What is Voice SEO?

Voice SEO is voice-based search engine optimization designed to answer questions in natural human speech, instead of manually-typed queries. Voice search is typically powered by virtual assistants. There are four main voice assistants currently on the market:

1. Google Assistant from Google
2. Alexa from Amazon
3. Siri from Apple
4. Cortana from Microsoft

Apple’s Siri previously used Microsoft’s Bing for voice searches but it recently switched to being powered by Google. However, the popular voice assistant Alexa from Amazon still uses Bing to answer users’ questions.

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How Many Searches Are From Voice?

According to Statista, 31% of US households own smart speakers with virtual assistants. Furthermore, a recent study from Adobe estimates that 48% of users use voice for “general web searches.” This makes sense considering that virtual assistants are now natively integrated with nearly all personal devices, such as smartphones, computers, and tablets.

Currently, about 44% of users use voice search technology every day. These numbers are expected to grow as natural language processing (NLP) technology continues to improve and users become more comfortable interacting with artificial intelligence (AI).

Source: Adobe Voice Technology Study, July 2019 (n=1,000)

Strategies for Optimizing Content for Voice Search

1. Write the Way You Speak

That’s right. Think about answering your question from a user experience (UX) perspective and try to write your content as you would if you were speaking to the user face-to-face. This helps make your content flow as though you were having a meaningful dialogue or conversation with your users in response to their questions.

Furthermore, readability makes your content easier to understand, especially when read out loud by a virtual assistant. A good rule of thumb for readability is to write at a high school or middle school reading level. These parameters translate to the lowest estimated level of standard education needed to understand your writing; they don’t necessarily mean that this demographic is your target audience. A handy tool to help make sure you’re on the right track is the Hemingway App, which can help make your content more accessible to your readers.

2. Answer Questions Succinctly

Short and to the point is the key here. Try answering questions in about 40-50 words maximum.

Formatting your content to answer questions quickly and efficiently also optimizes it for Featured Snippets. Virtual assistants frequently read answers from rich search results like Featured Snippets and Knowledge Panels, since they tend to answer questions briefly.

Optimizing content for informational search intent by using “definitive” phrasing and keywords (for example, using defining “to be” statements, like “Siri is a virtual assistant from Apple Inc.” instead of “‘Virtual Assistants’ can also refer to remotely employed administrative aides”) can help position your content to more directly answer users’ questions. Also, make sure your content is well-structured with semantic HTML and Schema mark-up (JSON-LD) to help search engines understand your page better. This can help reinforce the core content of the target page by providing search engines with supporting contextual signals.

3. Target Long-Tail Queries

We can get a good idea of how users might phrase their voice searches by looking at longer-tailed queries. These typically include inquisitive phrases like “what”, “why”, “which”, and “how” for introducing questions. AnswerThePublic is a great tool for brainstorming questions to answer in your content.

AlsoAsked.com is another free tool you can use to “reverse-engineer” user search intent by visually graphing Google’s “People Also Asked” questions into a hierarchy of related searches from other users. This helps us make sure that we are answering real questions that users are actually searching for.

4. Optimize for Local SEO

Voice search is frequently geographically targeted. For example, users commonly use voice search on their smart devices to ask for local directions or recommendations. Try using phrases like “near” or “in” when optimizing your content for local search.

Source: Adobe Voice Technology Study, July 2019 (n=1,000)

5. Improve Page Speed

Page load times are officially a ranking factor for Google’s mobile-first index. This means that it’s important for pages to load quickly in order for voice search engines to parse the information on-page more efficiently, so they can answer users’ questions faster.

For example, defer pesky render-blocking resources by inlining critical JS and CSS, and then minifying and loading the rest after the core HTML content is rendered in the DOM. Also, try compressing, lazy-loading, and serving images in next-gen formats (like WebP) with descriptive alt texts that are easy for search engines to understand and read to users.

Key Takeaways

Voice search is the future and continues to grow in popularity. This means that digital marketers and content creators need to adapt to the changing search landscape in order to stay ahead of the curve. By following these five simple steps, you’ll already be well on your way to staying top-of-mind and on the tip of the tongue (pun intended) of your target audience.

How to Optimize for Voice Search is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.

Keep reading to learn more about how you can do redirect mapping with little to no SEO experience! 

What Do HTTP Status Codes Mean for SEO?

When a user or bot tries to access a webpage, they send a request to the server that the page is hosted on. The server then responds with an HTTP status code. This code tells users about the condition of the page that they are looking for, such as live, broken, moved, and more. 

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There are 5 different classes of HTTP status codes in total, but for our SEO purposes, we will focus on 3 specific types:

• 2xx: Successful. The page is live and can be accessed successfully.
• 3xx: Redirection. The page no longer exists at the original URL, but the content can still be found at a new address.
• 4xx: Client Error. The page could not be found at that URL. In other words, it is broken.

Link equity is the search engine ranking factor based on the theory that value and authority are passed through links to webpages. This assigned value and authority is calculated by Google’s search engine algorithm (based on a variety of ranking factors) and is transmitted from one page to another. However, the “flow” of link equity can be interrupted by status code issues.

