Tapping into the World of Voice Search: Optimizing for Voice Assistants

 

The rapid advancement of technology has fundamentally transformed the way we interact with our devices. One of the most groundbreaking innovations in recent years is the proliferation of voice assistants. From Siri to Alexa and Google Assistant, voice search has become an integral part of our daily lives, revolutionizing how we access information and interact with technology. As a digital marketing consultant, it's crucial to recognize the potential of voice search and its impact on the marketing landscape. 

The rise of voice search can be attributed to several factors, including the increased convenience and speed it offers compared to traditional text-based searches. Voice assistants have become smarter and more accurate in understanding natural language, making it easier for users to perform hands-free searches while on the go. Voice search is also gaining popularity due to the growing adoption of smart speakers and voice-activated devices in homes and workplaces.

According to comScore, by 2020, half of all searches are projected to be voice-based. This shift in consumer behavior presents an enormous opportunity for businesses to leverage voice search as a powerful marketing channel.

Let's explore the world of voice search and uncover effective strategies for optimizing your digital marketing efforts to thrive in this new era.

Understand User Intent:

When optimizing for voice search, understanding user intent is paramount. Voice searches tend to be more conversational and long-tail in nature. People are more likely to ask questions using natural language, such as "What's the best Italian restaurant near me?" or "How do I fix a leaky faucet?" To effectively optimize for voice search, businesses must identify and target the specific questions and queries that their target audience is likely to ask.

Focus on Featured Snippets:

Featured snippets, also known as "position zero" results, are concise answers to user queries that appear at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). These snippets are often the answers that voice assistants read aloud when responding to voice queries. To increase the chances of your content being featured, structure your content to provide clear and concise answers to commonly asked questions within your industry.

Local SEO Matters:

Voice searches are often location-based, with users seeking information about nearby businesses and services. Optimizing your website for local SEO is critical for attracting voice search traffic. Ensure your Google My Business profile is complete and up-to-date with accurate location, contact details, and business hours.

Mobile-Friendly and Fast-loading:

Voice searches are predominantly conducted on mobile devices. Therefore, it is crucial to have a mobile-friendly website that offers a seamless user experience across all devices. Additionally, ensure your website loads quickly, as voice search users expect fast results.

Long-Tail Keywords:

Incorporate long-tail keywords into your content that align with conversational queries. People tend to use more words in their voice searches, and optimizing for long-tail keywords can significantly improve your chances of appearing in relevant voice search results.

Voice search is reshaping the digital marketing landscape and presenting businesses with exciting new opportunities to connect with their audiences. It's essential to embrace this emerging technology and optimize marketing strategies to cater to voice assistant users effectively. Understanding user intent, leveraging featured snippets, local SEO, and mobile-friendliness are just some of the key tactics to thrive in the world of voice search. By staying ahead of the curve and adapting to changing consumer behaviour, businesses can position themselves at the forefront of voice search marketing and reap the rewards of this transformative technology.

Visitor Management for a PPC Campaign

I tried putting down the various steps and action items when we run the Adwords or a PPC campaign. What one needs to do at every stage and rectify the campaigns in case the desired results are not acheived. (Click the image to enlarge it).

I have also posted one more post related to visitor mangement for an eCommerce Website which can be viewed here - Customer Management Check List

Google Adwords Vs Facebook Ads Vs LinkedIn Ads

I have been a big fan of Google Adwords and have been using it for a long time not only for my own business but, for my clients as well. And, it really worked well. It all depends on what type of products and/or services you are trying to promote on these platforms. The audience on these three platforms is slightly different and come on to Facebook or Google or LinkedIn with a different purpose. So, for one business Adwords works better and for some Facebook or for companies who are trying to find talent LinkedIn works as LinkedIn is a platform for professionals.

I have used all the three platforms and thought why not pen down my experiences.

Google Adwords

It is very easy and quick to set-up a campaign. Unlike Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads, it requires skill and experience to get the correct set of keywords and phrases that match your ads and business. You need to monitor the cost-per-click of each phrase and set it up as broad match or phrase match or exact match. In case you have experience in using the keywords tool then you can start. But, it takes time to optimize the campaign to get the desired ROI and to get better results.  

Keywords competition is high and you need to focus on the Quality Score to reduce the cost to attract the clicks. Optimizing the ads is the key here. This can be learnt only through experience.  

Another advantage of Adwords is people who click your ad are the people who are searching for your product or service. They searched for a certain term and were looking for it and they have landed on you webpage. Where as in Facebook and LinkedIn, the intention of the person was something else and they click the ad to come to your webpage. Thus, the conversion time to convert the visitor to a customer is longer on these platforms as compared to Adwords. 

