I gave my first presentation on the opportunities for SEOs interested in appearing for voice search queries back in 2016, and recently at Search Love Boston, I got a chance to chat over breakfast with Will Critchlow from Distilled about the voice search opportunity. That conversation inspired me to question the data we’ve seen thus far about voice search adoption and really dig into what type of marketing opportunity there really is with voice-driven queries.

And here’s another confession:

I was studying new human-computer inputs and their adoption by consumers back in 2003 with the first wearable computer. I have since watched the adoption of consumer’s interaction with computers while out in the world living their lives.

My perspective is influenced by all of that, and you’ll see that in my Voice Summit presentation.

So here’s my take on the current Voice SEO opportunity.

Let’s first start with the challenge:

Current Voice SEO data is misleading

The data that’s been quoted in every voice SEO presentation is flawed. It’s either misquoted or includes voice actions (like setting a timer) along with true voice queries. Heck, even I misquoted it back in the day or didn’t dig into the voice search data enough. We all do it and need to do better.

Here are the voice search data points that are widely shared:

• 1 in 5 searches on the Android app are via voice (2016)
• 1 in 2 use voice technology on their smartphone. (Source🙂 BUT this is both voice action and queries.
• By 2020 50% of all searches will be voice search. Most people attribute this to Mary Meeker, but in fact, it was the head of Baidu search, and the stat included IMAGE search as well. S
• By 2020, 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen source.
• The adoption curve of smart speakers is trending faster than other technologies, and while smart speaker ownership is at 18% of the U.S. population in just 3 years, it is outpacing the adoption rates of smartphones and tablets.

Here’s the key takeaway:

All of the data above does not necessarily mean that those owners are using the device to conduct voice searches that are marketing moments.

How many marketing moments are there?

17-25%

The reality is that the voice SEO opportunity is really small for most marketers. Of the studies we have access to, the average % of marketing opportunities (voice requests that are NOT actions) hovers around 17-25%.

There is one global study that was just focused on smartphone use that trended higher (more like 60%) but it was with a 6K sample size.

It all depends on your industry and market

There are some caveats. If you are in the industries below, there is more of a voice SEO opportunity for you.

Online Groceries

If you are in the online grocery business, here’s the most recent data:

“56% of online grocery shoppers use or plan to use voice-controlled smart assistant/speaker”. Source: http://bit.ly/voicegrocery

Product searches

“74% of consumers say text-based keyword searches are inefficient in helping to find products online.” Source: http://bit.ly/2NGYjWl

However, keep in mind that statistic above also speaks to image search abilities and opportunities. The prediction for voice shopping is 50% by 2020. At the moment it’s at 5%, so that prediction seems aggressive.

A lot of the voice shopping is directly into Amazon’s database. Neither dataset looks specifically at product discovery via voice on Google search vs Amazon.

“The growth curve of voice shopping looks a lot like the trajectory of mobile commerce seven years ago” – Moffett Nathanson’s Greg Melich 

Local businesses

Here’s where there are good data and no controversy. People are definitely using their smartphones to find information about local businesses. Here’s the most recent data:

58% of consumers used voice search to find local business info in the last 12 months, and most conduct daily searches. Source: http://bit.ly/2KQS2cL

If you’re doing SEO well, you’re already well positioned for voice SEO

Here are the things that you need to tackle to appear well in voice search.

1: Follow SEO best practices

High-level SEO best practices include the following:

Make sure your pages load fast
The research we have suggests that voice search results are from sites that are screamingly fast:

 

To see your time to the first byte, I’d recommend using Google Chrome’s Lighthouse tool:

.

There are additional resources and tools that can help you assess and improve your page load speed, some of which come with pretty reports or videos you can share with your team to make the point:

• https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
• https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/
• GTMetrix
• https://webpagetest.org

Make sure your site does not have crawl or indexing issues
If you haven’t conducted a full SEO audit of your site, we can help you with that.

