"Siri, find a gluten-free restaurant in Venice."
My wife and I were on vacation in Venice a few weeks ago. My wife has to eat a gluten-free diet, which often makes travel a headache. We didn't really want to take the time to boot up the laptop and do a search for reviews of gluten-free options, nor did I really feel like typing.
I asked Siri and I got 3 results. We ate at the first one that popped up.
This is the future of SEO. If you're not #1, you are out of the game. Voice search is increasing in use and its primary advantage is convenience. When you’re in a rush, you really don’t want to rifle through 10 results to find what you want. You just want what you’re looking for and voice search will get it to you with minimal effort on your part. Virtual assistants are designed with this in mind; if you’re looking for an answer to a question, they deliver the answer, not a series of sources that might provide an answer. This means that if you’re not #1, you may as well be #100.
What Can You Do To Prepare Your Site For Voice Search?
Get Your Local Citations
First, make sure that you have claimed all of your local citations. We have a list with the TF and CF of each site listed here. Local citations are often used as a confirmation of the accuracy of your listing and can help your site rank for “near me” searches. There are services that range in thousands of dollars in cost over the lifetime of your website, such as Yext PowerListings, to Fiverr gigs that will open up all of your accounts.
Set Your Microdata
Properly configuring the microdata on your website will help the search engine to gather the relevant information about your business that it wishes to deliver to search engine users. Make sure that your microdata, including address, phone number, hours of operation, your menu (if you have a restaurant) and anything else you can place in it is there. This could make the difference between your search result and a competitor’s being delivered for a query.
Maintain Your Reviews
It is likely that aggregators such as Yelp, Avvo, and Homeadvisor will become more important as time goes by. In particular, Yelp has a powerful algorithm that weeds out fake reviews and as it becomes more and more reliable, Google is likely to consider pulling that information when recommending a business to a search. Make sure that you do not ignore these platforms, since there is a good chance that businesses that have a strong presence on them will have an ace in the hole if, or when, Google starts weighing them more heavily in the algorithm.
Get Links
The relevance of links is not going anywhere. Healthy linkbuilding is unlikely to stop paying dividends, so get out there and start creating a presence online.
What Do You Think Is Next?
How are you prepping for the voice search wave? Have you have any wins in dominating voice search?