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.”

15 easy and evergreen SEO tips for authors

By James Byrd

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of making your author website more attractive to search engines. Some Internet marketing companies would have you believe that SEO is a black art best practiced by the experts, for a hefty fee, of course. Don’t believe it. With a few minor changes to the way you create content today, you can have a positive and long-lasting impact on your site’s position in the search engine results.

At my company, we call the tips I’m about to give you “evergreen” SEO techniques because they stand the test of time. These techniques are not designed to “trick” search engine spiders into favoring you. They are dedicated to giving the search engines what they want. What they want is the same things your readers want: high quality information that is easy to find. The tips you find below won’t ever go out of style.

Offer good content

The best website and blog content is targeted and useful. Targeted means it is written for a specific audience. Useful content either solves a problem or entertains. General tips for writing good content include:

1. Provide step-by-step or “how-to” instructions.

2. Clarify a widely misunderstood or complex subject.

3. Relate an interesting or amusing story.

Include organic keywords

In this context, the term “organic” essentially means “as they naturally occur in your writing.” SEO specialists get great joy from researching keywords related to the topic at hand, then “keyword stuffing” those terms into the content. Most writers I know have no interest in doing keyword research, particularly if they’ve ever given it a try, and certainly not for every blog post. Instead, I recommend integrating the following techniques into your normal writing:

4. After writing, review your content for terms you’ve used repeatedly and replace them with something else.

5. During your review, include terms you’ve heard from your audience, even if they don’t seem completely accurate.

6. Don’t be afraid to include well-known industry terms even if they seem technical. It will help the members of your audience who are “in the know” find your content.

Provide accurate metadata

Metadata is a scary word, but all it means is “data about data.” Your blog post or article is the data, and the metadata includes information like the title, description, category, and tags associated with your content. These elements deserve special attention when you publish your blog post or article. Remember that getting good placement in the search engine results is only part of the battle; you must get people to click through to your site for that placement to have any real value.

7. Craft your title to get the attention of people who are looking for the kind of information you provide. Cute titles might work for an entertainment piece, but they don’t attract potential visitors who are focused on solving a problem.

8. Make sure that the description under your link in the search results is specific and that it accurately summarizes the benefit of clicking through to the page. How you do this depends upon the tool you are using to publish your content.

9. If your web publishing tool (for example, WordPress or Blogger) offers ways to tag or categorize your content, do so. Tags and categories often create separate index pages of related content on your site, and the search engines will find and index those pages too.

Update frequently

It has become more important than ever to keep your site from looking like you’ve abandoned it. Not long ago, Google released the “Panda” upgrade to its search engine algorithm, and many sites saw their traffic fall off by 50 percent or more as a result. Others saw little or no change. Google keeps its algorithm pretty close to the chest, but one of the biases of Panda quickly became clear: New content is better than old content.

Add new content to your site as frequently as is practical for you. Every two weeks should be the minimum if you want to attract and keep followers (more on that below.) Daily is great, but it’s a grind unless you know a lot of people who will guest post for you. The main thing is to get on a schedule you can follow consistently. As for figuring out what to write, try these tips:

10. Create a “swipe file” – a file or folder of snippets you can use for reference and inspiration. If you have an idea for a post, add it to your swipe file before you forget it.

11. Save comments you make on other people’s blog posts. Each one is a potential gem of inspiration for a post of your own.

12. When you answer a question for someone via e-mail, save the exchange.

Make your content popular

Even if you do everything I’ve covered above to make your content the best that it can be for the search engines, whether or not you get traffic still comes down to a popularity contest. All other things being equal, a popular site comes up higher in the search results than an unpopular site. One of the main criteria for determining popularity is how many other sites link to yours. Here are some tips for increasing the odds that visitors will learn about your site and link back to it:

13. Include social media “like” and “share” buttons on your pages. The Google “plus-one” button is particularly important because it is a direct vote of confidence from your visitors to Google.

14. Allow visitors to “follow” your blog via email and RSS.

15. Use your social media accounts to announce every time you publish new content.

Most of us have enough to do without dedicating time to something as onerous-sounding as “search engine optimization.” If you use the above tips, you can work SEO into your normal routine and feel confident that your efforts will continue to work for you long into the future.