Optimizing Your Website for Voice Search & Position 0

Video Transcript

Today we’re talking about voice search and position zero and a little bit about myself I am the founder of Anvil Media back in 2000, I created what is now known as a measurable marketing agency. Thank you all for joining us today we’re going to leverage some of the insights the team has brought to the world of voice search and optimization for position zero. A little bit more context about me, I am an adjunct professor of Portland State around the same time that I found Anvil I started teaching there and I currently teach a search engine marketing workshop once a year. I also am the co-founder of pdxMindShare.com an online career community organization, we post event and jobs and we have monthly workshops on giving the next workshop actually later this month and you can check pdxMindShare.com for more information. SEMpdx.org I co-founded in ’06 as a trade organization for those interested in the digital dark arts particularly around search and that is how I helped set up the event Engage and the original predecessor of SearchFest I co-founded back in ’05 and SEMpdx got under that umbrella, now you have Engage at Sentinel Hotel I recommend you checking out for more information at SEMpdx.org. If you want to check out more about our expertise and philosophy I write regularly for iMedia, SmartBrief, and Online Marketing Institute. We have a large articles section in our insight section of our website.

Enough about me and about Anvil, let’s talk about what we’re going to talk about today. So today we’re going to talk about voice search, position 0, and why it matters, how to optimize and so let’s get started. People use devices like Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, or text-driven chatbots to get through their day-to-day lives and manage their lives, buying products etc. There are expected to be 56 million smart speakers sold this year and that means that there’s a lot of opportunities in and around as  brand and in terms of what we call V-commerce or voice commerce. 21% of folks trust voice commerce for eCommerce task so for reordering more Tide Pods for your kids to eat, it’s also about is that there are also opportunities to create more complex sales for a wider variety of products and of course right now a majority of that market is Amazon and Google smart speakers which we’ll talk about in a second. So down below, there’s a little screenshot which of the following types are goods to be purchased using Alexa mostly electronics probably a second or third smart speaker, home and kitchen, groceries, and other clothing as well.

So, additionally some visualization around what voice assistants are and appliances smart speakers and what they look like. On the right side you’ve got your smart speaker, Google home and there’s smaller mini speaker. I have a Google home at home and it’s portable, it’s a plug-in and I assume future will be wireless or cordless but it has great sound quality it’s very smart. Sonos and other third parties are manufacturing speakers with Alexa or Google technology in them. Alexa on the lower left you can see the Alexa technology it’s in half a dozen speakers plus the show plus the nest it’s all over the place and growing. If you have a phone which the vast majority of adults do they have Apple Siri, Samsung Bixby, or Microsoft Cortana as technology platforms among others for their vocal search as a path model.

Which brands which platforms are marketers adopting or piloting in the next year or so, primarily Amazon Alexa followed by Google and then Apple. So Amazon, if you are a consumer brand selling through Amazon it is a must have to have a voice search strategy. If not, intelligence agents or tasks or capabilities for the Amazon Alexa. The Google assistant, it’s all about optimizing your search result to be the only Google and we’ll talk more about that in a second. And I expect to see a lot more Samsung bixby growth outpacing Cortana in the next year or two would be my guess.

A few more stats to completely numb you before we get into the strategy and tactics. Nearly two-thirds of searches are now performed on a on a smart device. So right now there are a lot of searches performed on mobile devices and a lot of that means search because people don’t like to type with their thumbs or pinkies. 55 percent of teen 41 percent of adults are using voice search more than once a day and 82 percent are using search for mobile or local business and 50 percent of mobile visitors who become a local search will be presented, 18 percent leading to a conversion. So, extensively we’ve got a lot of opportunity here ahead of us. When did you first start using smart commands? Last six months for the most part. So a few more stats that I promise we’ll move on but right now it’s actually gone from zero to 20 – 25 percent of searches are originating from voice back in 2016 so see that known that that’s grown to 30- 40 percent this year according comScore campaign it’s going to be half of all searches in the next two years. So bottom line is that there’s going to be a lot of change. And then 22 percent searching for local content so that last mile is important. Four thousand products have Alexa integrated 15,000 have Google assistance so you can see that this is a huge issue, a huge opportunity.