If you’re looking to DIY it, we offer a course and coaching on Technical SEO which walks you through how to conduct your first audit, though you’ll also need a tool to crawl your site like Googlebot.

We use the following site crawl tools to troubleshoot technical issues for our clients:

• Deepcrawl
• Screamingfrog
• Sitebulb

2: Use structured data

Why?

• It helps the search engines understand who you are (noun/entity) and how you are associated with other nouns/entities.
• It also helps search engines understand if your content has an action associated with it (can the user “play” or “listen” to your content).
• It also in Google’s world lines you up with an automatic inclusion into the Google Actions in Assistant directory. This basically enables users on Android devices to play media directly from Google search or Google Assistant without opening a separate app. You as a marketer/website owner will get an email from Google asking you to claim your Google Assistant Action if you have news, podcast or recipe content that is marked up correctly (and if you’ve submitted your podcast RSS feed via Google Search Console). Once you claim your Action Directory page you’re all set.
• It can also help with getting a brand Knowledge box.

Here’s how you check to see if your pages have structured data on them:
https://search.google.com/test/rich-results

And here’s some great Google resources to get started adding structured data on your site. Side note, when you do add the structured data, Google is more fond of JASON-LD as a format.

• http://bit.ly/Googlestructureddataguide
• http://bit.ly/GooglesupportSD

Side note, you’ll be tracking those interactions in your Google Actions Console.

3. Be on HTTPs

Not only is it a factor in ranking (most top ranking sites are on HTTPs), and ranking factor for voice SEO (70.4% of Google Home result pages are secured with HTTPS.) but the browser warnings scare away users.

37.6% of Chrome users do not continue through SSL warning are Google’s results from a study about users and their interactions with browser warnings.

Be careful though, a transition to HTTPs should be treated like a full domain move with an SEO on board. I’ve seen clients loose rankings due to a technical issue with their migration.

If you haven’t moved yet though you have to move for a variety of reasons and now for voice search reasons.

4. Have a low bounce rate and high engagement

Ah, this is where clean data is your best friend. You can view your bounce rate and engagement in most content reports in Google Analytics, but if the bounce rate seems too good to be true, it probably is.

All sorts of things can create artificially lower bounce rates, and we tend to see double hit counting as one of the culprits. If you have a sense that your metrics are not as accurate as you’d like them to be, contact us for a Google Analytics audit and assessment.

5. Be mobile friendly

It’s important to keep in mind that while you might pass Google’s mobile friendly test, Google also takes into account how mobile usable your site is and that includes things like whether a user can navigate your site with their fingers, and whether they can zoom in on images.

It’s more effective for you to look at your site’s results in the Mobile Usability report in Google Search Console.

6. Know your audience context and intent

The most important tip here is think about (or ask) your users what else they are doign when they are looking for your product and service via voice. Most of the time they will be in the middle of doing something else.

For instance, I just evaluated a client’s podcasts and their reviews highlighted that most podcast users were listening to the podcast during their commute but it was too long and detailed to work effectively in that context and therefore they gave up on being a podcast listener.

Don’t let this happen to you.

7. Develop a brand voice

Most of the brands that I’ve worked with have have not documented their brand voice.

I first became obsessed with brand voice documentation when running the social media team running the handles for the NY State of Health during their Healthcare exchange launch. I had a team of 10-12 people on the handles from 8 am to 8pm monday- Friday and 9am- 1pm on Saturdays handling NYers health insurance questions and all of them needed to sound like the brand.

Magic like that is only going to happen with massive amounts of thought and documentation.

A brand voice document helps ensure

• Customers have a consistent experience with your brand
• Your brand is something that everyone understands, can articulate, and effectively share with others.
• Your marketing and sales (or your customer service team( is on the same page about who the brand is and how it should act and sound regardless of who is “behind the brand” on the handle.
• It lets you ensure that your brand “sounds” the same across social, paid, voice, AND SEO.
• It prepares you for the future moment when Google will play YOUR brand’s voice back to a voice searcher (my prediction).

Here’s a great resource to get you started on how to develop your brand voice.

