SEO
Tips For Leveraging The Power Of Voice Search Optimization
Imagine two businesses competing for the same customers.
Let’s call them Store A and Store B.
They are identical except for one thing: Store A has a location that’s easier for 7 out of 10 customers to access.
Which company will do more business?
You don’t need an MBA to figure this out – Store A offers more convenience and will therefore grab more market share.
Now, consider one convenience you can add to your website that will make a similar impact: voice search.
According to Statista, there will be 8 billion voice assistants in use worldwide by 2024.
That’s a lot of people speaking into their phones or smart speakers.
And if you’re not optimizing your web content to account for it, you’re leaving a lot of opportunities on the table.
Why are so many people using this functionality? Why is it important for search engine optimization? And more importantly, how do you claim your share?
Read on for answers to these questions and more.
How Popular Is Voice Search?
We’ve already established how many people prefer to use the voice search capabilities on their devices, but let’s look at some other relevant statistics, just to drill home the importance of taking advantage of this trend:
- In 2022, 35% of Americans over 18 own a smart speaker (up from 32% in 2021).
- 62% of Americans over 18 use voice assistants on their devices.
- One of the top three reasons consumers want a smart speaker is to ask questions without needing to type.
- 80% of smart speaker owners find it easier to use to discover new content and events.
- 57% of voice assistant users use it at least once per day.
As you can see, smart speaker and voice assistant usage is growing more popular in the competition for search traffic, and is only expected to rise.
And there are two key things that we haven’t even mentioned yet – accessibility and UX (user experience).
Voice Search Improves Accessibility
The US Department of Justice has been clear: Websites fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
And non-compliance can cost you more than potential traffic – you can be fined as much as $75,000 for a first offense.
Voice search plays a big role in ensuring your website can be accessible to everyone.
This includes those with physical limitations that restrict them from using the keyboard and mouse, those with repeated stress injuries who need to limit their time using keyboards and mouses, and people with cognitive issues who prefer to use voice search.
A lot of this functionality relies on speech recognition technology, but you may not realize the way your website is coded can also have a big impact.
According to the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative), there are several best practices your site should adhere to in order to ensure accessibility, including reading order corresponding with code order, the use of alt tags for images, and adding markup to convey meaning and context.
For a complete list of the WAI’s recommendations and information on implementing them, click here.
Voice Search UX Outcomes For Users
The link between good UX and improved search engine results has been well demonstrated. And the growth of voice search means designing your UX around voice interaction is becoming more important.
How your brand interacts with different voice search-enabled devices can significantly determine whether users have a positive or negative experience.
But before addressing this, you need to understand how people use voice search.
One of its main uses is informational.
Say you’re elbow deep in pasta dough, making tortellini while a red sauce simmers away in a pot on the stove.
You can’t remember how long the sauce is supposed to be on, so without taking the time to wash and dry your hands, you call out to your smart speaker, “Hey Google, how long should tomato sauce cook?”
Or you’re hanging out with some friends when one of your buddies refuses to believe Willie Mays ever played for the Mets.
A quick voice search can help you, once again, demonstrate your superior baseball knowledge.
In addition to settling arguments, many people also use it to check the news and weather.
Another common use is “near me” searches.
For example, you’re on a road trip in a state you’ve never been to. Your car is running on fumes, and you must find a gas station as soon as possible.
Without ever taking your eyes off the road, voice search can direct you to the nearest place to fill your tank.
And of course, there’s voice shopping, which was briefly touched on earlier.
From making shopping lists to ordering pizza to purchasing products with voice alone, more and more people are initiating and completing purchases without ever looking at a screen.
The uses for voice search are growing right alongside its increasing popularity.
So, that raises the question: how do you get in on it?
Prioritize Your Voice Search Efforts By Channel And Audience
When developing your voice SEO strategy, you must understand the capabilities and limitations of the platform you’re designing for. There are two approaches here:
- Screen-first devices like smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.
- Voice-first devices like smart speakers.
Each of these offers different strengths.
Screen-first devices (when the screen is being utilized) offer an efficient output for information.
