft Cortana is embedded in all Windows devices. This past Holiday season, Amazon sold “tens of millions” of its Alexa-enabled Echo at discount prices for the purpose of increasing Amazon’s sales.
Besides shopping, all of these devices can use your voice to access search engines. With the massive base using voice assistants, the value of search optimization for these devices is enormous.
How do you optimize for voice search?
Because people search differently with voice than with text, you want to make your content conversational. After all, that’s how humans talk. Though you want to use keywords, it is not about keyword targeting in the traditional SEO sense. Voice searchers ask questions. Their search queries are more often than not long-tail searches.
Keep in mind that though the search is in voice, the personal assistants are using search engines that index text.
You will find that FAQs resonate well with voice searches because they provide information. Think of the questions your target audience might ask. Review customer responses in reviews or on social media to discover topics to develop content around.
Which search engines do Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa use?
This is an important question because they do not all use the same search engine. Siri, Alexa, and Cortana use Bing. Search engine optimization for Bing should target on-page optimization and link building. Human interactions and behavior are not as big of a part of Bing’s algorithms as they are with Google. Bing provides straight-forward how-to search optimization at its Bing Webmaster Guidelines.
You will also find Bing Webmaster Tools will help you navigate the nuances of search optimization for Bing. Then when you add or change content, you should submit the URLs through Bing Webmaster Tools. That is because Bing is slow to crawl websites, unlike Google which finds new content on its own fast.
Android users are in luck because those devices use Google Assistant which means Google is the search engine. What did you expect? DuckDuckGo?
Google rewards quality content that engages its readers. Google search results will soon have (if not already) a bias toward mobile. That means you need to have a mobile website that loads fast. Check your website with Google Mobile Speed Test. If your website does not do well with this test, you should consider investing in fixing your site or building a new one. Websites that perform poorly on mobile will lose human visitors just as much as you will not do well on Google’s search engine results.
A wise investment is to develop structured data markups such as Schema.org and/or Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve performance. Google Assistant will reward sites using structured data by improving discovery by Google.
When all is said and done, if you are doing solid SEO and presenting a website that works great on mobile, you will increase your chances that Personal Voice Assistants will tell their owners about the information your website offers. That includes what you are trying to sell.
Do you want to improve your website’s performance on voice search? Contact E-Power Marketing. We’ll analyze your website and propose a plan to boost your search results.