8. Answer their questions (featured snippets)

You also need to create content that will truly answer their question based on the intent of their keyword, not necessarily the keyword itself.

For instance, I had a global media client who provided Amazon SEO services who wanted to rank for a particular term where all of the results where from amazon.com – in that instance clearly searchers wanted help with an amazon specific product but if you looked at eth keyword out of context (without looking at the search results) you would think that it was a term with marketing opportunity.

In another example, they wanted to rank for a term with a services landing page where the results were all DIY blog posts – the intent was clearly to learn about the topic and execute on the marketing themselves.

The intent matters – and getting it right for voice even more so as you need to rank in the top 5 for that keyword before even being considered for a voice search result – and to get there your content needs to work for the searchers.

9. Be found locally

If you are a global business with local offices, or a local business, you need to execute on what I call “brand” SEO and THEN execute on a whole other list of items critical to local SEO. Check out my blog post where I break down all of the elements required for good local SEO.

Don’t those tips above look familiar?

It’s the stuff you should be tackling anyway if you’re running a strong SEO program.

But…here’s one new audio SEO opportunity I think most are missing

10. Optimize your audio assets

And honestly, it’s a new announcement for Google so it’s possible that most clients and organizations are just not aware.

According to Google Podcasts Product Manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen, in the future, Google will have the ability to:

“transcribe the podcast and use that to understand more details about the podcast, including when they are discussing different topics in the episode”.

That means that while there are steps today that marketers should take to optimize their podcast landing page and episode, we should prepare for Google surfacing particular content from within the episode to answer a searcher’s question.

Think about these questions:

• If a user is dropped into the middle of a podcast, would they get enough context from that starting point?
• Are you structuring your interviews in a way that would support that user behavior? Google currently does something like this with celebrity video answers in Search.
• Are you optimizing your existing podcast for search?

New to podcast optimization? Google has provided technical resources around how to optimize your podcast content that you can find here: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/podcast

ONE thing everyone can do to prepare for future voice opportunities

The adoption curve for using voice via a speaker or a phone to look for information is aggressive, so even if you do not provide the specific products/services mentioned above, maybe you want to start preparing now so that you’re prepared for when your audience starts searching for you via voice.

Prepare now: Develop your brand voice

There’s still work to be done to be ready – particularly documenting your brand voice. This type of internal document can not only guide your team now as they share information for your brand across your site and social handles, but you can also NOW document what your brand should “sound” like once you have the opportunity for Google to play answers from your brand in search.

Not sure where to start developing your brand voice? I think these are some great starter resources.

Or contact me – I’ve helped other brands tackle this challenge, and I’ve even helped clients implement and adjust their brand voice via their social handles.

Here’s the OTHER new SEO opportunity most are not talking about

And that’s because it’s not sexy.

Remember that data point that was mentioned above? That by 2020 50% of the searches will not be text searches? That data point included image search.

There’s a HUGE number of people starting their journey with image search. Here’s the most recent data from Sparktoro about where people start their searches:

That’s right – taking a picture of an item with your phone’s camera and using that input to search for something similar. And we’re not talking about scanning a barcode, but instead actually just taking a picture of a particular easy chair you love or a painting – and having Google find more information for you about it.

For product searches in particular, I think that’s a HUGE opportunity that most business are not taking advantage of. And it’s relatively easy if you’re following good SEO practices to be found for those queries.

Here’s the image SEO checklist:

1. Make sure your image filename is optimized for a keyword
2. Add descriptive alt text to the image
3. Add text on the page (like a caption) that can help the search engines identify and image.
4. Choose next generation image formats (JPEG or using PNG-8)
5. Optimize your images
6. Reduce your file size (free resizer here)
7. Use image sitemaps

And here’s more guidance from Google related to image optimization:

• Image Publishing Guidelines: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en
• Image Optimization: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization

As usual, SEO is rapidly changing but for most marketers voice SEO is not quite there enough for it to be a priority.