You can target the ads as per the geographical area and set the time and schedule the display of ads. You also have the display ads where in the ads can be displayed across the Google network of ads. Thus, you reach a wider audience. 

The biggest advantage of Adwords is the analytics which Google provides. Google gives lot of data to analyze and fine-tune the campaigns and rectify the mistakes.

Facebook Ads 

It is very easy to setup and maintain. You can target the ads to specific demographic profile as Facebook has all the data with them - age, gender, profession, city, country, marital status...etc. So, you can really target your ads to the niche audience and not just geo specific. This helps in getting quality impressions and clicks.  

As stated above, the intent of the person to come on Facebook is different as compared to Google - thus, the CTR is low for the ads but, you get decent impressions. The clicks will increase the fan base thus, ready for direct future promotions on your Facebook page which is at no cost. The time to convert these visitors and/or likes into customers is longer and you need to build a strategy to keep them engaged and thus, converting them to customers. Facebook is a place of fun and leisure unlike Google and LinkedIn. Thus, the ads need to be designed in such a way that you are not just pushing the product or service for them to buy, but trying to engage them and increasing the fan base. Thus, it is difficult to measure the ROI here. The sales cycle is long and effort is required to engage and interact with the prospect.

Facebook ads can be used for more of brand recognition. A click is not necessary for this. As Facebook ads provide more impressions, people see the ad and can register the brand name. 

LinkedIn 

LinkedIn ads is frequented by professionals and in case you are looking at attracting right talent then this is the right place. Also, B2B ads are effective as compared to B2C.  

To setup and start the campaign will take some time, as the ads needs to be approved first by the LinkedIn staff. Here as well you can target the ads to the niche audience based on the demographic profile. LinkedIn charges as per impressions and clicks as well. Impression mode will burn out the budget faster we will hardly know if the ad was seen by the person or not. Thus, these are not that effective and economical. The CPC model will not be that effective as stated earlier it all depends on what you are trying to promote. You need to remember the intent of the visitor to LinkedIn and the type of audience that come here. 

Reporting tool is also not there. We can download a csv file and we need to do the sorting and filtering ourselves. 

To conclude, Adwords is better, if you know how it works and how to steer the campaign. In case you do not have that experience it will cost you. The conversion cycle is quick and you get warm leads. While Facebook, attracts more likes and fan base for you to keep them engage and interact. LinkedIn Ads can be more suitable to reach for senior executives. Lastly, it all depends on what product or service you are trying to promote.

New Windows Live using Google Adwords

This has really surprised me. MSN using Google Adwords to promote New Windows Live. That's business.... The above ad appeared on my blog.

Some Great Books on Google Adwords and Analytics - All 5 / 5 Start Ratings from me.

Ultimate Guide to Google Ad Words, 2nd Edition: How To Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes

Ultimate Guide to Pay Per Click Advertising: Advanced Strategies to Help You Beat 97% of the Competition 

Advanced Google AdWords

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Google PageRank Updated - April 2010

Google have taken the time over the Easter holidays and the weekend to update the PageRank system. The last time it was updated was during the Christmas holiday period of 2009. I see few of the new websites (lanced in Februay 20101) getting a PR of 1 which seems to be good for webmasters. I am yet to hear if it has caused any harm to any of the websites.

I do not think the PageRank is the only way Google judges the value of a website. A site without PageRank can still rank well in the Google search results. A website with a PageRank 2 or 3 can outrank a PageRank 6. I think PageRank is one of the metrics Google uses to rank the websites. But, still it is important to most of the webmasters. What are your thoughts?

The Future Could See Searches for 3D Content

It is talked that the “most used” button in search engines is the “back” button. That means, the searcher often cannot find what he/she is looking for in the top listings and are compelled to go back to find other links or to modify the search string. It is here that Bing is trying to look at this as its big opportunity as per Qi Lu, President – Online Services Division, Microsoft.

The search started with finding documents and then moved to images, videos, real-time information, events… The future could see searches for 3D images, 3D videos… And it seems Bing is trying to build the capability of capturing all the information and use it.

The bottom line is Google has such a better headstart over Bing that the former has more wealth of information and understands the user intent better that any other search engine.

The search giants’ alliances with the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter will get information about people and real-time events. This will be not just limited to celebrities. Bing thinks their alliance with Yahoo will bring together lot more information for the searcher. But, will it beat Google?

