Google recently announced the beta of Speakable, a schema markup that allows you to identify sections of your content that is most suitable for text-to-speech audio playback.
This new schema markup will help you to deliver news content over Google Assistant, the voice assistant used by Android devices, including Google Home.
Use of voice assistants is growing significantly and this structured data markup will help Google Assistant and Google Home devices to deliver voice content from news website to users.
Voicebots are essentially just another search engine.
They can make inferences based on the data they have access to.
Benefits of Schema Markup for Voicebots
Companies are starting to leverage chatbots and voicebots for marketing activities such as lead generation and also for customer service.
Some of the benefits of engaging with bots are that you can cost-effectively deliver 24-hour service, provide answers to simple questions and respond directly to customer inquiries.
- Schema markup can be re-used to power a Voicebot. Don’t have to do other structuring work, but instead re-purpose the search optimisation.
- The Voicebot can more easily understand and find information on the website
- Can the Voicebot take actions for the user? Define potential actions on the website, for the Voicebot to complete for your customers. Actions include but are not limited to: play, consume, rsvp, call, write, download, etc.
Schema Markup also leads to knowledge graphs (sometimes referred to as Ontologies) and can be used to infer intelligent answers.
This in turn prepares you for AI chatbots and voicebots with platforms such as Dialogflow and Watson Assistant.
Tips to Optimise Your Content for Voicebots
“Keep it Short”
It is important to ensure that the content that you mark up with “speakable” microdata be concise. Amazon provides the following advice at https://developer.amazon.com/designing-for-voice/what-alexa-says/
One-breath test
When writing what Alexa will say, read aloud what you’ve written. If you can say the words at a conversational pace with one breath, the length is probably good. If you need to take a breath, consider reducing the length.
For a response that includes successive ideas, such as steps in a task, read each idea separately. While the entire response may require more than one breath, make sure you only take breaths between and not during ideas.
Make Sure It Makes Sense and Feels Natural
Do not mark up sections of your content that won’t work well with voice assistants.
Imagine listening to Google Assistant as it reads a timeline, or goes through a bunch of photo captions on your site.
Read aloud what you are marking up and ask yourself if it sounds like something that a human being would say in response to a question.
If it doesn’t read naturally, expect people to stop the playback and move on.
Focus on Mobile Search
You must find better ways to meet consumer demand and query intent based on context. Certain keywords will be used much more often via voice search than traditional.
It’s worth it to find these keywords. You must remember that most of them will be used in mobile searches.
Use keywords built around the following: “when,” “how,” “what,” “who,” etc.
Stop Thinking Like a Marketer
As marketers, we are hardwired to share our news far and wide. Yet voice engagement is the antithesis to these kinds of interruptive, overt push messages.
To optimise your brand for voice search, you must think like the customer. What provides value? What do they need? Customers don’t speak to their devices for marketing messages.
Think service first and optimisation will naturally follow.
SEO for Voice is just SEO
While there are tactics such as developing Alexa skills or creating Google actions that can help your brand be more present in voice search, the basic optimisation tactics of content still apply to voice.
Make sure to incorporate long-tail and contextual keywords in your content and meta data instead of focusing on a single head term.
Also, use structured markup to help Google better understand your content.
Voicebots Will Grow as Mobile Does
As long as mobile use continues to skyrocket (and there’s no reason to believe that it won’t), customers will make use of voice search and voicebots more frequently, so optimising for this just makes good sense.
Fortunately, many of the steps you take to do this have triple benefits: you improve your overall mobile optimization, you better communicate your content to Google, and you increase your chances of showing up in results or being selected for featured snippets.
You’ll even be prepared for search using smart home devices like Google Home and Amazon Alexa.