Voice search and smart speakers: what to change on your site

Amazon Echo has been on sale since 2015, Google Home since November 2016, and both families now have cheaper models (Echo Dot, Google Home Mini) that are being bought as impulse purchases. Apple has announced HomePod for later this year. On phones, Siri, Google Assistant and Cortana handle a meaningful share of queries, and Google has said roughly 20 percent of mobile searches on Android in the US are now spoken.

The important shift is not the microphone. It is the format of the result. A spoken query like "how long does a kitchen remodel take" produces, on Google Home, a single answer read aloud, usually lifted from a featured snippet, with "according to" and the site name. On Alexa, general knowledge answers come from Bing and from Amazon's own sources, and local answers come from Yelp and Yext-fed data. There is no second result. You are either the answer or you are absent.

Three kinds of voice query matter commercially:

• Local and action queries ("Italian restaurants near me open now", "call a plumber in Austin"). These are answered from Google My Business, Apple Maps and Yelp data, not from your website.
• Informational questions ("what is the difference between a Roth and a traditional IRA"). These are answered from featured snippets and knowledge panels.
• Commands and transactions ("reorder paper towels", "play my workout playlist"). These go through Alexa Skills and Assistant Actions, and today they overwhelmingly favor Amazon's own catalog and a few large brands.

Voice assistants are picky about sources. Google has published guidance for raters evaluating spoken answers, and it rewards pages that load quickly, render on mobile and state a complete answer briefly. Before changing any content, check the following.

1. Mobile-friendly and fast. Run key pages through Google's mobile-friendly test and PageSpeed Insights. Aim for under three seconds to usable on a 3G connection. Most pages that win voice answers load in well under five seconds on mobile.
2. HTTPS everywhere. Chrome 62 this month marks HTTP pages with forms as "not secure". Google already uses HTTPS as a light ranking signal, and assistants prefer secure sources.
3. Structured data. Add schema.org markup for Organization, LocalBusiness (with opening hours, phone, address and geo coordinates), Product and Article. Validate it in Google's Structured Data Testing Tool. Markup does not create voice answers by itself, but it removes ambiguity about who you are and what the page is.
4. Crawlable text. If your answers live in images, PDFs or JavaScript that only renders in a browser, Google cannot lift them. Check what Googlebot sees with Fetch and Render in Search Console.

Spoken queries are longer and more conversational than typed ones. People type "kitchen remodel cost"; they say "how much does it cost to remodel a kitchen in Chicago". Your content needs to meet that phrasing.

Build a question inventory. Pull every question your sales and support teams hear in a week. Add the "People also ask" boxes and the autocomplete suggestions for your main topics. Use Answer the Public or keyword tools for the who, what, when, where, why and how variants. You will usually end up with 50 to 200 questions.

Answer each in 30 to 50 words, then expand. Put the question as an H2 or H3, in the words people say, then give a direct, complete answer in the first sentence or two. Then explain, qualify and link. This is the structure Google lifts into featured snippets, and featured snippets are what Google Home reads aloud.

Use plain, spoken language. Read the answer out loud. If it sounds like a brochure, rewrite it. Assistants read text at roughly 150 words per minute, so a 40-word answer is a comfortable 15 seconds.

Create FAQ pages that are actually useful. One page per topic cluster, not one giant page for the whole business. Mark them up with schema where appropriate and link them from the relevant service pages.

Target conversational long-tail. Your Search Console query report is the best free source of the phrasing people already use to reach you. Sort by impressions, filter for queries of five words or more, and look for questions you rank for on page one or two without a snippet. Those are the quickest wins.

For any business with a physical location or a service area, voice is mostly a local-search problem. "Near me" searches have more than doubled in the past year according to Google, and on a speaker there is no map to scroll.

• Claim and complete Google My Business for every location: primary and secondary categories, hours including holidays, phone, website, attributes, photos and a description.
• Keep name, address and phone identical across Google, Bing Places, Apple Maps Connect, Yelp, Facebook and the major data aggregators. Alexa pulls local data largely from Yelp, so a neglected Yelp page is a voice problem now.
• Ask for reviews consistently. Assistants surface "highly rated" and "best" results based on review scores and counts, and Google is now showing review snippets in local results.
• Make the phone number clickable on mobile and track calls separately, because a voice query that ends in "call them" never touches your analytics.

Alexa now has more than 20,000 skills and the Assistant directory is growing fast, but most skills are used a handful of times and abandoned. Build one only when there is a daily or weekly habit to attach to: reordering consumables, checking an account balance, a short daily briefing in your niche, a hands-free how-to for a product people use in the kitchen or garage.

If you do, budget $5,000 to $30,000 for a competent build, expect a few weeks of certification back and forth, and plan to promote it yourself through email, packaging and your site, because store discovery alone will not bring users. For most owners, the better return this year is still the free work above.

Chasing single-word keywords. Voice queries are long. Content that targets "plumber" will not win "who can fix a leaking water heater on a Sunday".

Answering the question in paragraph six. Google lifts the first clear, self-contained statement it finds under a matching heading. Put it there.

Treating voice as a separate project. The same speed, structure and listing work improves ordinary mobile search, which is still where the volume is. Fold it into your existing SEO and content program.

Ignoring Bing. Alexa and Cortana use Bing. Verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and claim Bing Places. It takes an afternoon.

Expecting attributable traffic. A speaker reading your answer sends no click. Judge the work by snippet ownership, impressions for question queries, calls and direction requests, not by sessions alone.

We treat voice as a layer on an integrated search and content program rather than a separate channel, because the same work serves brand, growth, web and technology at once. Discover audits technical readiness, current snippet ownership, listing accuracy across every location and the real questions customers ask. Plan maps those questions to pages, sets structured data priorities and decides whether a skill or action is justified. Build delivers the content, the markup, the speed fixes and the listing cleanup. Improve tracks snippet share, question-query impressions and local actions monthly, and expands the question inventory as new queries appear in Search Console.

The real estate engagement is a representative example. A multi-office brokerage was invisible for spoken, location-specific questions about neighborhoods, school districts and buying costs, even though it ranked reasonably for typed keywords. We rebuilt its location and guide pages around the questions buyers actually ask, added LocalBusiness and Article markup, cleaned up listings across every office and sped up a slow mobile template. Within a few months it held featured snippets for a growing set of local questions, and calls and direction requests from Google My Business rose noticeably.