Visual scanning is faster than listening and can be used to convey more info in less time. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
Voice-first devices, on the other hand, provide an efficient input.
Users can give commands quickly and easily on their own terms.
Of course, this relies on the device understanding natural language, a technology that has vastly improved since voice commands were in their infancy.
Depending on your website’s content, your user demographics, and a host of other factors, your users may be more inclined to prefer one type of device over the other.
You also need to understand at which stage of the buyer journey voice search is used.
More people are using voice assistants to research products than buy them, with 44.4% of U.S. consumers using them to browse new products, but only 24.2% using them to complete a purchase.
Most of these purchases are small items that don’t require being looked at, such as toilet paper or dog food.
Take all these factors into account, then tailor your voice strategy to your specific audience and channel.
Once you have that done, it’s time to get down to the nuts and bolts of optimizing your content.
Optimizing Your Content For Voice Search
If you don’t have much experience designing vocal user experiences or VUI (vocal user interfaces), don’t worry – this is fairly new ground.
While these are different from GUIs (graphical user interfaces), the UX/UI principles still apply, as does the effect user experience has on your search ranking.
Here are some important elements to consider when designing your VUI or converting over existing content to optimize it for voice search:
Start With A Plan
Rather than tackling your VUI and/or voice search optimization piecemeal, you should spend time developing a flowchart explaining how voice search users will navigate through your site.
Doing some upfront planning will save you lots of headaches, hassle, and duplicate work on the backside.
Make Interaction Natural
Voice searchers use natural language to find things, often using more words.
Whereas a desktop searcher might type [Chinese delivery nearby], someone using voice search is more likely to say, “Where’s a good Chinese delivery place near me?”
The same long-tail keywords used for ordinary SEO purposes will come into play in voice search.
Try to use full phrases and queries, which are even better than long-tail keywords. And make sure you’re always thinking about user intent.
Design For Flow
Earlier, we mentioned how your HTML, CSS, and other code should be structured the same way a person would read your site so it tells the same story in voice search.
You also need to take this sequential approach to structure your content.
Make sure the content follows a logical course.
Create verbal tags that can be easily navigated by voice alone (e.g., “select option #2″).
Improve Your Domain Authority
Here’s where your regular SEO efforts can pay dividends for voice SEO.
Voice search almost always selects the first search result to answer a query.
That makes it crucial to have your site fully optimized for ordinary search.
Check your backlinks, maximize your keywords, boost your local search, and do all the other tasks that come with SEO, and it will also reap rewards in voice search.
Grab Featured Snippets
Featured snippets aren’t just great for mobile and desktop search – they’re also used to answer voice search results.
In fact, 60% of all voice search answers come from featured snippets.
So, if your content claims this valuable real estate for a query, you will get the lion’s share of voice traffic.
Get Local
Because so many voice searchers are looking for local answers, your content needs to be optimized for it.
If you’re not already, get listed in Google’s local rankings.
If you’re already there, work to improve your results.
The goal is to be the answer when someone searches Google to answer queries like, [Where can I get a dress altered near me?]
Voice Search Is Only Going To Grow
Some technologies burn bright for a few years and then completely fade away – remember HD DVD?
Voice search is unlikely to be one of them.
Instead, it’s finding new uses and an even larger niche as technology becomes more advanced.
If anything, it’s the keyboard and mouse model we’ve grown to know and love that is more likely to become obsolete, especially should Elon Musk’s futuristic Neuralink catch on.
The most important thing in this sci-fi-come-to-life world will be user experience.
It’s not farfetched to imagine AI-powered search learning our likes and dislikes and providing answers customized to our unique intent.
The best way to ensure you’re prepared for this brave new world is to harness the existing cutting-edge technologies to ensure you’ve future-proofed your position as much as possible.
And that means leveraging the power of voice search.
It’s the foundation upon which much of the future of search will be built, which makes it crucial that you get on board.
Your targets are speaking. Make sure your website is listening.
More resources:
Featured Image: Prostock-studio/Shutterstock
SEO
Google On Hyphens In Domain Names
Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about why people don’t use hyphens with domains and if there was something to be concerned about that they were missing.