So what is voice search? Obviously it’s asking your assistant a device or any device a simple question. Google, Alexa their goal is probably the best answer. Google uses their knowledge graph to do that and most commonly obviously these are informational queries typically a quick answer for the who what when where why how with a focus of the who when and how are most common searches and what that means is there’s an opportunity for you as a brand to provide an answer. So you can see and the chart below, is that text input peaks it has a much longer tail I mean voice input has a much longer tail than text it peaks out at three to four words and that means you have a much bigger opportunity to own the tail which in the world terms of organic search is much harder to generate.

So by definition, position zero is the actual rich snippet or the visual element that appears in the Google search results as an answer box or an instant answer. It’s above the organic results and typically there are no page results on search on queries that generate an answer box because they’re very specific questions like what is the rich snippet. So most often getting is an opportunity to own the top position and also in the secondary position in the top 10. Now 80 percent of Google home results come from these rich snippets. So here’s an example what is a rich snippet is like it is an actual screenshot of what is a rich snippet. You have the answer, who provided the answer, Unamo, and then additional related questions to help people direct to other common questions that might generate a secondary instant answer or an answer box. So that’s really what it looks like. So the opportunities for you to own this box, there are a couple different formats paragraphs; bulleted lists, charts, tables, and occasionally embedded images but the beauty is it levels on position 0 you’re leveling the playing field because you can be a much smaller brand as long as you ranked in the first page for that phrase or question you can rank a position 0. And then these people also ask questions or further insights into what to optimize for and that’s important.

So let’s talk a little bit more about the future position for your snippets for position 0. So the amount of featured snippets being used in Google results has gone up dramatically since 2015 this is only for 15 through 16 and it’s closer to 20 percent now and or 30 percent according to a recent Stone Temple study. So there is a there’s a nice again other prediction say you know half of searches will be voice so I’m guessing even the amount of position zero results will increase in a similar trend line. The average snippet is relatively short, 54 to 58 so under 60 words in length so it’s basically a long sentence form maybe two short sentences that’s it. And so you can see the growth through January 17th of the number of searches that generate a rich answer or a rich snippet

So some of the hot topics in position 0 you might want to ask yourself where do I start? So one of the the top two would be health and financial, in terms of applications, those are the industries that have the greatest opportunity, in terms of applications of how to answer a question most people are asking mathematical time or transitional questions topically those are very difficult to crack because they’re finite answers that Google can provide you know within their current knowledge and knowledge graph. Other options, status requirements, DIY, so do yourself how to’s, there are some subjective queries like best reviews that are trending more than ever but what you’re going to try to avoid in your optimization efforts are more objective things like health facts, shopping images and video that Google already dominates. So you can see in the chart below a visualization of all the queries asked there are a certain percent that are no responses for and there are a certain  amount that answer with the answer box but some don’t generate answer box or have some combination of responses so you need to make sure that you understand which answers you want to go after so we’ll talk about that.

Bottom line is you want to rank in the top 10 that’s the catch you cannot own a position 0 or voice search results unless you appeared in the top ten already and in organic listings. So in order to do that you have to follow the best practices and we have a clickable link when you get a copy of this to our whitepaper, the three C’s which is our content, code, and credibility so you need to have all three of those great relevant unique content on your site, the code has to be clean and easily indexable plus optimized for speed and keywords, and the credibility factor is all about who’s linking to you and talking about your site. Once you can crack the top ten specific question then you can optimize and start to rank for position 0 / voice search, right? So what end result is that you have two listings or two results in a given query and that allows you to double up your presence and own the very top position, only 1/3 roughly of the top position number one organic listing power the rich snippet, so there’s a 66 percent chance you can get in as a lower ranking site in the top 10 with the featured snippet. So you can see it is a it is a trailing effort so you want ideal ideally they both fold positions one through three or one through five in order to trigger the likelihood of owning position 0 / voice search.

So why does it matter you know basically what mattered what you need to know is a voice search in general is about 3 times more likely to be location based so if you’re a retailer or local based business this is an important opportunity. There are 30 times more likely action-oriented. Positions there were ratings also generate a much higher click-through rate, far higher than the industry average. And it can just rank in position 0 can boost your organic listings by in Hub Spots case 114 percent so they own the number one position for a specific question about marketing automation and the click-through rate on their organic listing below the position 0 was 114 percent higher once they appeared. There’s also a link to a case study where a company that optimized for position zero saw 516 percent increase in traffic, so that’s massive completely huge and game-changing but not necessarily what you can expect you can only hope for.

