There’s been a lot of tech innovations over the past ten years, but voice search is still right up there as one of the most satisfying things you can do with a smartphone or speaker. Who amongst us hasn’t asked Siri for a ‘yo mamma’ joke?
Voice search is huge. More than 20% of all internet searches are voice-based, and over 40% of adults use voice search at least once a day. It’s popular with all age groups too, with boomers almost as likely as Gen Z’ers to ask Siri or Alexa.
What you might not know is how important Yelp is when it comes to voice search.
What is Yelp?
You’d be forgiven for thinking of Yelp as just another online business directory. But it’s a bit more than that.
Set up in 2004 by two Paypal employees, Yelp is one of the most popular business directories in the world. Millions of people use it every day to find restaurants, concert listings, podiatrists, hairdressers, and any other conceivable thing you might want or need.
And most importantly, it’s also the business directory that provides the search results for Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft Cortana.
So if you’re asking Alexa for a restaurant near you, Alexa’s checking Yelp, and giving you results from there.
Optimising your Yelp profile is one of the most important things you can do for your local SEO results, right up there with your Google Business Profile and your Apple Maps page. It’s completely free to set up (although Yelp offer enhanced packages, including Yelp Ads) and it’s one of the first things that Trio (or any other leading digital marketing agency) will look at when we’re setting up an SEO package for a client.
How to optimise for voice search
Here’s some quick pointers – you can read our previous blog here for a bit more detail.
Create content with a conversational tone, and use conversational long-tail keywords.
If you can write in a natural, conversational tone, not only will your content be easier to read, it’s more likely to provide close keyword matches to voice search.
Provide context.
Search engines have to do a lot of heavy lifting to figure out what we want, sometimes. A voice search for ‘good defence tactics’ will produce different results if the previous search was a football coaching website, rather than an emergency criminal law page. Provide the wider context in your content, and contextualise your images too, and Google will thank you.
Use schema markup.
Schema is a piece of additional HTML code that you can add to your website to help search engine crawl bots understand the purpose of your content.
Create FAQs.
FAQs are a great way to answer common questions that get asked using voice search. Write the question in a conversational tone, then provide a detailed, easy to understand answer.
And finally, just for kicks…
What’s the point in talking about voice search if you can’t have a little fun?
Funny things to ask Alexa
- Alexa, are we in the Matrix?
- Alexa, where is Chuck Norris?
- Alexa, what happens if you step on a Lego?
- Alexa, can you rap?
- Alexa, do you love me?
Funny things to ask Siri
- Siri, who’s the best virtual assistant?
- Siri, have you ever been in a relationship?
- Siri, what do you dream about?
- Siri, can you help me clean my room?
- Siri, can you make me laugh?
Funny things to ask Google
- Ok Google, is Santa Claus real?
- Hey Google, what am I thinking?
- OK Google, do you party?
- OK Google, what’s the best pick up line?
- OK Google, are you married?
Trio Media are an award-winning Leeds digital marketing agency, and we’re ready to get you the results you need. Call us today to find out more.