Source: Times Of India

10 Tools for Website & Page Load Speed Tests

Google is trying to help webmasters to build efficient websites which can load faster. Also, Google's new algorithm addition can also check at the time taken by the web page to load. So, it is always a best practice to test the loding of the website. There are lot many tools available and here are the best ones which I like -

1. Google's extension for Firefox - Page Speed
2. Google Webmaster Tools
3. Pingdom Tools
4. WebpageTest.org
5. Website Optimization Speed Test Tool
6. WGET
7. Uptrends Page Load Test Tool
8. Submit Plus
9. Link Vendor Speed Tester
10. Self SEO website speed checker - check and compare speed for different domains at a time

More details are available here.

Google Caffeine Now Live On One Google Data Center

Search Engine Roundtable in the blog post has mentioned that Matt Cutts confirmed that Caffeine is live 50% of the time on 209.85.225.103.

There were many threads across many blogs and forums about the major changes happening yesterday to Google search results. DigitalPoint Forums, Google Webmaster Help and WebmasterWorld discussed about this changes in the search results.

Matt Cutts was kind enough to update all stating that the change or update the webmasters are looking is only from one data center 209.85.225.103 which is hitting Caffeine update 50% of the time. So, Caffeine is live only at one data center and not all and that too you will get the results with Caffeine results only for half of the time. But, Matt did not disclose if we can get the results with the new update 100% of the time from a single IP.

Update from Matt Cutts: “So 209.85.225.103 does hit the Caffeine data center more often than other IP addresses, but it's always been the plan that Caffeine would roll out at one data center (no more data centers will get Caffeine until at least January”.

So, folks to see the search results with Caffeine update, I guess we need to wait till the vacations are over.

Happy Vacation!!

Google launches new social search function

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content (like blogs, tweets, status updates, reviews, relevant articles from your subscribed RSS through Google Reader and any relevant content linked from your friends’ Google profile) from people in your social circle. Your social circle means your Gmail contacts and contacts from social sites listed in your Google profile. For example, search for ‘adventure sports’, and Google Social Search will provide the reviews by your friends and other contacts in the search results.

You can join the Social Search Experiment here. Once you have joined, Google may bring up results from your friends and other contacts. These special results appear at the bottom of the search results page, in a section labeled "Results from people in your social circle".



Now, to improve the search result quality we need to have quality social circle who are engaged in submitting public web content by way of blog posts, tweets and reviews. If your social circle is weak, you may not get the right search results. So, increase your social circle with people who blog and tweet very often about the things you are interested in or want to search. Ha… does it sound simple?

But, read it on Search Engine Land that, Google Social Search went down for a while. Google has confirmed this is a temporary issue and that a fix will be in place in a day or two.

At Last Twitter is Making Money

Google and Microsoft are in talks with Twitter separately to strike a deal to include the tweets in the search results in real-time. Both the search engine rivals are engaged in separate talks with Twitter according to a report from Wall Street Journal’s website, AllThingsD. It also reports that numbers of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.

"This could be a way for Twitter to make some money, and maybe more than just a little money. It finally means a business model for Twitter, or at least the beginnings of one. And, of course, it means real revenue, which is very important. Not just in licensing revenue from Google or Microsoft, but also in potentially getting a piece of the action on an ongoing basis. So there could be considerable upside here for Twitter," said Dan Olds, an Analyst with The Gabriel Consulting.
This is good for the search giants and Twitter. For us we get the search results as a mix of web results and personal messaging. But…

• will this not spam Twitter with all the tweets of the folks who want their website on the top of the search results?
• how well these tweets can will be segregated as natural or real tweet to a spam one?
• what will be the criteria or filter used to get the tweet included in the search results?
• how can retweets be managed in the search results? Will they also appear?

The bottom line is if the deal (or deals) is (or are) through then Twitter will have a business plan.

Related post: What Can Be The Search Algorithm for Twitter Search?

Inside Adwords: Stay Connected With Google Industry Team on Twitter

Apart from Google on Twitter, the Google’s Industry teams too are on Twitter. Now, follow the industry you are interested in to get regular updates (through the Tweets) related to the industry – latest trends, additional info, special insights, news updates…

To follow, please click the industry of your interest: Auto, Media and Entertainment, Financial Services, Retail, Tech, and Travel

And on top of that Google has about 56 accounts in Twitter. It is good to see the way Google is leveraging Twitter to reach out to its customers. Does this indicate something? I am just trying to read between the lines to know if Google is taking Twitter more seriously.

