Attire Accessories - Feb/Mar 2019 (Issue 74)

114 voice search are much more semantic and will contain a broader range of phrases, following natural language patterns. For this reason, when optimising pages within websites for voice search, terms such as the following need to be included if appropriate for the page content: how, what, when, where, can, why, easy, make, top, define. There are a host of other terms to include in page copy. Just think of what you would ask for when speaking to Alexa, Cortana or Google, and you should start to build a comprehensive list of things to include in page titles and page copy. TOP FACTORS FOR VOICE SEARCH SUCCESS 1 Optimised for mobile? If your site isn’t built with a responsive layout or, at the very least, has a mobile friendly version, then you are most certainly going to be losing out on voice search. Google announced that it moved over to a mobile-first indexing cache for all search results in March 2018, which means that if you don’t have a mobile friendly version of your website, people will go to a competitor’s website that does! 2 Use natural language and normal English sentence structure. This not only means people will be able to read your content and understand it, but it also means search engines will be able to utilise the text on your pages to return voice-activated queries. 3 Make sure your page copy and page titles answer a searcher’s question – this is key to getting placed among the top results in search queries. Category and product pages on an e-commerce website may not be aligned with this sort of content, so create static pages or blog posts that do show it. 4 Go secure. Google is now heavily pushing the https protocol, and pages that don’t support https are less likely to be returned in search results on voice-activated devices. 5 Use schema.org tagging. Google and others such as Facebook use this to easily index your content and pages. Tagging important parts of your pages with Schema tags means fast access for search engines to your content and, therefore, a better chance of your content being returned in real-time search. There are many other factors to consider, but the best advice is to think logically about what you would search for when using a voice command and how this might affect the content you display on your website. David Fairhurst is head of creative online marketing at Intelligent Retail. David has been involved with SEO and web development since 1999 and has spoken at many different retail and SEO conferences, including Spring Fair and SES London. Call David on +44 (0)845 680 0126 or visit intelligentretail.co.uk