5 Voice Engine Optimization Strategies to Get Ahead

Whether it’s a speaker or smartphone, voice search usage is rapidly increasing. Leading research firms are predicting that somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of all searches will be conducted via voice by 2020.

Now is the time for brands to create an optimization strategy for voice search in order to get ahead of the curve

Here are the five steps to getting started with your VEO strategy:

VEO - " Voice Engine Optimization "

1. Optimize Your Business Listings

It’s essential to keep your business listings clean and your name, address, and phone (NAP) data consistent.

Approximately $10.3 billion are lost each year just because of missing and inaccurate listings. Make sure you’re providing accurate business information to users.

2. Speed Up Your Website

Why is this relevant to voice search? It’s because mobile voice search users are looking for immediate on-the-go results.

Additionally, Google has officially announced that their “speed update”, which enables page speed in mobile search ranking, is now rolling out for all users worldwide.

The time it takes to load the average mobile landing page is 15 seconds. The best time should’ve been under 3 seconds.

If you aren’t ranking well on mobile search because of speed issues, then it might affect your voice search opportunities.

3. Your New Content Strategy: Focus on Questions

Forty-one percent of people who use voice search say it feels like talking to a friend.

These people are engaging with their voice-activated speakers as if they were human. Thus, the way in which they conduct voice searches also differ.

They don’t simply say keywords. They ask questions.

Focus on using conversational, long-tail keyword phrases in your content as this will help you to better answer natural language questions.

You need to find the natural language keyword phrases that your target audience is most likely to ask.

4. Your New Content Strategy: Provide Answers

When you optimize for featured snippets, you’re likewise optimizing for voice search. About 40.7 percent of voice search answers come from featured snippets.

Here are a few things you can do:

• Create content that answers questions (i.e., FAQ page) to drive conversions at an easy reading level. (One paragraph 9th-grade reading level is best).
• Update your content often. Keep it fresh.
• Markup language: Questions should be marked up properly in <h2> headers.
• Answer any existing questions on your Google My Business Questions and Answers section.
• Create compelling questions about your products and services that will drive conversion.
• If you don’t have content to begin with, look at your reviews to source FAQ content ideas. The reviews you already have are written with natural language and give you content on what your customers are asking about.

5. Test It

Voice search is still new so you should take it upon yourself to test the voice search function proactively.

How to Test Voice Search

Test different devices: Smart Speakers vs. Mobile or Google Assistant vs. Alexa vs. Cortana vs. Siri

What are the results generated?: Where and who are answers pulled from?

Single vs. Multiple Listings: How many listings does each device/assistant offer you?

Rankings: Where are you ranking for your most common questions? Where are your competitors ranking?

Read More details: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/voice-search-optimization-strategies/261115/#close
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5 Tools, Tips and Hacks to Maximize your SEO Output

Columnist Brian Patterson believes that SEO success depends not only on your knowledge and skills, but on your ability to work efficiently. Check out his five suggestions for increasing SEO productivity.

Part of being an effective SEO is being incredibly efficient with the tasks at hand. You just aren’t going to have the time needed to go deeper and continue to add value if you’re spinning your wheels doing manual, repetitive tasks.

Because of this, we have always valued things that can make you more efficient: tools, scripts, automation, and even interns!

Today, we dig deep into our toolbox to pull out five of our favorite ways to maximize your SEO productivity output.

1. Automate Google Analytics data extracts & reporting

Generating monthly reports is one of those repetitive tasks that can consume a day or more at the beginning of the month (especially in the agency world!).

2. Find internal linking opportunities with Screaming Frog

Internal links are one of the most underrated ranking factors in SEO. They not only allow you to optimize the destination pages for the exact keywords you want, they also provide a great opportunity to strategically distribute link equity in a way that targets your key landing pages

3. Scale keyword research with Merge Words

Google is better than ever at understanding the topic of a web page through its improved entity recognition. Better language processing allows Google to group related terms and understand their context.

4. Scale SEO improvements with global changes

SEO productivity doesn’t have to just refer to specific tactics to make the collection of data easier. Productive SEOs are also capable of applying this thinking to campaigns as a whole to scale their success. While page-level recommendations can be extremely beneficial, often times it can be tedious and lead to diminishing returns to solely optimize a website on a page-by-page basis.

