Since the Web keeps getting better and becomes more integrated with devices, your website needs to be tuned up in order to make sure you’re grabbing all the website traffic you can.
The latest development is voice search, which is what Apple’s “Siri,” Amazon’s “Alexa” or Google voice search is all about. People are asking questions into their devices and those devices' brains search the web for results. Not just any website will show up a result and making sure your website is voice search optimized will help your website show up in these results.
Us web geeks call this schema markup and OpenGraph but all you need to know is that doing this makes your website’s content more valuable so it can be used for things like voice search results.
Google says that 20% of mobile searches are voice searches - that's a lot if you consider that websites now see 50-60% of their searches originating from mobile devices. Bing says it's 25% of searches. Forbes is saying that 2017 will be the year of voice search.
2017 Will Be The Year Of Voice Search (Forbes.com)
Clearly, optimizing for voice search is going to be a major key for your SEO success in 2017; a survey of 39 SEO experts listed “voice search” third in a list of the largest SEO trends for 2017 and beyond.
If your website was developed over 2 years ago, it might not be voice search optimized. If your website developer didn't bother to do it, then your website needs to have this done.
Take a look at your website statistics (Google Analytics). Do you see many searches with "near me" showing up? Those are voice searches.
Basically, search engines can pick out pieces of your content if it's labeled correctly and use it in different ways. For example, if you have a store or office and list your hours of operation on your page, it can be tagged to say those are your hours and search engines can use your store as a result if someone searches for a store like yours that's still open... something like that.
The most popular search right now is: "...near me" as in "Find a restaurant near me" or something like that. If your address is properly tagged, then you can show up as a result for people searching for what you do near where they are.
There's other kind of schema as well, such as saying your website is a business or using different data on your website like menu items at a restaurant. There's a big list of data that can be tagged and then used in voice search results.
This is one thing we do with all new websites we launch. We've been doing it a while now because it's essential. We don't want our clients coming to us, asking why we didn't do something. We stay on top of all that's going on and offer it. If a client doesn't want something done on their website, we've at least offered it to them and they are aware of it.
Being able to offer this service and lots of other services like this to our clients is why we can say our websites simply work better. They simply do because we've done what needs to be done.
To get voice search optimization, you can order a new website from us or we can do this to your current website. All you need to do is contact us and we'll give you a quote. It's not expensive and just one of those things that you really need to do - it just has to be done. Don't let your competition have this edge over you!