Yet…

Everyone can easily be prepared by:

1. getting their SEO house in order and
2. documenting their brand voice

Both of those actions will position you well if your target audience suddenly starts a search for you via voice.

Get my full presentation here, and connect with us to see how WO Strategies can help you evaluate your voice SEO opportunity!

I’ve counseled quite a few clients (RollCall.com, WattAgNet, and others) about how to get their sites into Google News and I wanted to share those best practices with my readers.

A word of caution, however – Google makes the decision to include you based on an algorithmic evaluation, which means that there are NO humans at Google you can talk to and who could troubleshoot why you are not included. The best you can do is follow their requirements and best practices closely.

So without further ado:

Here are the requirements and best practices for getting into Google News:

(If you are short on time, you can just download my Google news requirements spreadsheet).

At a high level, it takes the following to be indexed and ranked in Google news. All of these items are based on Google’s guidelines and industry research.

This is what Google says:

Ranking in Google News is determined based on a number of factors, including:

• freshness of content (content posted in the last 24 hours)
• diversity of content
• rich textual content
• originality of content
• User preferences for topics or publishers: learn more about how Google News stories are selected and how to see stories you want on Google News.

Additionally, we know that these factors are also critical for high Google News ranking:

• Meeting Google’s quality content guidelines, and news sites are considered Your Money or Your Life pages, so the bar for content quality is higher and includes transparent and robust information about the authors of each news article.
• A fast loading, mobile usability site.
• Clean XML news sitemap files that have unique, permanent article URLs that can be extracted by Google newsbot.
• News schema markup and relevant subscription markup on your pages.
• Accurate on page <title>, <h1> and <alt> tag markup.
• Inbound links.
• Social shares.
• Links out to other reputable sites.
• On page engagement and click through rate from SERPs.

Search Metric’s Media Ranking Factors study is the most recent industry study on Google news ranking factors highlights the following factors that impact ranking:

There are a few technical elements that you need to make sure are set up properly as well, including:

Your news article URLs:

• They need to permanent, unique URLs that you are not recycling or republishing at a later date. Here’s more from Google’s help files.
• Each URL in your news sitemap file needs to have content that is long enough and quality enough to be included in Google news.

 

You should create a News XML Sitemap file.

The Google News XML sitemap format is different than your regular sitemap. Here’s an example of that format:

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

• The sitemap needs to be less than 1,000 URLs
• Should only include URLs for articles published in the last 2 days.
• And it should update with fresh articles as they’re published.

Submitting to your articles to Google

Google now has 2 ways to submit your content for inclusion in Google News. You can sign up and license your content to Google News through the Google News Producer tool.

You can also submit your website for inclusion through the Google News Publisher Center. Even if you don’t do either, they might find your news content via a regular web crawl, especially if you have submitted that news formatted XML sitemap to Google via your Google Search Console account.

More about the new Google News Producer Tool

There seem to be quite a few benefits of signing up for this new tool. First of all, it gives you WAY more options to manipulate how your content appears in Google news searches and the Google Play Newsstand Android and IOs apps.

Note that you can set your logo and logo colors as well as contact information.

Also, you get additional analytics out of the box when you associate your Google Analytics account including automatic tracking of the following user actions:

• Reading an article
• Viewing an ad
• Bookmarking an article
• Viewing an edition’s section
• Interacting with content on common screens (e.g. Read now, Search, and Explore)

Again, a ton more options – associating an RSS feed, your social handles, your news photos, etc. You can also associate the font families that you use:

It also allows you to control the distribution with other Google products is also new, as is the ability to set your language and target language.

And there are new troubleshooting features that you don’t have in the old Google News interface, as News Producer allows you to troubleshoot your content directly in the Google Play Newsstand apps.

You have the ability to manage your on-site ads within this interface as well.

Only give Google-News bot access to your news articles via crawls

Google wants to ensure that Googlebot-Newscan only crawls news content – both on your site and via your sitemap file. You want to make sure that you only block Googlebot-News crawling of your non-news content, not the non-news Googlebot crawler. More about how to execute that here.