Domain Names With Hyphens For SEO
I’ve been working online for 25 years and I remember when using hyphens in domains was something that affiliates did for SEO when Google was still influenced by keywords in the domain, URL, and basically keywords anywhere on the webpage. It wasn’t something that everyone did, it was mainly something that was popular with some affiliate marketers.
Another reason for choosing domain names with keywords in them was that site visitors tended to convert at a higher rate because the keywords essentially prequalified the site visitor. I know from experience how useful two-keyword domains (and one word domain names) are for conversions, as long as they didn’t have hyphens in them.
A consideration that caused hyphenated domain names to fall out of favor is that they have an untrustworthy appearance and that can work against conversion rates because trustworthiness is an important factor for conversions.
Lastly, hyphenated domain names look tacky. Why go with tacky when a brandable domain is easier for building trust and conversions?
Domain Name Question Asked On Reddit
This is the question asked on Reddit:
“Why don’t people use a lot of domains with hyphens? Is there something concerning about it? I understand when you tell it out loud people make miss hyphen in search.”
And this is Mueller’s response:
“It used to be that domain names with a lot of hyphens were considered (by users? or by SEOs assuming users would? it’s been a while) to be less serious – since they could imply that you weren’t able to get the domain name with fewer hyphens. Nowadays there are a lot of top-level-domains so it’s less of a thing.
My main recommendation is to pick something for the long run (assuming that’s what you’re aiming for), and not to be overly keyword focused (because life is too short to box yourself into a corner – make good things, course-correct over time, don’t let a domain-name limit what you do online). The web is full of awkward, keyword-focused short-lived low-effort takes made for SEO — make something truly awesome that people will ask for by name. If that takes a hyphen in the name – go for it.”
Pick A Domain Name That Can Grow
Mueller is right about picking a domain name that won’t lock your site into one topic. When a site grows in popularity the natural growth path is to expand the range of topics the site coves. But that’s hard to do when the domain is locked into one rigid keyword phrase. That’s one of the downsides of picking a “Best + keyword + reviews” domain, too. Those domains can’t grow bigger and look tacky, too.
That’s why I’ve always recommended brandable domains that are memorable and encourage trust in some way.
Read the post on Reddit:
Read Mueller’s response here.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Benny Marty
SEO
Reddit Post Ranks On Google In 5 Minutes
Google’s Danny Sullivan disputed the assertions made in a Reddit discussion that Google is showing a preference for Reddit in the search results. But a Redditor’s example proves that it’s possible for a Reddit post to rank in the top ten of the search results within minutes and to actually improve rankings to position #2 a week later.
Discussion About Google Showing Preference To Reddit
A Redditor (gronetwork) complained that Google is sending so many visitors to Reddit that the server is struggling with the load and shared an example that proved that it can only take minutes for a Reddit post to rank in the top ten.
That post was part of a 79 post Reddit thread where many in the r/SEO subreddit were complaining about Google allegedly giving too much preference to Reddit over legit sites.
The person who did the test (gronetwork) wrote:
“…The website is already cracking (server down, double posts, comments not showing) because there are too many visitors.
…It only takes few minutes (you can test it) for a post on Reddit to appear in the top ten results of Google with keywords related to the post’s title… (while I have to wait months for an article on my site to be referenced). Do the math, the whole world is going to spam here. The loop is completed.”
Reddit Post Ranked Within Minutes
Another Redditor asked if they had tested if it takes “a few minutes” to rank in the top ten and gronetwork answered that they had tested it with a post titled, Google SGE Review.
gronetwork posted:
“Yes, I have created for example a post named “Google SGE Review” previously. After less than 5 minutes it was ranked 8th for Google SGE Review (no quotes). Just after Washingtonpost.com, 6 authoritative SEO websites and Google.com’s overview page for SGE (Search Generative Experience). It is ranked third for SGE Review.”
It’s true, not only does that specific post (Google SGE Review) rank in the top 10, the post started out in position 8 and it actually improved ranking, currently listed beneath the number one result for the search query “SGE Review”.
