130 – Keywords Revisited: Tom talks Voice Search

Episode 130 Voice Search
The world is changing and now is the time for you to start paying attention to the way people are searching for things online. If you want to be found, pay attention to this Monday training. For those of you new listeners, every Monday I do a session on something that has either saved me or made me lots of money and on Wednesday’s and Friday’s I interview other great entrepreneurs. On this episode, I can’t say I’ve made lots of money because of voice search. I am saying you and I both need to pay attention to this now if we want to make lots of money in the future.
Episode 129 Cindy Bishop, she’s the one who makes sure your real estate agent knows what they’re doing. And, I’ll tell you what she is high integrity in a business that’s not known for high integrity.
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Main Event
Voice Search. OK. This episode is to open your eyes to something that’s going on all around you and most likely you are participating in in some fashion. And that’s voice search. Anyone that’s been around me for a while knows that I’ve stated on probably 1000 or more occasions both publicly and on my numerous one-on-one mentoring sessions that the number one mistake people make with their online business is poor or zero keyword research and keyword usage. Heck, the first episode of this podcast is devoted to the topic of keyword research. I highly suggest you go back and listen to that.
The past couple years have seen what I think is the biggest change in keyword research and usage since the Internet started. In the entire past of the internet searches were done on a keyboard with short choppy words or phrases. The only exception being the short lived “Ask Jeeves” search engine of a long time ago. Voice search where people are saying keywords and keyword phrases is taking off exponentially and this episode is designed to get you in the mindset that if you start paying attention to this now, you can be way ahead of your competitors and grab some market share that you may have missed without emphasis on voice search. And I’m talking some serious revenue. The revenue generated by voice search is expected to increase by a factor of 20 in the next 2 years so getting your act together now can put you way ahead of the game.
And check this out. Forbes Magazine reported on a study by ComScore that by 2020 30% of all website sessions will be conducted without a screen at all and half of all web searches will be done by voice. Crazy huh?
So, what is Voice Search? Well, very simply that’s where you talk into a device and it returns the results orally. The device could be in your hand, on your wrist, the dashboard of your car, or a device sitting on your counter at home. The big players are Apple Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and to a lesser extent Microsoft Cortana.
It should be pretty obvious why voice search is going so crazy. People can type about 30-40 words per minute and that’s on a regular keyboard. Small keyboards make most people go way slower and with fat fingers like mine, it can be brutal trying to type something on a cell phone. Plus, it’s more of the old hunt and peck method instead of old school banging away on a keyboard like our fingers have been conditioned to for many years so it’s lucky if I can bang out ten words a minute.
On the other mouth….I was going to say on the other hand . . . hahahaha, most people can speak about 150 words a minute and I know plenty of motor mouths that speak 200 words a minute with gusts up to 300 LOL. So, with your voice it’s easier to make way more specific search requests with way less effort. Hey, it’s safer too. Lots of voice searches currently have to do with getting directions while driving.
When I say the searches are more specific you can just think to your typical Google search when you’re typing on a keyboard on a desktop or laptop. The typed searches are usually short and snappy. Spoken searches may be entire sentences and certainly lean toward what is called the long tail with many words in the search query.
For instance. If someone was interested in buying a family protection dog ….which by the way we sell at https://www.ProtectionDogsElite.com ….. hahaha I snuck that in subliminally ….. they might simply type into Google “Protection Dogs”, or “Guard Dogs” or “Protection Canines” or maybe at most “Family Protection Dogs” but with voice search people tend to give more detail in hopes of getting more specific results. They might say, “How do I buy a family protection dog? or “Tell me about family protection dogs.” or “Can a dog really protect my family? or “Is a bite trained canine safe around children? or something like that. It’s a long sentence.
This brings up a good point about preparing your sites to be found when people are searching for things. It’s not a bad idea to make answers on your site to the kinds of questions people would ask about your products and services when they are using voice search. This gives you a greater chance of being found. Basically, you are optimizing your site for more conversational keyword phrases.
One thing you can do is to put these answers and other things like heading tags, bullets and a thing called a snippet near the top of your pages and you can put the keyword phrase you are optimizing for their too. This makes it easy for the search engines to pick you, because you made it easy for the searcher to find what they were looking for and the search engines love this and reward you with a higher ranking.
