Voice Search Week: Building a Voice Search Content Strategy // Courtney Cox Wakefield

Quotes

• How Marketers Can Leverage Voice Search To Have a Positive Impact On Their Business (03:15) There isn’t really a clear roadmap for how marketers should leverage voice search. Also, I think that most marketers start at the end of that roadmap instead of the beginning. Almost everybody wants to start with skills, but the reality is that most of the searches that are done via voice are local searches. You absolutely must start with local first and you must create a strong local strategy. Make sure you have a relevant listing and that you have a full control of it. The most important listings are Google and Yelp. Check out the four data aggregators and look up for your business information. Make sure that it is relevant and accurate. Tools such as Yext can make sure that the information is pushed constantly and up to date. Alexa is using Yext as their main source of local data now.The Other Ways That People Are Using The Voice Search Devices And Formats Of Content That Need To Be Voice Enabled (05:12) If marketers really want to leverage content, they need to have an organic voice strategy before they build an app. The way to do that is to just optimize for the featured snippet or the instant answer. You've got to optimize for that and have a really good strategy for being there for different questions or you're going to lose out.The Resources For Ranking On Position Zero (06:46) A podcast called The Voices of Search is a great resource for learning about position zero. Moz also has some really great resources. In my opinion, there are four important pillars to leveraging position zero. The first is doing your audience research. If you don't understand the questions that your audience is asking, you're probably going to write your content in a way that is operationally driven and that's not going to be useful for voice. Find out the biggest pain points, the biggest questions that customers have. After that start preparing content that concisely answers that question.The other pillars are competitor research and measurement. But the first two pillars - audience research and content optimization - they are the most important. Measuring The Impact of Voice Search (08:45) Right now, we don’t have a lot of great tools available for the measurement of voice search. Google Analytics doesn’t split it out. They track traffic but not impressions in the same way that we would need it to for our voice search efforts.    Start with checking out your appearance in the search results and whether you rank for position zero. That's what's going to be read off for most searches. The more appearances that you have for those searches in the answer box, the better. Tools such as Searchmetrics and SEMrush allow you to search for featured snippet appearance. Search impressions are going to be a good metric, but I am still waiting to see who's going to come up with a perfect tool for measuring this stuff.