Voice Search
How Can Hotels and Restaurants Increase Their Visibility?
Working in SEO, I can appreciate that voice has become the buzzword as of late, but with the current limitations of the technology, the inability to attribute traffic within Google Analytics, and rare conversions to online purchases, it hasn’t been a focus of current strategies. But, with such dramatic growth in the usage and functionality of the technologies driving this avenue along the buyer’s journey, we see a great future opportunity that shouldn’t be ignored.
The four big players in voice assistants are Google Assistant, Amazon Echo/Alexa, Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana. Google is the current leader and continues to dominate traditional searches. For hotels and restaurants, there are a lot of excellent opportunities to populate the information that these devices return. Here are some tips to make voice search work for your hospitality business.
Geo Specific Non-Branded Voice Search
Since queries like “What is the best hotel near Central Park?” are populated from listing information including Google My Business, the first step towards optimizing voice search for brick-and-mortar locations like hotels and restaurants is ensuring that local listings are verified, accurate, and up-to-date.
The same traditional ranking factors apply for determining the top positions for voice results as they do for a desktop or mobile local 3-pack result in Google. Ensure your site is regularly ranking on mobile and desktop for the search results that have the highest intent for your location. A neglected, inactive listing can easily lose its position to a competitor over time.
Having issues getting into to the top three results? Research the current ranking top three competitors’ reviews and backlinks. If your competitors are leading in the number of reviews, supplement naturally occuring reviews with an outreach campaign to customers after they visit, asking them to review you on platforms like Google. If more backlinks are required, that is a bit more of a process. Ask the team currently handling your SEO to shift more budget into quality backlink campaigns. Both of these approaches are long term, so don’t expect to see results immediately.
Branded Voice Search
Branded voice search results for hotels are fed from the information currently being presented in the knowledge graph. For more specialized, boutique properties like Baccarat Hotel where a Wikipedia-fed description is not currently supplementing the results, the information with a voice search is just the address and the distance from your current location. Although the opportunities to capitalize on voice search for this type of query are currently limited, ensuring your listing is up-to-date will help potential customers receive accurate information.
Looking to take your knowledge graph game to next level? Check out How to Get the Most out of Your Google Post, by VERB’s Local Search Specialist Lesley Mailman.
Answering Prospective Customer Questions
A large portion of long tail question-type searches result in a Quick Answer result. These results, commonly referred to as position zero results, often populate the voice search answer.
The 2 most effective ways you can get into position zero are:
- FAQs — A page with multiple questions, each marked up with the secondary heading tag (<h2>) with text answering the question, has a higher likelihood of surfacing in position zero results and therefore being featured in voice searches.
- Content — Any page where the main heading asks a question and the content of that page answers the questions. In a lot of cases this can be blog content.
The first step is to nurture existing quick answers results. It easier to retain an existing result than gain a new one. To do this, use your favorite keyword research tool (mine is Brightedge), determine which longtail keyword searches you are already ranking for, and confirm that the results you expect to see surface in the search results. This will help in two ways. It helps identify issues with your content, allows you to correct them, and ultimately improve user experience, and it also helps you understand how Google is pulling the information.
Understanding how Google populates this information helps you determine the ideal content structure to feed position zero information. So how do you determine the questions your potential customers are asking? There are multiple techniques to get into your clients’ mindset, some of my favourites are:
- Look for longer tail question-type keywords in Google‘s Search Console.
- Enter your main topics in https://answerthepublic.com/ and cross reference those results with a tool like https://keywordseverywhere.com/ to determine the competition level and monthly search volume.
- Explore your onsite search queries within Google Analytics to find the types of information being searched by users on your site.
Voice assistants are still in their infancy and their current level of knowledge can be both limited and broad. With voice search you can establish yourself as the authority for information about your brand and your local area, helping potential customers answer questions along their user journey.
VERB Interactive is a leader in digital marketing, specializing in solutions for the travel and hospitality industry. Find out more at www.verbinteractive.com.