Related post: Google Signs Up on Twitter

Google's Project 10 to The 100th

Google’s Project 10^100 (pronounced as Project 10 to the 100th) is a call of ideas to change the world by helping as many as people as possible. About 150,000 ideas were submitted by people and Google selected 16 top ideas under different categories. Now, we folks need to vote for them before October 8, 2009. And Google is commenting $10 million to implement these projects and their goal is to help as many people as possible. Which ones should Google make real? Cast your vote, and help Google change the world.

"We received over 150,000 ideas from users which far surpassed our expectations," said Jamie Wood, a Google spokesman. "We've never managed a project like this and it's taken much more time than we imagined to judge and sort through the ideas." Wood promised that "within a month" Google would announce the next phase of the competition. That will likely involve the release of 100 proposals for the public to vote on and choose 20 finalists, from which a Google board will choose the five lucky winners.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Criteria that is considered:

• Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
• Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
• Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
• Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
• Longevity: How long will the idea's impact last?

And, I am sure you would like to know the TOP 16 ideas and here they are -

1. Community: Create real-time natural crisis tracking system
2. Community: Make government more transparent
3. Opportunity: Help social entrepreneurs drive change
4. Education: Provide quality education to African students
5. Shelter: Create more efficient landmine removal programs
6. Energy: Drive innovation in public transport
7. Everything Else: Build real-time, user-reported news service
8. Education: Make educational content available online for free
9. Education: Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists
10. Opportunity: Build better banking tools for everyone
11. Environment: Work toward socially conscious tax policies
12. Community: Collect and organize the world's urban data
13. Community: Create genocide monitoring and alert system
14. Education: Enhance science and engineering education
15. Health: Promote health monitoring and data analysis
16. Community: Create real-world issue reporting system

Why this project?

Never in history have so many people had so much information, so many tools at their disposal, so many ways of making good ideas come to life. Yet at the same time, so many people, of all walks of life, could use so much help, in both little ways and big.

In the midst of this, new studies are reinforcing the simple wisdom that beyond a certain very basic level of material wealth, the only thing that increases individual happiness over time is helping other people.

Thanks Google.

Also friends, please take out sometime to vote on the projects. Voting ends on October 8, 2009.

How to Sign Out of Your Gmail Account Remotely

If you do not remember if you have sign out of your Gmail account from a public terminal or you have a doubt that somebody is also accessing your account else where then, here is a very simple way to sign out of all your Gmail sessions by checking the IP addresses which are unknown to you. This video from cnet demonstrates how.

New Update in Google Webmaster Tools: Submit URL Parameters to Ignore

I think this is definitely a good initiative by Google, allowing the webmasters to let the Googlebot know which URL parameters to ignore while crawling or indexing the site web pages.

1. Log in to your Google Webmaster tools account
2. Click on the ‘Site Configuration’ link on the left and then on ‘Settings’
3. At the bottom you will find ‘Parameter Handling’ to adjust the parameter settings.

Dynamic parameters (for example, session IDs, source, or language) in your URLs can result in many different URLs all pointing to essentially the same content. For example: http://www.example.com/product?pid=123 might point to the same content as http://www.example.com/product. You can specify whether you want Google to ignore up to 15 specific parameters in your URL.

Also, Google lists the parameters they have identified in the URLs of your site and suggests if the parameters are vague for them. You can confirm your choice to ignore or not to ignore. You can also add parameters that Googlebot was unable to identify and list them.

The reasons why I find this useful are:

1. This will really help Google in identifying the duplicate content pages and help them in proper indexing with fewer duplicate URLs.
2. This can result in more efficient crawling of Googlebot.
3. Googlebot can crawl more pages and index them, as the crawler efficiency is increased.
4. This can reduce the PageRank dilution as external website may be linking to various versions of your URLs and this will help Google understand that all these pages are same. Thus, providing the proper PageRank credit to the page.
5. Simple way to indicate the parameters to ignore or consider, instead of using the canonical option.

Yahoo Site Explorer has a similar feature and Bing is yet to include this. If you want to opt this method then you will be ignoring Bing and other search engines which do have the parameter suggestion option.

Related posts: Duplicate Content Issues and Probable Solutions

Google Reader Goodies

Here are the three Google Reader Goodies (or gadgets) I like to use. They are very easy and simple and save a lot of your time while reading the different posts or subscriptions. RSS Readers was itself a great tool to save time. Now, you have these gadgets to make it very simple and thus saving more time.

1. Reading Comments From Everywhere: gCreations (not from Google) is a very cool and free Firefox extension that allows you to read comments from all over the web to your posts, directly in Google Reader. For each post in your feed, it gets comments from Blogger, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and more.