So by comparison to the chart below 26 percent of clicks typically go to the first URL. If you look at a listing a results page with a featured snippet it just under 10 percent go to the featured snippet, 19 percent go to the natural listing below the featured snippet so the number one listing. Nw I know you just saw there’s conflicting data here that some results increase the click-through rate organically others there is some cannibalization according to this study by ahrefs, so they get a higher click-through rate than other sections or lower rankings but they may be at the cost of the number one position. So immediately you want to be that number one position zero but you also want to be maybe three through five organically so that you’re not eroding your own top position but beggars can’t be choosers I’d like to have both pole position in that regard.

So the other consideration on voice search in position zero is this concept I mentioned earlier of v-commerce so Amazon echo will account for about seven billion dollars in voice transactions this year according to Missoula Bank. A third of Internet users would like to make a purchase through the voice enabled speakers and annual estimates for the value of owning a position zero for a term like virtual desktops specifically according to stat research is about two million dollars. So two million dollars a year in value in terms of traffic and visibility based on just one high high-end head term like virtual desktop. So if you’re in the world of virtual desktop you should search sharpen your pencils now and looking for a gunning for position zero. Now the chart below just shows that very likely is you know 14 somewhat likely, 19 so that’s the 33 percent roughly of what is the likely to purchase via v-commerce and again that was from July of last year that’s only going to increase quite incrementally versus exponentially over the next year or two.

So what are some of the ranking strategies and tactics I’ve hopefully convinced you not to ignore voice search in position zero that it’s important there is high value there so let’s talk about how we can rank. So for starters, you want to begin looking at important modifiers. So modifiers around your tour search terms, so for Anvil it might be search engine marketing agency but you want to figure out what are the modifiers and from interest to intent. So what is a digital marketing agency? Who is a local digital marketing agency near me? How does a digital marketing agency price their services? when and then you start to run out so when people get to one and where they’re ready to act so you need to be able to optimize three questions based on level of intent or action which is really important. So that’s the idea and so understand where those questions fit within the sales cycle and then as best you can try to triangulate with conversations and surveys about on how to conduct research especially those suggested searches.

So with that in mind let’s take a look at some of the tools you can use to actually to start this process from research to optimization. Now on the integrated tools side there is there are a couple key and if you’ve been in the world of search for a long time you would know that Moz is one of the grandfathers and granddaddy’s of SEO and they typically they have a variety of tools but they’ve integrated some of the voice search capability into their tools. There are a couple other secondary tools like Rank Ranger, Rank Tracker, ubersuggest, these have integrated voice search results and optimization tools from and tracking into their platforms. There is of course the free tools which can help in terms of Google Adwords, Keyword Planner, Search Console and just keyword tool which is what it’s called it’s not a Google product but those can be used tied to triangulate what kind of keywords and sentences or questions you should be asking. More topical tools to try and identify trends in terms of newer questions around your industry, FAQ for frequently asked questions, Faq Fox, StoryBase, BlogSearchEngine, Hubspot, and Answer The Public are all great places to find new ideas. And in terms of ongoing tracking SEMrush, STAT search and Searchmetrics have tried capabilities built-in around voice search similar to the integrated tools but the integrated tools are great for the keyword research, ongoing tracking tools are great for seeing how well you’re progressing in the positions your voice search onslaught as it worked. So there’s a little really dull hard to see my apology screenshot of what one of those keyword research tools looks like the tracks position 0 you can check any of these are hyperlinks when you get a copy of this deck you can click through and check them out for yourself.

So with that said there we go how to rank for long tail, so it is worth mentioning that long tail is a thing. So that is where you have phrases typically five or more words or phrases constitutes a tail which is typically seventy percent, sixty seventy percent of us for instance amazon’s revenue is a tail a majority of the revenue. So the idea is to look at those tail phrases a couple reasons to get very specific in your questions, number one it’s less competitive, number two it’s far more focused so people are looking for something specific which gives you a chance that’s just lowering the funnel where they’re ready to buy. So you can see the stats on us in the bottom 25 percent of web pages of visited, 70 percent of queries are longtail they’re two and a half times more likely to convert. Some of the keywords that are triggered that you can look at in your keyword research, how, what, best, and interestingly I’ve been trained the last 20 plus years of doing SEO that you pull out terms like the, is and so forth that are stopping button though in the turn in the world of questions it’s good to factor those in so obviously some of these are in context some are not but they’re worth looking at as you look for inspiration and research phrases you want to own.

