Voice Search SEO in 2018 – All You Need to Optimize Your Content

In the last two years, we have faced the adoption of a fast-growing technology which will reshape the way we experience the web. In 2018, voice search is everywhere: on your computers, smartphones, cars, and even at home through smart speakers like Google Home and Amazon Alexa. If you are publishing content online, you’re likely to be curious about voice search SEO in 2018.

What is it going to be like? And, moreover, what can you do to optimize your content?

Starting from what is voice search and why is it so important for your online business, in this guide we will share with you 10 actionable tips on how to optimize your content for voice search and different SEO techniques that can specifically help you with this. You will also discover how to create content-based Google Actions starting with your news, podcasts, and recipes in order to open new access points to your content from the Google Assistant.

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Make Your Website talk
Voice Search SEO in 2018 – The Handy Guide

Table of Content

What is voice search and why it’s booming
Focus on: From keywords to semantics

10-step checklist to optimize your content for voice search
#1. Answer questions (and do it accurately)
#2. Make your content easy to read
#3. Optimize for mobile and local search
#4. Add schema.org markup
#5. Embrace everyday language
#6. Control Rank Zero
#7. Curate Your Entity
#8. Teach Google the right Synonym
#9. Hijack your environment and let the PAs do the talking
#10. Claim and Optimize your Business
Voice ranking factors – a Backlinko study

A schema.org property for speakable content
What is speakable?
What content can be eligible for speakable structured data?

What is PASO?
Why are personal assistants (PAs) going to shape the future of SEO?

What are Google Actions?
How Can I Make My Google Action Easy to Find?
Content-based Actions
#News
#Podcast
#Recipe

Speech quality rating
#1. Length
#2. Formulation
#3. Elocution

Key takeaways and conclusions

What is voice search and why it’s booming in 2018

Voice search, also known as Conversational Search, is a new kind of human-machine interaction where devices can answer human spoken questions. Conversational search analyzes a string of words and replies with responses which resemble our natural language.

Voice search is now integrated into many devices such as mobile phones, home assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home, and cars which support Intelligent Agents.

Today this technology has four main players:

• Amazon, whose Alexa Voice Search uses Bing as a search engine
• Apple, whose Siri is now using Google, after a long time using Bing
• Google, whose Google Voice Search, of course, relies on its own algorithms
• Windows, whose Cortana uses Bing – which is also owned by Microsoft – as a search engine.

Just a few years ago, voice-activated technology sounded like science fiction, it reminded us of Star Trek‘s iconic characters commanding their computers with just their voices. Now it’s 2018 and voice search is real and going to stay: 35.6 million Americans used a voice-activated assistant device at least once a month in 2017, estimates eMarketer — it’s a year-over-year increase of 128.9 percent. We are facing the adoption of a fast-growing technology which will reshape the way we experience the web.

Alpine.ai counts that, in 2018, there are over one billion voice searches per month and, according to ComScore, voice search will keep on growing, covering at least 50% of all searches by 2020.

Internet users are finally massively using voice search for a variety of reasons:

1. It finally works! The error rate in speech recognition is getting close to zero. Andrew Ng has long predicted that as speech recognition goes from 95% accurate to 99% accurate, it will become the primary way that we interact with computers. This 4% accuracy gap is the difference between annoyingly unreliable and incredibly useful. Thanks to deep learning, we’re finally cresting that peak.
2. It’s fast and simple. Most people speak faster than they type. That’s a fact. So, when you are in a hurry, it would be much easier to speak to a virtual assistant and get the answer you were looking for straight away. Also, when searching the web by typing a query you have to evaluate the results and pick the one that comes from the most relevant source (probably between those in the first SERP), if you are not satisfied with the results, you will have to narrow down your research by adding more keywords to the query. It requires some time and experience. Since virtual assistants are becoming more and more conversational, the voice search process is now simpler and more user-friendly: it resembles a natural conversation where the virtual assistant keeps track of previous questions and replies accordingly.
3. It’s multitasking-friendly. Say you are at home cooking an apple pie and you just need to know how many eggs you need or you are driving to the venue of some event which is about to begin and you are not sure about the fastest route. In both cases, voice search can help by giving you the information you need while you are busy doing something else and without using your hands!
4. It’s mobile-friendly. Anywhere, anytime, our virtual assistants are in our pockets, just a voice command away. Most times, thanks to instant answers, you don’t even need to read something on your device, you just get the right answer… in zero time!