Screenshot Of Reddit Post That Ranked Within Minutes
Anecdotes Versus Anecdotes
Okay, the above is just one anecdote. But it’s a heck of an anecdote because it proves that it’s possible for a Reddit post to rank within minutes and get stuck in the top of the search results over other possibly more authoritative websites.
hankschrader79 shared that Reddit posts outrank Toyota Tacoma forums for a phrase related to mods for that truck.
Google’s Danny Sullivan responded to that post and the entire discussion to dispute that Reddit is not always prioritized over other forums.
Danny wrote:
“Reddit is not always prioritized over other forums. [super vhs to mac adapter] I did this week, it goes Apple Support Community, MacRumors Forum and further down, there’s Reddit. I also did [kumo cloud not working setup 5ghz] recently (it’s a nightmare) and it was the Netgear community, the SmartThings Community, GreenBuildingAdvisor before Reddit. Related to that was [disable 5g airport] which has Apple Support Community above Reddit. [how to open an 8 track tape] — really, it was the YouTube videos that helped me most, but it’s the Tapeheads community that comes before Reddit.
In your example for [toyota tacoma], I don’t even get Reddit in the top results. I get Toyota, Car & Driver, Wikipedia, Toyota again, three YouTube videos from different creators (not Toyota), Edmunds, a Top Stories unit. No Reddit, which doesn’t really support the notion of always wanting to drive traffic just to Reddit.
If I guess at the more specific query you might have done, maybe [overland mods for toyota tacoma], I get a YouTube video first, then Reddit, then Tacoma World at third — not near the bottom. So yes, Reddit is higher for that query — but it’s not first. It’s also not always first. And sometimes, it’s not even showing at all.”
hankschrader79 conceded that they were generalizing when they wrote that Google always prioritized Reddit. But they also insisted that that didn’t diminish what they said is a fact that Google’s “prioritization” forum content has benefitted Reddit more than actual forums.
Why Is The Reddit Post Ranked So High?
It’s possible that Google “tested” that Reddit post in position 8 within minutes and that user interaction signals indicated to Google’s algorithms that users prefer to see that Reddit post. If that’s the case then it’s not a matter of Google showing preference to Reddit post but rather it’s users that are showing the preference and the algorithm is responding to those preferences.
Nevertheless, an argument can be made that user preferences for Reddit can be a manifestation of Familiarity Bias. Familiarity Bias is when people show a preference for things that are familiar to them. If a person is familiar with a brand because of all the advertising they were exposed to then they may show a bias for the brand products over unfamiliar brands.
Users who are familiar with Reddit may choose Reddit because they don’t know the other sites in the search results or because they have a bias that Google ranks spammy and optimized websites and feel safer reading Reddit.
Google may be picking up on those user interaction signals that indicate a preference and satisfaction with the Reddit results but those results may simply be biases and not an indication that Reddit is trustworthy and authoritative.
Is Reddit Benefiting From A Self-Reinforcing Feedback Loop?
It may very well be that Google’s decision to prioritize user generated content may have started a self-reinforcing pattern that draws users in to Reddit through the search results and because the answers seem plausible those users start to prefer Reddit results. When they’re exposed to more Reddit posts their familiarity bias kicks in and they start to show a preference for Reddit. So what could be happening is that the users and Google’s algorithm are creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
Is it possible that Google’s decision to show more user generated content has kicked off a cycle where more users are exposed to Reddit which then feeds back into Google’s algorithm which in turn increases Reddit visibility, regardless of lack of expertise and authoritativeness?
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Kues
SEO
WordPress Releases A Performance Plugin For “Near-Instant Load Times”
WordPress released an official plugin that adds support for a cutting edge technology called speculative loading that can help boost site performance and improve the user experience for site visitors.
Speculative Loading
Rendering means constructing the entire webpage so that it instantly displays (rendering). When your browser downloads the HTML, images, and other resources and puts it together into a webpage, that’s rendering. Prerendering is putting that webpage together (rendering it) in the background.
What this plugin does is to enable the browser to prerender the entire webpage that a user might navigate to next. The plugin does that by anticipating which webpage the user might navigate to based on where they are hovering.