5. Make interns part of your company culture

This may sound like cheating, but sometimes a repetitive or tedious process just needs that human touch. We’ve found that these types of tasks are perfect for interns. They get to do real work, and it frees up our team members for more difficult and meaningful work.

Final Thoughts

Scaling, efficiency, and productivity are core tenants my company — and for good reason.

If you can find a better and faster way to do something, you increase your quality output while freeing up time to do the more thoughtful (and more rewarding) work required to be successful at SEO.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/5-tools-tips-hacks-maximize-seo-output-279599

Overview of Google Algorithm

Google has a long history of famous algorithm updates, search index changes and refreshes.

Below are links to some of the most important resources for search marketers:

Google Hummingbird
Google Mobile Friendly Update
Google Panda Update
Google Penguin Update
Google Pigeon Update
Google Payday Update
Google Pirate Update
Google EMD (Exact Match Domain) Update
Google Top Heavy Update

Google: Hummingbird

What Is Google Hummingbird?

“Hummingbird” is the name of the new search platform that Google is using as of September 2013, the name comes from being “precise and fast” and is designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words. Read our Google Hummingbird FAQ here.

Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.

Google Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.


Google: Mobile Friendly Update

What Is Mobilegeddon & The Google Mobile Friendly Update
On April 21, 2015, Google will release a significant new mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that’s designed to give a boost to mobile-friendly pages in Google’s mobile search results.

The change, which will take about a week to complete, is so significant that the date it actually happens is being referred to by a variety of names. Here at Search Engine Land, we’re calling it mobilegeddon, but sometimes it’s also referred to as mobilepocalyse, mopocalypse or mobocalypse.

One of the best ways to prepare is to test that Google considers your web pages to be mobile-friendly by using its Mobile-Friendly Test tool. More about the algorithm, including ways to bring improve the mobile-friendliness of your pages, is below.


Google: Panda Update 

Google’s Panda Update is a search filter introduced in February 2011 meant to stop sites with poor quality content from working their way into Google’s top search results. Panda is updated from time-to-time. When this happens, sites previously hit may escape, if they’ve made the right changes. Panda may also catch sites that escaped before. A refresh also means “false positives” might get released.


Google: Penguin Update

Google launched the Penguin Update in April 2012 to better catch sites deemed to be spamming its search results, in particular those doing so by buying links or obtaining them through link networks designed primarily to boost Google rankings. When a new Penguin Update is released, sites that have taken action to remove bad links (such as through the Google disavow links tool or to remove spam may regain rankings. New sites not previously caught might get trapped by Penguin. “False positives,” sites that were caught by mistake, may escape.


Google: Pigeon Update

Launched on July 24, 2014 for U.S. English results, the “Pigeon Update” is a new algorithm to provide more useful, relevant and accurate local search results that are tied more closely to traditional web search ranking signals. Google stated that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.


Google: Payday Update

Launched on June 11, 2013 – the “Payday Update” was a new algorithm targeted at cleaning up search results for traditionally “spammy queries” such as [payday loan], pornographic and other heavily spammed queries.


Google: Pirate Update

Google’s Pirate Update is a filter introduced in August 2012 designed to prevent sites with many copyright infringement reports, as filed through Google’s DMCA system, from ranking well in Google’s listings. The filter is periodically updated. When this happens, sites previously impacted may escape, if they’ve made the right improvements. The filter may also catch new sites that escaped being caught before, plus it may release “false positives” that were caught.


Google: EMD Update

The EMD Update — for “Exact Match Domain” — is a filter Google launched in September 2012 to prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names. When a fresh EMD Update happens, sites that have improved their content may regain good rankings. New sites with poor content — or those previously missed by EMD — may get caught. In addition, “false positives” may get released. Our latest news about the EMD Update is below.


Google: Top Heavy Update

Top Heavy was launched in January 2012 by Google as a means to prevent sites that were “top heavy” with ads from ranking well in its listings. Top Heavy is periodically updated. When a fresh Top Heavy Update happens, sites that have removed excessive ads may regain lost rankings. New sites deemed too “top heavy” may get caught