Google’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri has been growing in popularity ever since their launch just a few years ago. We are at an age where it is not unusual to see someone telling their Alexa to turn the lights off in a house. It is also just as commonplace for someone to tell Siri to call an Uber for a friend. At the rate that the technology is growing, there is a good chance that a business with technological know-how or a large budget will be optimized for voice-assisted search engines. So, how do you optimize your website for voice-activated search engines to find you? Here are three steps that will get you started.
Learn or Pay for Custom Voice Activation Templates
A lot of practitioners are often learning new skills to make their practice more profitable. They often attend seminars, take courses, or even go to college if they think it will set them apart from their competition. Any practice owner would want to learn as much as possible about voice-activated search engines, especially while the technology is still in its early phases.
If you look hard enough, there are resources available to teach you how to design your own voice template for Alexa. If you are mindful of the common words or phrases that people would use to search for your practice, and know-how to program it in the way the software approves of, it can work wonders.
The only downside is that it will take courses that consume time or money before anything gets started. So, if you are not comfortable with the software, programming, or anything else to do with computers, you might want to hire someone who can create custom voice templates for your practice.
Using Context in your Voice Activated Content
People talk differently than they write. After all, we tend to be more mindful of the words we write down. Possibly because we have more formal intent while we do write. When we talk to friends or family, however, that changes. When we speak naturally, we have no script. This results in questions being asked that are more conversational in tone than in writing. So when you want people to find you, you need to offer the right information for the right questions. In other words, context is key.
If you use long-tail keywords, nix specialized vocabulary, and try to add context to the questions that you want to cover, you will be more likely to create accurate templates for your site.
Utilize Schema for your Website
Naturally, SEO does not always happen on its own accord. You have to tell Google which web pages to look at when they provide written results for search engines. The same goes for voice activation data. The data that recognizes and filters voice commands in the form of microdata or JSON-LD. Both of these are a type of code that tells Google which data is relevant in a search, and which data is not. There are a variety of rules and restrictions when it comes to the structure and use of microdata. Some of which are more obvious than others.
Most people use microdatagenerator.com to create a code that will point their practice for Google to pick up. You can put it on your page in the right place for code and it will point Google in your direction.