Block Googlebot-News crawling to any pages that are not news

You can either do this via your robots.txt file (if all of the content is in a particular folder), or you can add a meta tag to all non-news pages with the following formats:

Here are some common meta tags you can add to your HTML pages:

To prevent specific articles on your site from appearing in Google News, block access to Googlebot-News using the following meta tag: <meta name=”Googlebot-News” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

To prevent specific articles on your site from appearing in Google News and Google Search, block access to Googlebot using the following meta tag: <meta name=”googlebot” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

To prevent specific articles on your site from being crawled by all robots, use the following meta tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”>

To prevent robots from crawling images on a specific article, use the following meta tag: <meta name=”robots” content=”noimageindex”>

To inform us that an article should be removed from the Google index at a certain time, use the following meta tag:
<meta name=”googlebot” content=”unavailable_after: 25-Aug-2011 15:00:00 EST”>

Specify the time and date in RFC 850 format. This meta tag is treated as a removal request. It takes about a day after the removal date passes for the page to disappear from the search results. However, for the tag to function properly, it must be included with your article when it’s first crawled.

Make sure you have fast loading article pages

Google uses your sitemap file to discover new URLs to add to its crawling quota and then ultimately it’s index. You need to make sure that your pages load quickly enough so that Google Mobilebot can discover the URLs. You can check your mobile page speed with on the Think with Google site, using Chrome’s LightHouse audit tool, via your Google Analytics page speed timing report, or by running the site/page through GTMetrix.com.

You want to aim for a page that loads in two seconds or less. The GTMetrix and LightHouse reports will give you tons of specific things to do to improve your page speed.

Use Structured Data Markup

Make sure that your news articles use the news article markup.

Proper structured data in your news, blog, and sports article page can enhance your appearance in Google Search results. Enhanced features include entry in a top stories carousel and rich result features such as headline text and larger-than-thumbnail images.
(Google’s implementation instructions are here.)

Here’s what the articles would look like with the markup:

Check to see if your competitors are using AMP

This is where you should check to see if you’re still ranking, but not being rewarded with top rankings based on your competitor activity.

Are you competitors using AMP and being included in the news carousel and you are not? Are your competitors using other types of structured data markup that is giving them an advantage? You can check by using Google’s Structured Data testing tool.

Not in Google News (and you feel like you meet the above criteria)?

Here are some things you can check:

1. Have you checked whether your content quality meets the content quality for Google News guidelines?
Here’s more about that issue from Google’s help files:

According to our analysis, having many low-value-add URLs can negatively affect a site’s crawling and indexing. We found that the low-value-add URLs fall into these categories, in order of significance:

• Faceted navigation and session identifiers
• On-site duplicate content
• Soft error pages
• Hacked pages
• Infinite spaces and proxies
• Low quality and spam content

Google goes on to finish by stating:

Wasting server resources on pages like these will drain crawl activity from pages that do actually have value, which may cause a significant delay in discovering great content on a site.

2. Do you have aggressive server errors?
Server errors can also cause a problem on larger sites:
Again, more from Google:

“If the site responds really quickly for a while, the limit goes up, meaning more connections can be used to crawl. If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit goes down and Googlebot crawls less. Even if the crawl rate limit isn’t reached, if there’s no demand from indexing, there will be low activity from Googlebot.”

3. What if you are in the Google News Publisher network, but can no longer find your articles in Google News?

Here are the things that you should check:

• Log into your account and check to make sure that Google is not having issues with your news XML sitemap file.
• Check to make sure Google News-bot can extract your articles by using the troubleshooting tool within your Google News Publisher account.

Here is a sampling of the type of errors you might see:

Article disproportionately short

Uncompression failed

Extraction failed

Here’s more from Google about the specific crawl errors:

3. Does your site have mobile usability issues?
The site currently has mobile usability issues and considering that mobile usability is a larger ranking factor for news sites (see Google’s announcement here), this area is impacting indexing and ranking for mobile search queries:

4. Are your bio pages for your authors too thin?
Google has somewhat recently added News articles are now considered Your Money or Your Life pages as you can see from their latest Google Human Rater Guidelines. This means that there is a higher bar for what it expects on your bio pages, and depending on what type of news site you are, perhaps Google expects even more information about the expertise and authoritativeness of your authors.