Now here’s a sidebar. You might say, “Tom I just heard you in a recent episode, in fact, it was just last week, talk about how you’ve abandoned search engine optimization in favor of paid traffic. What’s up with that?” Well, a closer listen to that episode which was Episode 127 if anyone is keeping score hahaha I said, even though I went to paid traffic years ago, I did not abandon basic search engine optimization techniques. I still place keywords properly and I don’t do stupid things that would get me banned. Also, keywords are still critical for paid traffic, YouTube videos, articles, blog postings and such. This episode is just highlighting the differences in keywords and phrases because of voice search. And back to paid traffic, the answers to many of the voice searches that apply to me can be put in my ads to get more people to click through. So, keywords are just as important as ever, they’re just different.
Reviews
Now let me take you in a different direction. If your business is the type of business that typically gets reviews. Right now, they seem to matter quite a bit with regard to voice search. Hero Digital did a voice search about looking for Thai Restaurants and all the results from Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant brought up the 4- and 5-star restaurants first. What’s really crazy is that they also used the search “I’m Hungry” and most of the services returned restaurant results except for one who brought ups a song on YouTube called “I’m Hungry” Siri even came up with some joke answers when the search query was “What should I eat”? This is really crazy how sophisticated and smart these services are and they’re getting smarter all the time. However, none of these are perfect. Siri’s response to “How do I change a tire” gave an article about how many calories you burn while changing a tire. I’m including in the show notes the very extensive article about voice search Hero Digital did with many examples in many industries.
https://herodigital.com/optimize-content-for-voice-search/
Hero Digital’s Conclusions and I’m quoting from their article
• Generally, Siri will be more difficult to optimize for as there is no strong connection between its results and what appears in SERPs. For localized searches, Siri will give you listings that are closest to your specified location or your device. For informational queries that don’t produce a direct answer, Siri will give you top Google results excluding the answer box. Interestingly, Siri pulls web results from Google, but image results from Bing.
• Alexa’s results revolve around the locations, pages or products with the top rating. Reputation management is key for optimizing for Alexa’s voice search.
• Google Assistant offers the most similar results to Google’s SERPs, especially with local searches. Structured markup and coded formatting are pertinent to winning the voice search result.

OK Here’s some tips for you to do to start preparing for the coming tsunami of voice searches.
Just like I’ve been preaching for a couple years for your regular web pages, Google voice is going to give a boost to websites that load quickly. Your site must be optimized for mobile; your images need to be optimized for fast loading plus you need to put your long tail keyword phrases in the alt tag and title of your graphics. Make sure all your big files are compressed and that you use website caching to improve page speed. Make sure you don’t have any bloated plugins that are keeping your site from loading fast. And I know you may not understand some of these things and what to do about them, but any geek that’s worth anything will know or can figure it out easily.
A really important thing is called a “featured snippet”. Ask your geek or IT person about these. One quick tip like a mentioned above is to put stuff at the top of your page which is like a concise summary and current consensus is to keep it under 29 words, but that could change.
And speaking about the number of words, even though your pages must load quickly, both desktop and mobile searches still favor deep content with current estimates being that pages with from 1850-2500 words in general rank the highest. And there’s another thing you should think about and that’s Mobile First Indexing”. Google came out and said that they are going to rank your site based on the mobile version of it, rather than the desktop version, so you better put a heavy emphasis on the quality of the mobile version of your site. .
So, to wrap up this quick episode and even though it’s quick, it doesn’t mean it’s not super important. You heard me say earlier the money generated from voice search is going up by a factor of 20 in the next two years, right? You need to pay attention to this right now. You need to jot down all the questions your customers and prospects ask you and use them strategically in all your online marketing and some of this you’ll just have to pursue on a leap of faith because the keyword tools to help you really haven’t caught up to give you figures to work with so you know where to spend your valuable time.
Many of the phrases that could make you a fortune are too long or too low of a volume to register in the current keyword search tools we have available. So, you’ll be flying blind for a while until these tools start to catch up, but by paying attention to the questions your prospects and customers ask you, you won’t really be flying totally blind and doing it now will help you blow past your competitors who weren’t smart enough to subscribe to this podcast. LOL. You are subscribed right? If not, get your butt over to https://www.ScrewTheCommute.com/ and we have tons of places where you can subscribe.
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