What users need when using voice search is a quick and actionable answer: here is why, when it’s possible, intelligent agents try to give an immediate answer skipping the websites. The bright side is that when your content is structured and rich, your articles and pages may be displayed as the instant answers by Intelligent Agents giving to you a boost in CTR.

Moreover, voice searches are often longer and more contextualized than typed ones. When using a keyboard, users try to be specific enough and use as few words as possible, on the other hand, asking something to an intelligent agent, users tend to indulge in details related to their context. Content writers should prepare for voice searches by trying to be relevant to the long-tail of complex searches.

There is more. Smart speaker and conversational interfaces are perceived by users as shopping channels. In a recent survey published by Bing, more than 40% of consumers state that they expect digital assistants to understand their purchase preferences and make routine purchases on their behalf within the next 5 years.

That’s why according with Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella: “Every brand will build intelligent conversational agents.”

Focus on: from keywords to semantics

The rise of voice search trend is just the tip of the iceberg: search engines are slightly moving from keywords to semantics and natural language processing is heading towards human-centric results. It’s not just happening on voice search, it’s true for any kind of search, especially on Google.

Since fall 2013, thanks to the algorithm known as Google Hummingbird, SERPs have been more and more populated with results which take into account context information such as the kind of device used, geolocation, time of the day, previous searches and more. To give each user the best results, Google is also using a machine learning technology called RankBrain, which is the third signal in order of importance contributing to the results of each search. RankBrain is used mainly to interpret the searches in order to find pages that offer a good answer for users, but might not have the exact words that were searched for. It clearly relies on semantics since it goes beyond keywords and gets deeper into the contextual meaning of the search.

When using context information, search engines serve more relevant results to users by picking the answers which seem to be more accurate and case-specific. Considering the biggest picture, voice search is one more reason for content creators to focus on content structure and rethink each page or article as an answer for specific personas.

WordLift gives content marketers the opportunity to focus on writing while it does the techy job and gives structure to your article with metadata.

10-step checklist to optimize your content for voice search

#1. Answer questions

Many voice searches are questions which start with the 5W + H (in case you don’t remember from your school days they are Who, What, When, Where, Why and How). Usually, the answers to questions which start with Who, What, When and Where are a single piece of information that can be isolated: that is why Google and Intelligent Agents tend to answer these kinds of questions with instant answers. Owning or being the result picked as an instant answer is a strategic asset (the so-called Rank Zero case).

WordLift offers you the chance to structure your content by assigning a role to each piece of information using the Who, What, When and Where categories.

#2. Make your content easy to read

Organize the content of your page with subtitles, bullet points, tables, and some highlights: it will help machines understand the content on your page. Also, remember that many people tend to quickly scan a page before actually reading it. A neat content organization of your page will help your hasty readers and give them a reason to thoroughly read your article.

#3 Optimize for mobile and local search

Most times, voice search comes from mobile devices. Keep in mind and consider that a mobile-friendly website is crucial for your SEO. When talking about mobile optimization, remember that page speed is crucial.

Let’s take a step forward and think about how proximity could eventually change the relevance of your content. If you own a local activity, it probably does: think about how your products or services may help people around you and structure your content accordingly.

Think about the needs of people walking nearby your office and feed them with useful information that relates to your business.

#4 Add schema.org markup

Google Assistant has no doubts: WordLift is the best answer for those who are looking for an SEO plugin that uses semantic technologies.

Schema.org markup helps you by adding context to your content: you can use it to explicit the relations between information in your content, to disambiguate the words you are using and to give structure to your pages. When using schema.org markup you are communicating with machines through semantics instead of keywords: you are helping machines to define the context around information so that it will turn into useful results for humans.

#5. Embrace everyday language

Do you think that average users talk to their virtual assistants with complicated, hyper-specialized words? Wrong! They will most likely use everyday language or even slang to ask questions. So, more than ever, remember the KISS principle: “keep it simple, stupid!“. Ask yourself what would users who know nothing or nearly nothing about the topic you are writing about would search, and then write for them.

Einstein used to say: “If you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough“.

#6. Control Rank Zero

When dealing with Google Home or Google Allo or Google Assistant (they do have their own slight differences) one source of information is the so-called rank zero snippets. These are featured snippets in search results whose summary has been extracted programmatically from a web page. While the real difference, for these snippets, is not the way the information has been fetched by Google (as this works much like the good old SEO) but how the result is presented to the user: these snippets answer a great deal of questions, triggered by our voice.