Chrome lists a preference for only prerendering when there is an at least 80% probability of a user navigating to another webpage. The official Chrome support page for prerendering explains:
“Pages should only be prerendered when there is a high probability the page will be loaded by the user. This is why the Chrome address bar prerendering options only happen when there is such a high probability (greater than 80% of the time).
There is also a caveat in that same developer page that prerendering may not happen based on user settings, memory usage and other scenarios (more details below about how analytics handles prerendering).
The Speculative Loading API solves a problem that previous solutions could not because in the past they were simply prefetching resources like JavaScript and CSS but not actually prerendering the entire webpage.
The official WordPress announcement explains it like this:
Introducing the Speculation Rules API
The Speculation Rules API is a new web API that solves the above problems. It allows defining rules to dynamically prefetch and/or prerender URLs of certain structure based on user interaction, in JSON syntax—or in other words, speculatively preload those URLs before the navigation. This API can be used, for example, to prerender any links on a page whenever the user hovers over them.”
The official WordPress page about this new functionality describes it:
“The Speculation Rules API is a new web API… It allows defining rules to dynamically prefetch and/or prerender URLs of certain structure based on user interaction, in JSON syntax—or in other words, speculatively preload those URLs before the navigation.
This API can be used, for example, to prerender any links on a page whenever the user hovers over them. Also, with the Speculation Rules API, “prerender” actually means to prerender the entire page, including running JavaScript. This can lead to near-instant load times once the user clicks on the link as the page would have most likely already been loaded in its entirety. However that is only one of the possible configurations.”
The new WordPress plugin adds support for the Speculation Rules API. The Mozilla developer pages, a great resource for HTML technical understanding describes it like this:
“The Speculation Rules API is designed to improve performance for future navigations. It targets document URLs rather than specific resource files, and so makes sense for multi-page applications (MPAs) rather than single-page applications (SPAs).
The Speculation Rules API provides an alternative to the widely-available <link rel=”prefetch”> feature and is designed to supersede the Chrome-only deprecated <link rel=”prerender”> feature. It provides many improvements over these technologies, along with a more expressive, configurable syntax for specifying which documents should be prefetched or prerendered.”
See also: Are Websites Getting Faster? New Data Reveals Mixed Results
Performance Lab Plugin
The new plugin was developed by the official WordPress performance team which occasionally rolls out new plugins for users to test ahead of possible inclusion into the actual WordPress core. So it’s a good opportunity to be first to try out new performance technologies.
The new WordPress plugin is by default set to prerender “WordPress frontend URLs” which are pages, posts, and archive pages. How it works can be fine-tuned under the settings:
Settings > Reading > Speculative Loading
Browser Compatibility
The Speculative API is supported by Chrome 108 however the specific rules used by the new plugin require Chrome 121 or higher. Chrome 121 was released in early 2024.
Browsers that do not support will simply ignore the plugin and will have no effect on the user experience.
Check out the new Speculative Loading WordPress plugin developed by the official core WordPress performance team.
How Analytics Handles Prerendering
A WordPress developer commented with a question asking how Analytics would handle prerendering and someone else answered that it’s up to the Analytics provider to detect a prerender and not count it as a page load or site visit.
Fortunately both Google Analytics and Google Publisher Tags (GPT) both are able to handle prerenders. The Chrome developers support page has a note about how analytics handles prerendering:
“Google Analytics handles prerender by delaying until activation by default as of September 2023, and Google Publisher Tag (GPT) made a similar change to delay triggering advertisements until activation as of November 2023.”
Possible Conflict With Ad Blocker Extensions
There are a couple things to be aware of about this plugin, aside from the fact that it’s an experimental feature that requires Chrome 121 or higher.
A comment by a WordPress plugin developer that this feature may not work with browsers that are using the uBlock Origin ad blocking browser extension.
Download the plugin:
Speculative Loading Plugin by the WordPress Performance Team
Read the announcement at WordPress
Speculative Loading in WordPress
See also: WordPress, Wix & Squarespace Show Best CWV Rate Of Improvement
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