Here’s a strong example of a good bio page:

And here’s more from Google’s guidelines about what they are looking for:

Users tell us they value news sites with author biographies and clearly accessible contact information, such as email and physical addresses, and phone numbers.

Here’s more from a Google News Help forum answer:

Does the person or organization has sufficient expertise in the topic? If expertise, authoritativeness, or trustworthiness is lacking, experts use the Low rating to your site.

In news, you need to specify an author attribution. The author is an always human (an individual reporter), not a company name or website. (You need to) create a separate profile page for authors. Specify the author’s name, a photo, a biography, his/her office address and phone number, Email…. On each article (news), you include a byline with the author’s full name and an author short bio below with a faceshot.

If there is no author bio, thus no indication the author is a professional journalist or an expert in the field. On (the about) page (Contact), you need to specify company name, office address, office phone number, office E-mail, business time, editor’s name.

5. Did you recently move to HTTPs?
Did you set up a new account with Google News for your HTTPs version of the website? If not you will see an error when Google crawls your https sitemaps like this:

Here are Google’s news publisher recommendations for when you change your domain (or move to HTTPS):

When you plan to change your domain name, let us know Changing your site’s domain without notifying us may cause your site to be dropped from our news index. In order to give yourself the best possible chance of avoiding an interruption in crawling, please follow these steps:

After the switch is completed, submit the URL of your new site. Depending on the nature of your website change, our team will give you next steps. For certain types of changes, we change your site URL immediately. For others, we must review your site for quality purposes. After the change is made, you can verify that articles from your new domain are included.After verifying ownership for your new domain, update our record of your section URLs and associated labels within the Google News Publisher Center. If you’re using a Google News Sitemap (recommended) create your news sitemap with your new domain, and resubmit it in Search Console.

6. Did you update your sitemap file in Google News to HTTPS?
Is your old sitemap file still valid? DId you add your new https sitemap file to your new HTTPS Google News Publisher account?

Your new HTTPs news sitemap file can generate errors if the name in the sitemap file and they are not registered in your Google News Publisher account. Here’s what that error looks like:

Additionally, here are Google’s recommendations around how the sitemap file needs to match the domain:

The protocol you use in your sitemap should match the protocol of your site URL in the Publisher Center (e.g., if the URLs in your sitemap start with https://, the URL listed in the Publisher Center should also start with https://). If you need to change the protocol of your site URL to make it consistent with your sitemap, contact us.

&. Are you handing your subscription-based content in a Google-friendly way? 

Here are Google’s recommendations about how to handle subscription sites properly.

Sites with paywalls are strongly encouraged to apply the new structured data to their pages, because without it, the paywall may be interpreted as a form of cloaking, and the pages would then be removed from search results.

There are only two options Google recommends for handling subscription content: daily metering or lead-in.

Daily metering
We recommend that publishers start by providing 10 free clicks per month to Google search users in order to preserve a good user experience for new potential subscribers. Publishers should then experiment to optimize the tradeoff between discovery and conversion that works best for their businesses.

Lead-in
Lead-in is generally implemented as truncated content, such as the first few sentences or 50-100 words of the article. Lead-in allows users a taste of how valuable the content may be. Compared to a page with completely blocked content, lead-in clearly provides more utility and added value to users.

To indicate that you are either providing metered or lead-in content you need to adjust the schema markup on the page.

Here’s an example of the proper markup to use for subscription content: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool and here’s the developer resources for implementing the proper code.

Note that Google has also rolled out Subscribe with Google which is currently in beta with a few first-mover publishers, expect that the functionality will be available to more publishers in the future.

Need help diagnosing your Google news ranking issues?

Drop me a line and we can take a look!