Google is making a big push for voice search. Last month, the search engine giant sent notifications to publishers with directions on how to make their content easier for Google Assistant to discover.
Google started with US-based publishers of podcasts, recipes, and news. These content creators received information on “Actions” Google has developed, so that users can ask the Assistant to provide this type of content. To make these companies more discoverable, Google has also auto-generated directory pages with information about the publishers, who have the option to keep the page as it is or make changes to it as they deem necessary. Publishers can even prevent Google Assistant from finding their content. Although with voice search currently making up around 20 percent of mobile queries and that number expected to grow, it doesn’t make sense for a publisher to do this.
However, if you do not fall into that category, Google has some advice on how you can make your content more appealing to Google Assistant. The first piece of advice is to use structured data. Make sure that your content is organized in a way that computers understand it. This goes hand in hand with the second suggestion, which is consider voice snippets. Basically, does your content still make sense when read aloud? If it doesn’t, rewrite it.
Google also suggests content creators make their content easy for users to read. While you’re probably doing that already, Google specifically means creating content in a Q&A format. This makes it easier for Google Assistant to figure out what question your content is answering. Keep in mind that you don’t want to go too far in the other direction. If all your content is optimized for voice search, it becomes useless because it will feature the same pieces of information every other site on the same topic has.
As with most Google advice, you should proceed with caution because nothing remains the same for very long.