1. Send To Feature: Now send and share the posts directly from your Reader to Facebook, Twitter, Blog…more using the Send To feature in Google Reader. Just click on the Settings tab on the top-right corner and enable the services you want to use.



2. Google Reader on Google Desktop: Using this gadget, you can track your feeds and subscriptions directly from the desktop. The Google Reader gadget is designed to be familiar for existing Reader users, yet compact like our other Desktop gadgets. You need install Google Desktop gadget first and then you can download this gadget.

Do let me know if you know more Google Reader gadgets which can be added here. Please put them as comments below.

Caffeine Update: Google Asks Webmasters to Test the Next-Gen Search Infrastructure

Today in Google Webmaster Central blog, Google confirmed that for the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: next-generation architecture for Google's web search.

This process will help Google search with indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so to get the feedback from web developers they are collecting the feedback.

The web developer preview of Google’s new infrastructure is available at - http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ . To provide feedback on the current search results and new one can be provided through the link at the bottom of the search results page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us to improve.”

I am yet to identify significant changes in the rankings but, few other experts did notice the changes as

1. This change has effected to rankings related to keywords used in social media
2. This will affect the long-tail keywords
3. Keyword suggestion is popping bit faster
4. Not indexing as many web pages as the normal one
5. Providing the search results faster – may be the load is too less on Caffeine
6. May impact SEO rankings and/or traffic
7. May impact PPC search strategy
8. Link structures will not be the only one to decide the ranking
9. Indexing of social media, news sites and micro-blogging sites as immediate as possible
10. Improving of accuracy of results

Do comment on this if you have noticed something important about this.

Choreographing the Google News Experience for 2034

Krishna Bharath, the principal scientist at Google Inc., talks about the future trends of how people would like to get news during an interview with TOI.

His envisage about the news after 25 years is, the news delivered will be more personalized which will match the individual’s lifestyle and interests. He also adds that the consumption of such news will be across various devices – laptop, palmtops, mobile phones and more… So, the news will be tailored made for each individual and you will get to read what you really want.

Secondly, news presentation will be more complicated and inter-linked. Readers will like to go deep into the article and would like to know more and gather as much knowledge as required. Moreover, the reader would like to comment and provide opinion on the same. He sees this as a challenge to deliver this functionality.

The third trend he says is public access. In future, the reader will have direct access to government documents, facts and figures and perhaps interact with people at the heart of the news.

News will not be just text. Multimedia and video will dominate here too. Multi-lingual channels can also be anticipated.

Customization is what Google will be looking at now. News has to be customized as per the person’s choices. What is on page 4 for one person will be page 1 for another. When you want to keep the interest of the reader on to the subject, customization and automation of news selection comes into play.

So, the questions which are to be answered are:

• How to give the reader what he/she wants?
• How to give the reader something else in future which he/she will be interested in?
• How to provide good content which drills deep into the area and makes it a rich experience with related information and links?
• How to provide interactivity and sharing of such subject with like-minded people?

Do you think for the media, this is a challenge to choreograph the news experience for the reader?

Source: TOI

Google Holiday Logos

I saw the Google logo depicted for the solar eclipse and want to say that it was an amazing logo. The logo was really depicting the real sense of eclipse and keeping the corporate brand identity of Google.

So, this inspired me to know more about the person behind these designs. And I got this on googling it. He is a 23 year old Korean kid, Dennis Hwang. He started it as a contractor and is now designing all holiday logos for Google. The best part of the interview is his answer the question for his challenging letter of manipulation. He says he relys on the doodles he used to make when he was kid and uses them and he finds it easy to manipulate the ‘o’ and the ‘l’. He finds the first ‘G’ to be the most difficult to deal with.

Few of the holiday logos I like

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss - Valentine’s Day - Veteran’s Day -
But... I like all of them.

Read Dennis’s complete interview and additioanl details here.

And look at the comprehensive list of Google holiday logos here.

Control the Site Links Now Through Google Webmaster

Google announced today in its Webmaster Central blog about a new update named “Summer Sunshine”. The main highlight was you can edit the site links using your webmaster account.

1. You can block the other links from the site links apart from the home page. Site links are generated automatically by Google, but now you can suggest which links you do not want to list in site links.
   
2. The Google site selector now lists all verified sites and allows you to search as you type.

3. It also provides a clear distinction between verified and non-verified sites.

These improvements are really cool. Mostly the #1 and it really helps a webmaster to restrict any links which should not be there.