Link equity can only pass through 2xx and 3xx links. It cannot pass through 4xx links.

Think of links as doors and of webpages as rooms. Pages that return 2xx status codes are like open doors – they can be visited by users browsing the web and crawled by search engine bots with ease. Meanwhile, pages that return certain 3xx codes (especially 302s) are like trap doors that lead to even more trap doors. Even if they eventually lead to a room (i.e. a webpage), redirects can be confusing for both users and bots because it forces them to take extra steps to get where they want to go. Finally, pages that return 4xx status codes are like closed (and locked!) doors. When users and bots reach broken links, they get stuck because there is nowhere else to go.

Therefore, when a link is broken, then the value and the authority from the referring page is not passed on to the target page.

How To Perform The Redirect Mapping Process

Regaining the benefits of link equity is easy! The following steps can be helpful for guiding the process:

Step 1: Identify 404 and 302 Errors

Use Ahrefs, or your favorite tool, to find any broken external links to your site. Filter results by “404: Page Not Found” response codes. In general, 404 errors should take priority because they completely block the flow of link equity from referring domains to your site.  It is also a good idea to check for any “302: Found” temporary redirections, formerly known as “302: Moved Temporarily”. 

These should be changed to “301: Moved Permanently” to signal to Google and other search engines that they should be re-crawled and re-indexed at their new “home” (i.e. their new URL address). However, it is important to touch base with any internal teams before changing temporary redirects to permanent. There are legitimate reasons for temporary redirects, such as site migrations. That being said, sometimes temporary redirects are never changed after a site migration and need to be made permanent to reflect that change.

Step 2: Identify Best Match Live Content

The main goal of this task is to reroute link equity from a broken link to a live page via a 301 redirect. In order to do this, you need to find existing content on your site that matches the missing content on your broken page as closely as possible.

If you do not have access to the CMS for your client (or sometimes even if you do), then you will have to find these pages manually.

You can accomplish this by performing a site search on Google using the “site:” boolean operator in the search bar.

The syntax for a Google site search is:

• site:domain keyword

For example:

• site:gofishdigital.com seo

 In other words, this operator performs a Google search for all indexed pages that include the “gofishdigital.com” domain that are relevant to the keyword “seo”.

You can even take this a step further by appending “&filter=0” to the end of the search engine results page URL in the browser address bar. After pressing the “Enter” or “Return” key, this will show all results for the query, not just the most relevant, in the case that Google might be filtering some results from displaying in the SERP for reasons beyond the scope of this post.

This technique helps find content on your site that matches the search intent of any broken links. So, if your broken page is about PPC, then you would include the keyword “ppc” in your site search to find all relevant pages on your site that are about pay-per-click.

If you do not know what the original content on a broken link is about from prior knowledge, then look for keywords in the URL itself. These can be helpful hints to what the original page was about and are a great reason to always have slugs optimized for SEO.

Click on the most relevant link in the SERP to check that the landing page is live and returns a 200: OK status code. After all, a webpage that returns a 3xx or 4xx error can still possibly be included in Google’s index (if it broke or redirected after Googlebot originally crawled it successfully)!

If there are no exact-match or best fit pages for a broken page, consider their parent pages. These pages are typically category pages for sections of a website and can usually be found at their parent folders in the URL addresses. For example: 

• https://www.domain.com/parent/child/

In the case that there is not a relevant parent page (or any page for that matter) on your site that is directly related to the content of the broken page, then consider leaving it as a 404.

Not all 404s are bad. For example, imagine that a user follows a link with the anchor “smartphone case for Google Pixel” and is redirected to the homepage of a mobile accessory website (maybe because the cases are no longer in stock and thus the product page was taken down). Redirecting to distantly related pages can do more harm than help from a UX perspective because it might make users confused. However, a 404 page clearly communicates that the page that the user was looking for is no longer available. Although it may be disappointing to the online shopper, it sends a meaningful message. 

Step 3: Create a Redirect Map Spreadsheet to Map the Redirect Paths

Now that you have matched all broken links to live matching or best fitting content on your site, prepare a redirect map spreadsheet in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to hand-off to developers for implementation. Note, a spreadsheet can still help, even if you’re doing this all by yourself! This can be as simple as two columns. Column A can contain all of the links to be redirected (referring pages) and column B can list all of their new URL addresses (target pages).

Step 4: Implement the Redirects and Reclaim Link Equity

Create a ticket for your developer team to implement the redirect map or go into your content management system and set up the 301 redirects yourself. That’s it! A job well done.

Key Takeaways

Throughout the link reclamation process, it is important to keep UX in mind. Broken links can create a poor user experience (in most cases) simply because they are dead ends on the user journey. That’s why our job as SEOs is to make sure that both users and bots are happy by opening doors for all. Not only do thoughtfully implemented redirects regain the benefits of lost link equity, but they also create a more fulfilling user experience!

Redirect Mapping: How to Create 301 Redirect Maps is an original blog post first published on Go Fish Digital.