So once you’ve identified phrases you want to figure out which ones then have a position 0, do they actually trigger a position 0 result? If they don’t if they don’t there’s quite a bit more work because you’re not guaranteeing that just optimizing for will trigger Google determining that it’s worthy of a position zero result. So you’re better off starting with questions that are already answered with a position 0 and then reverse engineering the current result that owns the answer box and try to insert them with a better answer to that question. So if not then you have to work your way up to higher volume terms then but are also at the same time longer tail to try the that are most likely for Google to trigger a new position zero result that aren’t currently there in the next you know year or so. And that also gives you a year to build a foundation so that once you do rank that you’re harder to knock out by your competitors once they see the opportunity. But make sure they start with what you already have, so look at the site content using Google Analytics or your analytics platform to see what content is performing well and has great potential and then cross-reference that with content that inherently does well with answering position 0. So as you look at position 0 answer boxes across your industry you’ll see what kind of content does well, if it a blog post, is it an article or more likely is it an FAQ or frequently asked question or is a Q a very similar format. You need to look at those as the potential as a starting point so for instance we have an FAQ, we have articles, blogs, webinars, glossary of terms in our website some of that ranks relatively well and very little of it have we optimized for position 0 yes because this is a relatively new phenomenon but we are working on that now for ourselves and for our clients.

So how to rank you need to select a format basically and what that means is you look at what format is most logical for Google to say this is the one. So paragraphs are ideal for standard answers most commonly used, so it’s a sentence or three you know we talked about the average being under 60 words. Google generates 41 one percent higher rate of ordered lists in their featured snippet, so that is where there’s a step then another step so they’re dependent, or a recipe how to change a tire these are typically ordered list. Even charts are deal when your computer getting complex our comparative data so complex you know should be a concept. Comparative could be which one or two or three things stack up well you know in a product side-by-side comparison, that’s where you would have the chart. So you need to prepare that Google is going to like one format over the other and try and anticipate what that need is based on the context of the question.

So the other important thing is you want to get to the point so if you have a page that you think is ideal and FAQ, a Q&A page, a really good blog post, you do want to make sure you optimize the page itself to address Google specific needs and there’s a hierarchy starting with get to the point. I of course personally like that concept get right to the point. So in your first paragraph you should be answering that question or at the very top of the page in some fashion – chart, ordered list, paragraph. And then lowered the page second a half second third two thirds of page you wanna provide additional detail to back up your answer that you are indeed an expert worthy of position 0. So in sense you’re following the hierarchy. Most newsworthy info you answer the five W’s or the h the best alliterative and provide more detail and then additional more general information or links to more information to round it out so start with the answer first, provide more context and more credibility, and move on to the additional information or conversion elements call to action.

So how to rank. So in terms of the page optimization there are basic fundamental SEO best practices, search engine optimization best practices, so you want to basically create the new content based on whatever rich snippet format is most important but beyond that you have to follow the best practices for optimizing the code. So the URL itself should have the relevant keywords that are appearing somewhere in that question, the title type which is the blue hyperlink in the search results and at the top of the browser window, the Meta Description which is around now 300 characters an opportunity to provide more detail around the question, the answer your header type which carry more weight than the rest of your copy and of course as a perfect using schema markup which is really what powers Rich Snippets. So telling Google these are the elements, this is what they ar,e and this is why you should care. So basically featured snippet URLs that included an exact match query to the tag appeared 20.1 percent more often than ones that did not. So follow those best practices you can see what we recommend for title tag, character count, and meta description character counts and you know we basically are saying optimize for Google because their vast majority of search results and they’re the ones that are generating for now position 0 and voice search.