Sometimes controlling Rank Zero can be as simple as interacting with a site owner, share your product and get a review for it.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Look for an easy-to-reach Rank Zero position that is relevant to your business. For example, I discovered a featured snippet for one of my favorite SEO tools by searching over Google “What is WooRank?”
2. Understand where the information is coming from, in my case, the content on WooRank was extracted from a reviews’ website called Reviews – Finances Online (they do a very good job)
3. Contact the website owner and ask for a review, just as I did for WordLift, our beloved WordPress plugin
4. Boom! “That’s right, man. I got in.” – epic quote from the movie “Tron Legacy”. The snippet was created within hours and this was a simple and easy way to train Google on what WordLift really is.

#7. Curate Your Entity

While Rank Zero results are driven by old SEO tactics, other snippets are driven by data that Google can truly understand and compute. This information is stored in the Google Knowledge Graph (eventually evolved in the Google Knowledge Vault). This is a large database organized much like our brain in a network of synapsis. These snippets, called knowledge panels, are bound to a Knowledge Graph ID, a unique identifier in the web of data that unambiguously maps the information related to a person, a company or a product. Just to give you an example my Knowledge Graph ID is kg:/m/0djtw2h. A simple query using this ID will show you everything that Google knows about me.

These types of results are way more powerful than the results generated using the Rank Zero snippets as they can be computed. The machine knows what it is talking about – it is not just repurposing information scraped from a webpage. The AI now has the data needed to discover other data and learn from it.

Here are the steps in this case:

1. Look for the Graph ID you need using the Knowledge Graph Search API (here is a good article to walk you though) – if you can’t find it – give yourself a new target and build the data you need to get a Graph ID for your entity.
2. Ensure that a consistent representation of the same entity is available in other digital spaces such as social networks, the universal encyclopedia, and your own website or blog.
3. Remember to add your structured data markup (on all websites you can control) and a direct link to that Graph ID identifier. WordLift does this for you automatically and tells Google “Hey here we’re talking about entity X and here you can find additional information to learn from”. This is very a powerful technique for the so-called semantic search optimization.
4. You’re done! Let the fun begin!

#8. Teach Google the right Synonym

The explosion of online information has led to an impressive growth in quantity, diversity, and complexity of linguistic data accessible over the Internet. These resources become way more useful when they are linked to each other. Today’s natural language interfaces and personal assistants leverage on this vast amount of information and benefit from the linked data paradigm. There are already incredibly useful lexical-semantic resources that AI tools and PAs can use by accessing linked data: WordNet, FrameNet as well as general knowledge graphs like DBpedia and Yago represent the foundation of today’s computational linguistics. How can you take a spin at these technologies and improve the visibility of your brand?

Discover “Bauernherbst” with Google Allo

Here is an example that uses structured data markup to help Google Assistant promote a major festival in Salzbugerland, whose brand name is a German word (Bauernherbst), to an English speaking audience:

1. start with an entity (in this case an entity of type event that describes the harvest festival in the region of Salzburg)
2. add the synonym to the entity using the schema.org markup
3. create the same entity (and the corresponding web page) in both German and English
4. connect the schema.org linked metadata of the German page with the schema.org metadata of the English page (and you can do all of this with WordLift without any technical skill)
5. Voilà, magic happens!

#9. Hijack your environment and let the PAs do the talking

I remember the first time I saw the Google Glasses at SXSW Festival in 2013. The proud smile depicted on the faces of the very few lucky early adopters and how easy it was to kill their enthusiasm and annoy them to death without even talking to them. As soon as they would pass by with their head-mounted displays, someone nearby would shout… “OK Google” therefore activating the device and requesting them to press a button and stop the talking. We all know now, as Google Assistant has been shipped to all most recent Android devices, how frustrating it is when it gets activated by mistake.

Now, what if… this is done with a purpose and within the context of an online advertising, a business talk or a presentation? This is what Burger King just did a few days ago to set the Internet on fire and to force Google to update all home devices and shut down the assistant-activated ad. Burger King’s new 15-second commercial on YouTube triggers Google devices by shouting a voice search query within their promotional video… “Ok Google, what is the Whopper burger?”. Sorry, I just loved that. There have been a lot of understandable complaints and yet, if used properly this is a game changer.

