Is Your Web Site Ready for Voice Ranking?
Voice Ranking Is More Important Than You Ever Imagined.
The future of voice search is not predictable. However, we do know that it is gaining considerable traction and its growth is not slowing anytime soon.
Voice search is not a fad. It has comfortably crossed the threshold of early adopters.
Voice search is a speech recognition technology that allows users to search by saying terms aloud rather than typing them into a search field.
ComScore has predicted that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be via voice; and 30% of searches will take place without a screen.
Here are a few statistics to prove that voice search is here to stay:
● Voice labs found that there were a total of 33 million voice-first devices in
circulation.
● In a survey of SEO trends for 2017 and beyond, voice search stood at the third spot.
● In his keynote, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that one-fifth of the queries on Google are voice searches.
- 52% of people keep their voice-activated speakers in their living rooms, per Google. 25% keep them in their bedrooms, while 22% keep them in their kitchens.
- 46% of voice search users look for a local business via voice search on a daily basis
- There were one billion voice searches made in January 2018
- 58% of consumers have used voice search to find local business information in the last 12 months
- 28% of consumers call the business after making a local voice search
- At the start of 2018, the combined install base for Google Home and Amazon Alexa was 45 million
- 33% of consumers have called a local business using their smart speaker
- Google Assistant is now available on more than 400 million devices
- 37% of over-55’s have used voice search for local business
- 25% of consumers haven’t yet tried using voice search for local businesses, but would consider it.
What Are Rich Snippets?
Google SERP (search engine results page) is full of handy features and enriched organic results nowadays – the so called rich snippets.
In this guide I will show you what types of rich results and features you can find in Google SERP in 2018 and how you can implement them
and benefit from them as a website owner.
Rich snippets are enhanced search results displayed by search engines on their results page. In opposite to a common organic results they have more visual appeal.
They are described by structured data implemented by webmasters on their websites.
Here is an example of how a Rich Snippet might look like!
But there are more types you can use depending on your particular business.
Rich Snippets categorization
● Sponsored features
● Local business features
● Knowledge features
● Media features
● Voice Query Results
● Search query features
Why Use Rich Snippets
Like the canonical tags, the use of Rich Snippets (or Schema.org markup) is by no means mandatory, but it does benefit search engines, users and yes, even site operators. The big difference though is that, unlike the canonical tag, the benefit is more noticeable to all involved:
● The search engines are able to return more relevant results.
● Users can determine the relevancy of specific results more easily, often on the SERP.
● Site operators may benefit from increased click-throughs, and reduced bounce rates, since users have a better idea of the site contents, and relevancy to their query, before they even visit the site.
How To Get Rich Snippets
Google can show rich snippets if you add structured data to your site. Structured data is a piece of code in a specific format, written in such a way that search engines understand it. Search engines read the code and use it to create rich snippets.
A Local Rich Snippets WordPress Plugin is available that will help you insert the right rich snippets for the right type of content.
To get started all you have to do is simply download it and install it on your WordPress site.
Is Your Site Mobile Ready?
It should go without saying that your website or your clients website should be mobile ready in 2020!
How can you tell if your website is mobile ready or not?
We can answer this question with other questions.
Is Your Web Site SSL Secured?
What Is An SSL Certificate?
What An SSL Certificate (Secure Sockets Layer), also called a Digital Certificate, creates a secure link between a website and a visitor’s browser.
By ensuring that all data passed between the two remains private and secure, SSL encryption prevents hackers from stealing private information such as credit card numbers, names and addresses.
The main benefit of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is that it provides a secure connection to users on the pages where they share personal data with you. It’s great to have on your entire website. But, when a user shares precious info, like credit card details, HTTPS adds extra layers of protection.
An SSL certificate binds together your domain name (or server or host name), company name and location.
How SSL Works
Namely, SSL customers can:
● Utilize HTTPs, which elicits a stronger Google ranking
● Create safer experiences for your customers
● Build customer trust and improve conversions
● Protect both customer and internal data
● Encrypt browser-to-server and server-to-server communication
● Increase security of your mobile and cloud apps
HTTPS-Secured Websites Dominate Google Voice Search Results
Google has stated that HTTPS can give your website a “minimal boost” in the search results. But does this also apply to voice search?
Our data suggests that HTTPS might play an even more important role in voice search than in desktop or mobile search.
Is Your Website Fast Enough?
What is your real website speed?
ATTENTION: This is a HUGE Voice Ranking Factor!
PageSpeed appears to play a major role in voice search SEO. The average voice search result page loads in 4.6 seconds (52% faster than the average page).
Do You Use Metadata?
Metadata describes unseen HTML elements that directly communicate and clarify website information for search engines, playing a critical role in effective Search Engine Optimization for Voice SEO
as well.
<–This includes page titles,keywords and description tags. –>
Meta tags are the foundation of SEO and the first thing you’ll find yourself setting up when building a web page. Without meta tags, you can’t reach readers organically. It doesn’t take much time to generate meta tags, but it’s more important than you might think.
That’s because 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine.
Organic search traffic is the holy grail of SEO, so it can’t be ignored.
Fix metadata using the following plugins:
● Yoast SEO
● All In One SEO
● Seo framework plugin for WP (Install plugin
and demonstrate the plugin)
Do You Have A Sitemap?
A site map is a model of a website’s content designed to help both users and
search engines navigate the site. A site map can be a hierarchical list of pages (with links) organized by topic, an organization chart, or an XML document that provides instructions to search engine crawl bots.
Types of Sitemaps
As the name suggests, a sitemap (or site map) lists all the pages on your website, but there are two different kinds:
XML Sitemaps.
These are specially-structured files used by search engines and other robots to better understand the content of and the relationship between pages on your site.
HTML Sitemaps
These are web pages designed for visitors to provide a complete overview of a large website.
How To Fix A Sitemap
You can do this two ways.
You can either generate the sitemap from your Google Webmaster platform and submit it to google there.
Or, you can install a simple WordPress plugin to take care of this for you automatically and keep the sitemap updated as you add content.
Do You Have A FAQ Page?
Why FAQ Is More Important Than Ever!
If you are planning to get better rankings and drastically improve your
chances of getting the Position ZERO from Google, FAQ Pages is a must
have for your website, or your clients websites.
Having FAQ Pages is Crucial for Voice Ranking because there are voice
phrases and questions you can directly target.
● List most important questions on one page
● Redirect people to another page for the answers.
● Google Loves this strategy!
● Link FAQ page from your Homepage
Voicefied Keywords
What are Voicified Keywords?
Voicified Keywords means we will target longtail keywords from 5-8 words that that quickly solves a user problem or question.
Best Voice Keyword Length?
Conclusion
In other words, if you are serious about ranking in google voice, there is
no magic trick or software that does all this for you! You need to follow
all the above steps and get your website optimized for claiming a
position ZERO result in voice!
It’s important to optimize all the factors we discussed in this training, and
results will be visible in your traffic.
Are you ready to assess your site for voice ranking today?
Send us your web site URL to admin@visionserservice.com, or, just complete the form below to get us started
We’ll get right on it, and, get right back to you with a ranking report.