So more advanced tactics to keep in mind. So right now you’ve got the you’ve got the Google Search Console click-through data, so you can map your keywords to see which ones have featured snippets or not. So again you want to match what data you seen your click-through rate data on your Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools, with the keywords which you have the future snippets for to see what kind of insights you can gain there. And always make sure that you’re utilizing the proof terms, which is an industry jargon that are basically around the keywords most relevant to the topic of the question at hand, need to be utilized more than once, so liberally throughout the page but we’re not keyword stuffing this is an 1998. Evaluate existing high-performing pages again we mentioned that before. So do indeed dive in your analytics, see what pages and content is stickiest, driving the most traffic, generating the best conversions, lowest bounce rates those are a good place to start. And then also, be sure to test you know this is a very new thing so test less common modifiers terms like cost and buy and so forth and see where those might take you. Google likes an eighth-grade reading level for pretty much you know standard for website so make sure that you carry through on that so don’t dumb it down too much. And then you definitely want to optimize your lower funnel searches for the purchase I think of e-commerce can people order make it easy. And then to round it out I would augment and support with a paid search campaign so it’s not common for ads to show up on position zero searches because they’re long specific questions doesn’t mean you can’t buy them, buy any terms you want for the most part. So rounding out an owning a paid position could help with the conversion rates for sure. You can see on the bottom of small chart, SEO trends for 2017 and Beyond. Right now the pushes are an order mobile, followed by quality content, followed by voice search, so that is absolutely you know it’s a top three priority for many bigger brands no reason it can’t be a priority for you.

Let’s talk a little bit about the future before we hopefully move to a bit of Q&A. So what does the future look like voice search and position zero? So last year there are 25 million voice search voice first devices those were estimated to be shipped which is up almost two million from the year from 2015 so that’s a huge hockey stick curve you know 20x increase a 15X increase I’m terrible at math. Now only 30 percent of conversational interactions are actually successful. So when people are conducting voice searches half the time that way search is not generating the proper result or it’s a basically returning no information. So really there’s opportunity for radical improvement despite the fact there’s been a massive improvement from a failure rate of nearly 90 percent just a couple years ago. And ,then the small percentage of voice skills that are out there today are branded so particularly for Alexa that’s where you can create voice skills and very few were there an article to hit today that had tweeted out @KentJLewis talks about how brands are being muted on or blocked more or less from Alexa preferring a looks at it you know Amazon preferring to have their own controls. Doesn’t mean that won’t change but it doesn’t mean voices need their brands need to voice their opinion about voice and the ability to utilize skills to extend their brand and facilitate commerce. So voice first device footprint again nothing in 14 a little bit in 15 and all of a sudden 17 a blew up and look for this year to increase maybe not exponentially again but certainly a mass increment so 40-50 percent 40-50 million devices.

So let’s talk a little bit more about the commerce aspect so expecting where the result folks so people looking for specific questions that are modified for a local audience and then think transactional commerce and so when people are looking for something like buying movie tickets for tonight’s you know Black Panther can we can we facilitate that, you know for Fandango? And then media formats like images and video that will become more and more prominent as Google loves multimedia they’re gonna start incorporating more and more video in addition to the images they already incorporate into their search. So make sure to prepare a multimedia voice experience so for instance Amazon Echo Show will show you the visual results not just give you the audio results so that’s important to factor in, although it seems like the worst of both worlds compared to just using a computer in my mind but we’ll see how that evolves. More than half a regular Smart speaker users want information on deals and promotions so that’s according to Google so think about how you can utilize voice search to capture this magic moments, these primetime micro moments, that people have looking for something and they’re looking for deals and if you can be one of the early adopters and voice would be highly advantageous. Consider creating voice apps or skills or other artificial intelligence related products driven by machine learning they get smarter and smarter. So for instance one in five smart speaker owners use voice commerce to add an item to their cart, they can review it later, research an item they might want to purchase, reorder an item they’ve already purchased, or order new product you’ve not previously purchased. So that is really in my mind the big opportunity from voice bot is that their research saying that 22 percent of voice search users would buy a product they’re not even familiar with purely through voice which is pretty phenomenal such as a lot of opportunity and of course a third are just saying I’ll just drop it into my cart just under a surface so look for all these numbers to increase in the next year.

