Why authors need a voice search strategy

By Miral Sattar

Have you ever asked Siri on your iPhone to tell you the time or set an alarm? Do you own a smart speaker, one of those voice-controlled search devices that include Amazon’s Echo and Google Home?

If not, you probably know someone who does.

What they all have in common is that they perform voice search through a voice assistant  on a smart speaker that you speak to.

Here’s what all of that means.

What is voice search? 

Voice search is speech technology that allows users to search by saying the terms rather than by typing them into a search engine.

Voice search is growing in popularity and by next year, 50 percent of all searches will be done through voice.

What is a voice assistant?

A voice assistant is a digital assistant that uses voice recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis to help users through phones and voice recognition applications.

Common voice assistants are Siri, Cortana, and Alexa. Built into smartphones and smart speakers (see below), they help with tasks that often include:

• Listening to audiobooks
• Requesting information (that’s where voice search comes in)
• Performing mathematical calculations (like my kids love doing)
• Playing music

What is a smart speaker?

A smart speaker is a device that processes voice search commands and responds to voice commands. Examples include most smartphone brands plus Echo, Echo Dot, and Google Home.

Why you need to optimize for voice search

Optimizing for voice search is critical to book marketing because a smart speaker and a voice assistant such as Siri are gateways to purchasing in the home.

What happens currently with your book if someone performs a voice search for it?

Nothing?

Does it return your website? Recommend your book?

Getting smart about how to use voice search to your advantage as an author reminds me of what happened with audiobooks. A few years ago, they weren’t the norm, but now, you can listen to almost any book you want in audio format.

You want to leverage the power of voice search in the same way that authors are taking advantage of audiobook popularity, too.

Just like with regular search engine optimization (SEO), there are things you need to do to get your book optimized for voice search SEO.

What you can do right now to prepare for voice search

In fact, there are a couple things you can do right now to make sure you’re prepared for the voice search revolution.

1. Update your meta description.

Having a meta description for your home page is especially important for voice search and voice assistants. The meta description is what voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google use to describe your website.

The meta description is hidden text on every page of your website that tells search engines what’s on the page. It’s a snippet of up to about 150 characters.

Search engines display the meta description in search results mostly when the searched-for phrase, such as the author’s name, is in the description. You can make sure yours is as good as possible using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO.

To see how this works, do a test. If you have an iPhone, ask Siri about your favorite author and see what comes up.

Example: “Siri, who is (favorite author name)?” 

If you have an Amazon Echo or Dot device, speak the following prompts.

“Alexa, who is (favorite author name)?” 

The search results that get displayed on your phone screen or read aloud are often the meta description on the author’s website.

2. Make sure your book is available in audiobook format:

Because smart speakers can play audiobooks, they give preference to books that are available in audiobook format when delivering search results.

That means that if there are two books with the same title and only one of them is available as an audiobook, that’s the one that will be at the top of search results.

To see how this works, if you have an Amazon Echo or Dot device say the following prompts:

“Alexa, read (book title).”

It will demonstrate why you want to make sure your audiobook is available on Amazon and Google Play. That way, the smart speakers can purchase, read, and recommend your audiobook to potential readers.

Authors and publishers stand to lose millions this year because they are not optimizing for voice search. Be prepared for the voice search revolution. It’s already here.

Learn how to leverage voice search for your book

Save 50 percent on my new course, “How to Leverage Voice Search to Sell Books,” with coupon code LAUNCH by May 30 at the Build Book Buzz affiliate link for the course. I will also give you another one of my training programs, the SEO Masterclass ($299 value), for free – but only if you purchase by May 30 at this link: “How to Leverage Voice Search to Sell Books.”

7 foolproof SEO tips for authors

By Miral Sattar

Let’s be honest. You understand the power of Google, but have no clue how it works, right?

This lack of understanding can be a problem for authors, though.

You rely on Google, the largest search engine in the world, to help readers discover your books, so you really should know at least the basics about how to get found.

What you do to your website and Amazon sales pages to make sure they’re discovered through Google searches is called search engine optimization – SEO. And there’s lots you can do to make sure that readers find you and your books when they’re searching online for your topic, name, or even parts of your book title.