Here is how it goes:

1. Make sure you can successfully have the PA talk about you or your preferred entity
2. Create a podcast or a video that engage the PAs in the room where your video is being watched
3. Always avoid being too invasive and remember privacy is important for everyone

#10. Claim and Optimize your Business

Being successful in the Voice Search world is about strengthening your online presence, focusing on the user intents and making sure content, as well as data,  is consistent across the Internet. A lot of people use voice search to get information about local businesses. Sometimes it’s quicker from a mobile device (if not absolutely mandatory – if you’re driving) to ask your PA to make a call for you or to help you drive on time to a destination. These search queries rely on the accuracy of the business listings and on the consistency of a business’ name, address and phone number (NAP).

Hello WordLift. Tap to Call.

Here is what you need to do to help Google Assistant find your business:

1. Add it to Google My Business, Yelp and Bing Places for Business and remember to choose the right business category.
2. Incorporate schema.org markup on your website to tell search engines: yes, this business has this website and yes, this is the business’ name, address, and phone number. Schema markup helps PAs truly understand what your business is all about and reinforces the same data you should already have in the various directories.

Voice ranking factors – a Backlinko study

In February 2018 Backlinko published a research study that collected and analyzed 10.000 Google Home results. The aim of the study was to better understand how Google Voice ranks works and, moreover, how to optimize a website for voice search.

They investigated the role of 11 ranking factors, and here is the summary of their work.

1. PageSpeed is the king of voice search SEO. The average voice search result page loads in 4.6 seconds, which means that is 52% faster than the average page.
2. HTTPS websites are crucial to appear within Google’s voice search results. In fact, 70.4% of Google Home result pages are secured with HTTPS.
3. Length: Google prefers short, concise answers to voice search queries. The typical voice search result is just 29 words long.
4. Schema.org: 36.4% of voice search results come from pages that use Schema.org, slightly higher than the global average of 31.3%.
5. Authoritative domains produce more voice search results than less authoritative ones. The average Ahrefs Domain Rating of a Google Home result is 76.8.
6. Social media: content with high levels of social engagement seems to perform well in voice search also. Just consider that the average voice search result has 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets.
7. Simple, easy-to-read content may help with voice search SEO. The average Google voice search result is written at a 9th-grade level.
8. Title: we found that very few voice search results had the exact query in their title tag. This might mean that creating individual pages for each voice search query is not an effective voice search SEO strategy.
9. Word count: on average, a voice search result page is made of 2,312 words. It may surprise you, but Google often sources voice search answers from long-form content.
10. Desktop search: content that ranks high in desktop search is very likely to appear as a voice search answer. 75% of voice search results rank in the top 3 for that query.
11. Featured Snippet: 40.7% of all voice search answers come from a featured snippet. If your page is eligible for a featured snippet, it will likely appear on voice search.

A schema.org property for speakable content

Recently schema.org and Google have launched Speakable, a new property for web content that is still in beta and that may change the publishers’ approach to voice search optimization.

What is speakable?

According with Google:

The speakable schema.org property identifies sections within an article or webpage that are best suited for audio playback using text-to-speech (TTS). Adding markup allows search engines and other applications to identify content to read aloud on Google Assistant-enabled devices using TTS. Webpages with speakable structured data can use the Google Assistant to distribute the content through new channels and reach a wider base of users.

A the moment, this property only works for websites that are in English, other languages will be implemented soon.

What content can be eligible for speakable structured data?

Content from news sites is eligible to appear in news results and also to be read by Google Assistant. To validate your news site you can:

• submit it to Google through the Publisher Center
• set up a valid edition in Google News Producer.

Find out how to implement speakable in your website with schema.org.

What is PASO?

The acronym PASO stands for Personal Assistant Search Optimization, and it is referred to the use of SEO techniques with the aim of positioning content as the source of the answers given by Personal Assistants (PAs) such as Siri and Google Assistant to their users. The term was first introduced by John E. Lincoln in an editorial appeared on Search Engine Land and titled «Why the future is all about PASO — personal assistant search optimization».

Why are personal assistants (PAs) going to shape the future of SEO?

1. Personal Assistants typically return only one result instead of the thousands of links we are used to in regular search. This means two things: competition is going to be really hard because it’s first or nothing, and the winners will take all the clicks (and traffic).
2. Personal Assistants are used on smartphones and at home. They are portable, hands-free and incomparably convenient, especially when you are busy doing something else and you need a quick information to take action. Their use is going to grow very fast in the years to come: in fact, voice search is predicted to overcome regular search within 2020.
3. Personal Assistants are powered by Artificial Intelligence and they can give tailored results to their users, learning from factors such as localization and previous searches.

