Use AI to make your site more relevant

Once thought of as only a passing novelty, voice search and digital assistants are here to stay. These days, 20% of searches on an Android are voice searches. Word recognition errors have also decreased over the last few years: less than 8%.

And when you factor in digital assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Google Assistant, many users are skipping search engine results altogether.

So is the concept of SEO, specifically mobile SEO, dead?

Not so fast.

In this piece, we’ll go over how you can use voice and semantic search optimization techniques to improve your website’s performance in mobile, voice and “interactive agent” search. (Don’t worry, we’ll explain that last part in more detail in a minute.)

Voice Search Optimization

One of the most important aspects of optimizing web content for voice search is to create it using natural language. What do we mean by natural language?

Think of it this way: which of these queries is someone most likely to use when conducting a voice search:

• Leaky faucet
• Leaky faucet solution
• How do I fix a leaky faucet
• Faucet dripping water

The first and last queries could work for a desktop user, but most people don’t talk to their phones in that way. They’re most likely to use the third option — it’s just the polite thing to do.

Since voice search results often rely on Google’s featured snippet results, approach your content in the same way:

• Consider the user’s intent. What question are they answering or problem are they solving?
• Meet that intent as quickly as you can. For “what is” questions that means answering the question in 50-60 words.
• Use HTML headers to specify each step in a process.
• Put the question in your page’s <h1> tag and the put the answer in the <p> tag right after the header.

Advanced Voice Search: Interactive Agents

As computers have become better at hearing, interpreting and understanding spoken human language, people have started searching more and more through programs known as “interactive agents.” In fact, it’s estimated that 85% of people will manage their interactions with businesses via interactive agents.

Interactive agents are programs designed to perform tasks requested by a person using natural language.

Chatbots

What’s more, interactive agents are able to use previous interactions and context clues to inform tasks requested by the user.

For example, say you asked your Google Home “How old is Tom Brady?”

Google would come back and tell you he’s 40 years old.

Then, if you asked “How many kids does he have?” Google would come back with 3 kids.

The fact that computer programs can now answer questions that use pronouns was exciting new technology in 2013 when it debuted. These days, however, it’s just the way search works.

Preparing your website for interactive agents isn’t just for SEO anyway. Chat app usage growth has far outstripped that of social network app. To the point that the big 4 messaging apps — WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and Viber — now have more active users than Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and, Instagram.

And since Facebook is actively encouraging businesses to create chatbots for Messenger, you’ve got a huge opportunity to bring your content and products directly to your users on their phones, tablets and smart speakers.

You can give them purchasing guidance by answering their questions and then let them order a product, all without them ever needing to pick up a device.

Structured data

Structured data refers to information that is stored and organized in a standardized way so that a machine can read and understand it. For our purposes, that “data” refers to content found on a website.

You can’t see structured data on a website, but you’ll see it in Google’s search results:

The first two results on this search results page both show structured data: Schema.org’s recipe markup and review rating markup.

Chatbots also rely on structured data to find content relevant to a user’s spoken query. The birthDate and children properties of the Person schema are how Google Assistant was able to answer our questions about Tom Brady.

So how do you add structured data to your website?

Using structured data

First, create what are called “entities”. These are the people, places, organizations, concepts or events relevant to your website. Your entities, when combined, form a vocabulary for bots to read and interpret.

When creating entities, there a lot of vocabularies you can use to structure your data. But the best one is probably Schema.org. The schema was created by the major search engines as a way to standardize structured data.

Once you’ve created your vocabulary, you have to link your content back to your structured data. Marking up your pages with links to your structured data is how interactive agents find and deliver content relevant to a user’s query.

Like with structured data, there are multiple ways of adding linked data to your content. You can use JSON-LD, microdata or RDFa. We recommend using JSON-LD simply because you can manage it via Google Tag Manager. All 3 formats are equally valid.

You can manually add your JSON-LD to the <head> and <body> of your website, but that’s not feasible for people with small teams and/or big websites. Luckily, there are lots of great semantic web tools that can automate this process.

If you’re running a WordPress site, WordLift.io is a simple and easy way to handle any of your structured data needs.

The WordLift plugin lets you create and add linked data to your content. Completely automated.

Start Reaching A More Relevant Audience

Once you’ve managed to create content that’s optimized for voice search and marked up for chatbots, you’ll find that your website has opened up doors to users all over the web. Not just those using Google or Bing.

You’ll now be able to take advantage of all those people on Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Kik who want to interact with your business. You’ve just opened up a whole new conversion channel.

At the same time, you’ve also prepared your website to deliver more relevant content to people who are searching via Google. So now you’re ready for the future of SEO too.

Author: Justin Borja, Key Account Manager at WooRank