Here are seven ways you can use the power of SEO to make it easier for readers to find and discover your books immediately.

1. Optimize your Amazon pages.

There’s no question that Amazon is one of the most well-indexed sites online. The search box there is a search engine, after all. Actually, if you search for your book or your name, it’s likely that your Amazon page will show up much higher than your website does.

Here are a few things you can do to optimize your Amazon pages:

• Make sure you have an Author Central account with your bio and picture. This will help you rank higher on Amazon searches.
• Connect your social media accounts to your Amazon Author Central page.
• Make sure your book has the relevant keywords you would use to find a book like yours.

2. Start blogging on your website and do it in a meaningful way.

It’s important to have a blog because it’s the key way that people learn about books.

It’s a good idea to blog to add value and not just to blog for the sake of blogging. David Gaughran and Joanna Penn are great examples of authors who blog effectively.

Blogging helps make sure that when people type your name into the Google search box, your website shows up on the first page of search results. They will then get to your site, where you  have all the information about you and your books that they need (and want).

3. Optimize your blog for Google.

You want to make sure that your blog is optimized for Google so that when it gets “crawled” or visited by all the major search engines, they will find the right content.

Plugins that include Yoast  will help you set up tags, title, keywords, and metadata.

Another way to optimize your blog is with sitemaps. This is a structured listing of all the pages on your blog or website. It tells Google and other search engines about your site’s structure.

A sitemap also lets Google know when a new post is published so it can index it and add it to search results.

4. Understand and use outbound and inbound linking.

Linking (links from one site to another) is another critical element of SEO.

You want other sites to link to your content, and you want to link to theirs, too. Let the sites you link to know you’ve linked to them so they can link back to you, too.

When someone links back to your blog posts, it’s basically a vote for your content as far as Google is concerned. Those links to your site are weighted by Google according to their reputations. For example, if TIME.com links or Buzzfeed.com links to your site, you get the equivalent of bonus points from Google.

5. Guest blog.

Guest blogging is a great way to establish yourself as an expert. It provides an opportunity to link back to your book or site in your bio that runs with your guest post (like the bio at the beginning of this article).

When author Hymn Herself wrote a blog post about 5 Things Movies Don’t Tell You About Mental Institutions for Cracked.com, the link to her book in the article bio helped her sell 1,000 copies in a few days.

She wrote about that experience for us on Bibliocrunch.

6. Write good headlines, keywords, and metadata.

Having a good title tag that tells what the blog is about will help make your content easy to search. When I worked at TIME, I was in charge of all the SEO and one of my responsibilities included training journalists in SEO.

Here are a few tips:

• Titles: Writers love using titles that don’t say anything about the content. For example, “Amazon Stops Selling Hoverboards Over Safety” is much better than ” You Don’t Want to Buy This Dangerous Gadget.”
• Keywords: Have five to seven keywords that describe your content. Examples would be: Amazon, hoverboards, hoverboard safety, Swagway, consumer safety
• Meta description: This is a short paragraph that describes your blog post content. This will show up in Google results. The meta description for that article about hoverbards might be, “Several models pulled by online retailer Amazon over fire hazard fears. Leading hoverboard maker Swagway confirmed the online retailer is requesting companies manufacturing the popular devices to prove they are safe to use.”

7. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly.

Because a lot of users now read on smartphones and other mobile devices, Google changed its algorithm in April 2015 to penalize any sites that are not optimized for mobile devices.

Use the free Google tool to test if your site is mobile-friendly: Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

These tips will definitely help you rank higher and make your books easier to find. If you’d like more help implementing these and other important steps that will help your book get found and purchased, register for my new training program, “Masterclass: SEO That Translates to Book Sales.” (This is an affiliate link.)

This course for authors will teach you how to get more traffic, fans, readers, and buyers for your books. And, Build Book Buzz readers get a 50 percent discount on registrations through tomorrow, June 7, 2018, so make sure you check out “Masterclass: SEO That Translates to Book Sales” now! (This is an affiliate link.)