A couple of thoughts on advertising in voice, so I was quoting an article recently with TechRepublic about what the future of advertising on voice looks like and right now the ads are currently banned on Amazon Alexa skills with very few exceptions there are no plans to add advertisements to Alexa for now and I stress for now I think that will change. Amazon does want to brand they want brands to focus on developing skills to provide a more engaging experience,  yet they’re limiting access to those voice skills so I think you’re actually going to have to walk their talk and be far more supportive of brands that are willing to invest in the early stage. Look for more advertising once installed ages and celebrate has reached a hundred million right now you’re looking at 20 to 30 million today so in the next probably two years. So your companies can also monetize skills without advertising by offering paid subscriptions skills so basically creating a skill that’s so valuable people are willing to pay for it. So what that might be is you know we can we can certainly talk about it with you if you’d like but I’m not gonna give away too much of the milk. So this article in TechRepublic you can see the title if you want to look it up there are some other experts quoting the article they have some great things to say about what advertising might look like but again we’re looking one to two years out at this point no reason not to start evaluating, brainstorming, and testing maybe get an early stage beta if you’re a bigger brand and if not just be ready to go when these Alexa and Google adopt voice advertising options and look for Google to probably do it first because that’s their model versus Alexa, she is more about Commerce and direct marketing.

So we have a bunch of related materials, some of this is our content, some of it is content that I used as sources. So the first link is Online Marketing Institute a very detailed article I used as a source for this deck you’ll see this presentation has some additional information and charts and graphs that have come up since I wrote that article in December and then there’s a two-part article for smart brief the next two links and/or the next link and then there’s I’m sorry I’m talking out of order, second one is our blog post, third one is the coverage that I mentioned, and then the rest is pretty much sources for the article plus a couple of our other articles for bonus. So I didn’t include the smart brief two piece articles because those are a subset of the first link which is the Online Marketing Institute article so that in a nutshell are the resources again will get you a copy if you’ve RSVP’d if you haven’t please send an email of Kent@anvilmedia.com and we’ll get you a copy if you somehow join without RSVP first.

So one little plug for our answer to this because I like to give people answers not just questions and so the idea is that we have our own product that addresses the need for brands to get 0 to 60 in voice search very quickly, so we have our overall a voice search optimization strategy. So we do the keyword research, we analyze positions zero for your industry, what the opportunities are looking at the competitors, reverse engineering pages, identifying top content to optimize and creating a map for new content do the keyword mapping and on-page optimization and then we can offer optional ongoing monitoring reporting and that starts about $2,500 at the low end for a smaller site, more focused effort for a smaller brand and then goes up from there. So if you’re interested you can obviously drop up right.

So these are hyperlinked as well next steps you can I encourage you I promise you the next Lunch & Learn will not have these technology issues we will make sure everything is working very smoothly next time around as we familiarize ourselves with the WebEx having moved from a different platform recently. We also have our insight set in which complete which is complete with whitepapers, ebooks, guides, articles, blog tons of content we are archiving these lunch and learns as well we have a monthly newsletter you’re welcome to sign up for or you can follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay updated. And then we’re always happy to offer you a free marketing digital braking audit of your online presence and provide recommendations on what you as a brand can do more effectively across our magic triangle of organic search, organic social, and paid media.

So with that said I am happy to answer any questions if people want to throw down chat throw down some chats and I don’t know if you want to help me moderate that. So go ahead and throw down some questions, we don’t have any questions, did you have a question not so much yet. Okay so what I would say is make sure that you send us an email if you haven’t already RSVPed, send us an email at Kent@anvilmedia.com and we’ll get your presentation as a part of a follow up as well as all the links there embedded in that presentation and then we will put a recording of this up on YouTube and a copy of this on SlideShare as well down the way. Look for our next Lunch & Learn is on Podcasting do we lock down the date so on March 28th and we’ll add a slide into this deck that we post on March 28^th, same time, same place we’re going to do a how to build your brand through audio via podcasting with one of our own internal talents and podcast experts Taryn so look for that at the end of the month and you can RSVP for that probably starting tomorrow as we update the site with the new RSVP information. So we’ll send you a teaser for that as well with the follow-up of a copy of this deck.

I want to thank everybody for your time you can always email me questions later if chat scares you in some fashion or you in some fashion email smoke signal again kent@anvilmedia.com and we look forward to seeing you next month at the end of the month for the podcast session, want to thank you for your time and we’ll see you again soon.

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