So, yes, PASO is definitely going to be something you should think about from now on.

Here is a very immediate example of how this exact web page that you’re reading has been indexed by Google and it is now providing the answer to the question.

What are Google Actions?

Google Actions are apps that extend the Google Assistant to help users get things done using their voice. Rather than by tapping on your phone as we normally do with apps, an Action lets us accomplish tasks mainly through our voice using a natural-sounding conversation.

In the last few months, Google has sold tens of millions of smart devices like the Google Home, Google Home Mini, and the Google Home Max at an incredible growth rate (one every second since last October according to Google).

By the end of 2018, the Google Assistant — which is already available in eight languages — will be available in more than 30 languages and will reach 95% of all eligible Android phones worldwide across multiple devices from Smart TVs to cars with Android Auto (yes, since January 2018, the Assistant is accessible behind the wheel of your favorite car).

At a time when it’s harder and harder to grow your traffic organically over traditional social networks without spending a fortune on advertising, we’re talking about a new entry point to your content for millions of users.

How Can I Make My Google Action Easy to Find?

Users need to invoke your Google Action through Google Assistant in order to engage with it. There are two main ways to make your Google Action accessible to users:

• Explicit invocation: This occurs when a user already knows the name of your Google Action and asks the Google Assistant to talk to it with something like “Hey Google, talk to Sir Jason Link” – a user, in this case, needs to know what it can ask your assistant. The Web Directory of Google Actions is a good place to start. Here is the page dedicated to Sir Jason Link.
• Implicit invocation: This is where the magic really happens. It’s the way to engage with users that don’t know yet about the existence of your app. As shown above, if a user will say something like “Tell me something about Semantic SEO?”, Sir Jason Link might be invoked.

In the table above – taken from the Google Action Console of our app – we can see which phrases led to Google recommending our app.

The columns in the table above include:

1. Matched spoken phrase: the user query that led to Google recommending your app.
2. Matching action: the intent or action that the user’s query was mapped to.
3. Impression: this is the number of times the phrase led to Google recommending our app (it’s similar to impressions in SERPs).
4. Selection: the number of times a user invoked our app after Google recommended it. Imagine this as the equivalent of a user clicking on a SERP result.
5. Selection rate: Probably the most important one in terms of optimization. This is the percentage of impressions that led to a selection. This metric would be the equivalent of a Click Through Rate on the result page.

As you can see from these results, Sir Jason Link received the highest number of impressions for an open intent call — $topic:topic — that basically deep links the request on single entities (whether these are companies like “Google” or a concept such as “Linked Data”).

When the user triggered these keywords we got a significant amount of requests and for each of these requests, we had the content ready in our website (we do have entity pages for companies like Google and for concepts like “linked data“).

The selection rate, of course, in this specific example, was not optimal.

Content-based Actions

If you are a publisher and you produce constantly one specific kind of content such as news, podcasts, and recipes, you may be interested in optimizing your content in order to help Google automatically create Actions on the basis of your content. In this way, Google will generate a page on the Assistant directory.

Then when Google Assistant users’ intent will match with your content, Google will ask them if they are interested to listen at your news, podcasts, and recipes.

1. News. Once your news is part of the Assistant Directory, users will be able to access to your news articles as part of Google News – that includes top stories carousel and can massively improve your performance in traffic.
2. Podcasts. Users will be able to find and listen to your podcasts, playing episodes on their devices directly from the Google Assistant.
3. Recipes. Users can access your recipes starting from the rich card presented in the Google Assistant.

In other words, content-based actions will create a new access point to your website, driving more traffic to your content.

What do you have to do to prepare your content to become a Google Actions? Follow the instructions below.

#News

In order to index your news in the Assistant Directory and in Google News, your content has to meet these requirements:

1. Associate your content with Google News, following the official guide by Google.
2. Mark up your content for AMP, following this documentation.
3. Mark up your content as structured articles
   Accepted schema.org types for non-video news are: Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting.
   Here are the schema.org properties that Google requires for news markup: author, author.name, datePublished, headline, image, publisher, publisher.logo, publisher.logo.height, publisher.logo.url, publisher.logo.width, publisher.name.
   Modified date, description, and main entity are recommended, but not required.
   For video news you should use the schema.org type VideoObject.
   Here are the schema.org properties that Google requires for video news markup: name, description, thumbnailUrl, publisher.name, publisher.logo, publisher.logo.url.
   Duration, content URL, embed URL, interaction count, and eventually expires (in case after a specific date the video won’t be available anymore) are recommended, but not required.

