Voice Search? Another Thing to worry about?
Voice Search? Another Thing to worry about?
Just when you thought you had your website and blog all sorted out, along comes voice search. Whether voice search means anything to you might be what kind of company you have and what kind of customers are important to you.
Voice search is when people talk to those Google Home units and even the Amazon equivalent. This voice search might mean, “hey, my pipe is broken I need a plumber”, or “where can I get some great vegan food around here?”.
If you identify that your business might benefit from voice search SEO, then you want to make sure you have the upper hand. However, how exactly to do it? Actually, voice search is similar to ranking well on the Internet, especially locally. If you follow most of the same plans for ranking locally, you should do pretty well with voice search.
However, voice search ranking parameters are a little flipped around. In order of weight the ranking, the parameters go like this:
Speed
Organization
Person
Image
schema
On the technical end, these factors are minimally taken from the “Schema” markup, or the nerdy code markup that helps Google easily identify what the page is about. However, this is bound to change shortly as Google tries to deepen the market and give better results. If a SEO person today doesn’t jump on a soapbox about how important this is or discounts its importance, run fast and far.
Voice search relies heavily on domain authority, so creating a site with great information and getting it linked to the community is critical to ranking well on Google.
Google’s voice assistant is currently powering 400 million devices, so we continue to analyze this tool and play. We have 5 devices in our office and we spend a regular amount of time to see how our local clients are affected by voice search (if at all).
Part of an agency responsibility is to actually be ahead of the curve. When we got into proximity marketing about 4 years ago and started playing, we realized that the technology was not ready for prime time in all but the largest companies where half percents of things meant millions. Today, with cheap proximity marketing technology, many companies can benefit.
It seems to be the same with voice search. While it doesn’t appear that ROI supports spending a ton of company time on it, in the future it may become very important.
Also, it appears that voice search is hard to “game”, and cheat. That is good for us and our clients, but it is something that we are constantly on the lookout for to make sure nobody eats 80% of the market overnight, leaving our clients and us scrambling to fill a void.
In conclusion, voice search is important, but if you are doing the things you need to do to rank well in regular searches, you should be great!
If you would like help with your ranking, just click here and we can set up a time to talk.