Katherine Watier Ong @kwatier 1 SEO for Voice Search

Katherine Watier Ong • Owner of WO Strategies LLC • 17 years of communications experience • 12 years of online marketing experience (SEO, SEM, social media, web analytics) • Built first website in 1994 • Once crashed a website for 4 days and still received almost 1.3 million visitors/mo. (up from 300K) • Wrote master’s thesis on consumer adoption of wearable computers 2

Brands Katherine has worked with 3

Current State of Voice Search

Google study (2014): 55% of teenagers & 45% of adults use voice search daily

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Adoption is Increasing ● 1 in 5 searches on mobile apps in the U.S. are voice searches. (May 2016) ● By 2020 prediction is 1/2 of all searches will be voice search (Mary Meeker). ● Today, speech recognition word error rate is 8 percent. ● Speed! Humans can speak 150 wpm, vs. typing at 40 wpm.

How is voice search different? On desktop you’re more likely to type: “weather paris” With voice search you’re more likely to ask: “What’s the weather like in Paris?”

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Are you already appearing in mobile searches? ● 73% of Google search results show different results on mobile devices compared to desktop, so optimizing just for mobile is not enough - BrightEdge 2016 research ● 51% of smartphone users have discovered a new product or company via mobile search.

Top Reasons for using Voice Search

Get your featured snippet Google Home will read featured snippets along with your promo messages

Paid search won’t help Ads are currently being served for voice queries However they are thinking about it: "I think it can range from being purely transactional meaning we make it convenient for you to fulfill a transaction with this assistance or it can involve promotion" but that his team "are keeping an open mind about the kind of monetization opportunity that there is going to be." -Google's SVP of advertising and commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy

Brainstorming Keyword Topics “Is there anything about my brand that someone might be interested in while on the go?” Am I currently seeing voice search queries? Credit Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Is your content voice ready? ● What questions should this page answer for visitors? ● Is it currently answering those questions? ● Does it offer complete information? In other words, would someone return to the search results after checking this page? ● In what contexts do people search for a page like this? ● Is the page ready for mobile search? ● Is the content approachable and easy to read?

Note about Personalization All voice query results and personal assistance results are personalized based on the user’s device. Most users in the US don’t share devices.

Using Voice Search as a Radio Ad In the latest version of the Google Search App for iOS and Android the search app can speak your answer right back to you. Google will chat back to you when the query has a knowledge graph result or rich snippet result. [Source] Even more reason for you to own that rich result.

Difference between Desktop and Voice 1. Voice has longer queries 2. Natural language means more question phrases 3. Natural language reveals intent clearly 4. Voice search has high local value; 5. And greatly impacts 3rd-party listings

Fun with Google Voice Casting Harry Potter spells on your phone: Android Users: ● ‘Ok Google’ ● ‘Lumos’ or ‘Nox’ ● “Silencio”

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How to optimize for voice search? ● Look for signs of voice queries in your GSC search query reports ● Think about ways to prioritize the types of queries they want to optimize for voice. ○ Create an FAQ page ● Make sure that you’re using microdata/schema and that it’s accurate.

KATHERINE WATIER ONG 202-930-1744 katherine@wostrategies.com @kwatier www.linkedin.com/in/katherinewatier www.WOStrategies.com 22 Stay in touch!