#Podcast

In order to index your podcast in the Assistant Directory, you have to follow these 4 steps:

1. Expose a valid RSS feed describing the podcast, which conforms to the RSS 2.0 specifications. Google also asks for a few requirements:
   Podcast level
   <title> containing the name of the podcast
   <link> URL to the homepage of the podcast
   <item> listing the episodes of your podcast
   Author, image, description, and category are not mandatory, but surely the more your RSS feed is structured, the more easily Google will process your content and match it with users’ searches.
   Episode level
   <title> containing the title of the single episode of the podcast
   <enclosure> containing a URL of the audio file. These are the audio formats that Google accepts: aac, m4a, mp3, ogg, wav.
   Description, GUID, publication date, and duration are the information you can also include to every single episode.
2. Add the at least one episode that conforms to the requirements above to your feed.
3. Create a homepage for your podcast. It has to describe what your podcast is about. Include this HTML element somewhere in the code:
   <link type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate" title="Your Podcast's Name" href="Your podcast's RSS url"/>
   Don’t place any other <link type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate"> element on the page.
4. Needless to say, the homepage, the RSS feed, and any the single episodes of the podcast must be exposed to Googlebot. This means that they must not require a login, and must not be protected by robots.txt or <noindex> tags.

Extra tip: the RSS specifications for Google Play Music and Google Search are complimentary – even if not identical – adding your podcast to Google Play may be worth the extra mile. Follow the instructions here.

#Recipe

Recipes are content about creating a specific dish. For example: “pizza margherita” is a valid name for a recipe, while “facial scrub” is not.

In order to index your recipes in the Assistant Directory, you have to structure your content using the entity type Recipe.

The schema.org properties that Google requires for recipes mark-up are only two image, and name, but some of the extra properties can really make the difference.

For instance, recipeIngredient and recipeInstructions are required to allow the Google Home and Google Assistant to read the recipe and guide the users through the preparation of the dish. And… this is really what a key feature for people who are looking for a recipe!

More recommended properties are: aggregateRating, author, cookTime, prepTime, totalTime, datePublished, description, keywords, nutrition.calories, recipeCategory, recipeCuisine, recipeYield, review, video.

You can get deeper into content actions reading Google’s guide.

Speech quality rating

To determine if the speech quality is acceptable, Google rates your content on the basis of three factors: length, formulation, and elocution. Learn what it means to improve your texts thinking about how the robotic voice of a personal assistant is going to pronounce them.

#Lenght

Was the response of an appropriate length matching the complexity of its content? Would it have been beneficial for the user if it were either more concise or more detailed?

#Formulation

Was it grammatical? Was the response formulated in a way you would expect a native speaker to formulate it? As opposed to a machine or someone not fully fluent in the language. When the answer included an attribution, was the source of the content clear and understandable?

#Elocution

How accurate were the pronunciations of each word spoken in the response? Was the intonation of the voice natural throughout the response? Was the speed at which the response was spoken appropriately? This could be due to an awkward rhythm in the spoken response, or words slightly mispronounced.

Key takeaways and conclusions

Throughout this article, we saw that the voice search is here to stay. People are adopting it more and more often, and publishers have a unique chance to play into a new field of SEO, where the first result is really the one which counts.

To optimize your content for voice search you have to rethink your content in a more conversational way, trying to guess what a user would ask to a search engine or a personal assistant. Embracing the everyday language and switching to a conversational style is important, but it’s just the beginning.

You have to keep strong attention to technical SEO matters, such as mobile optimization and schema.org markup.

Schema.org markup is fundamental when it comes to Google Actions, the digital applications that the Google Assistant uses to answer to its users’ search intents. Your content can automatically become a Google Action with the help of a proper schema.org markup.

Structured content is the key to the new SEO strategies and it’s a critical asset to be featured in voice search results, as well as featured snippets and Google Actions.

WordLift makes content structuring through schema.org accessible by anyone without any technical skills. In other words, using WordLift you can optimize your content for voice search and create new access points leveraging on personal assistants.