If you are forward-thinking in your SEO strategy, you definitely need to optimize your blog for Google Assistant. SEO-Hacker calls it the most intelligent AI assistant to exist today. And considering the market share of Google, it’s safe to assume this solution will take the first place in the smart assistant industry soon.
The good news is that Google welcomes developers with open arms and makes integrating the Assistant quite simple. However, your blog will take some tweaking to make it easier for this AI to find.
How to Optimize a Website for Google Assistant: 4 Tips
1. Optimize for full sentences
It’s a fact that people word their search queries differently depending on whether they are written or spoken. When optimizing for regular browser Google Search, you’ll use keywords that are very to the point and might even contain grammatical mistakes, like ‘food blog vegan recipes’.
When a person makes a voice query, they are more likely to word it as a complete sentence, like ‘Hey Google, find a food blog with vegan recipes’. As even the most advanced digital assistant that works on Voice Search cannot provide more than three top results of a search for now, it’s essential to optimize your website’s keywords as efficiently as possible.
2. Plan for being taken literally
Despite the fact that AI in Google Assistant is designed to understand human speech patterns, it’s still lacking in interpreting subtleties. For example, if a person asks it ‘ do a web search for the best blog on hunting’ the GA is most likely to show some page that offers narrower web search of blogs by category.
This happens because the AI takes the command literally, meaning it thinks the person is looking for something to do a web search of blogs, not the blog itself. Keep this in mind when selecting keywords.
3. Don’t disregard other SEO factors
As mentioned before, Google Assistant only provides top three browser search results max, so it’s essential to make your website as visible as possible there. This includes optimizing for ‘written’ keywords, snippets, page loading speed, and more.
Start with choosing the right provider for hosting a website. Your host must be reliable and your package must provide enough storage space and bandwidth to ensure fast loading. In the meantime, optimize the visuals to both adapt to screen sized and load fast without losing quality. Don’t for4get to tag every visual element to increase your chances of ranking high.
The textual content of the page should contain a selection of keywords that will rank high with Google Search first. When developing content, think about what kind of information the users are most likely to search through Google Assistant. Detailed instructions and how-tos definitely fall into that category.
4. Make local optimization a priority
Google Assistant searches out local results by default. Even if the location isn’t specified in the query, it will ‘assume’ it based on the user’s geolocation data. For example, if a person in NYC asks ‘Hey Google, find me the best pizza delivery’ the AI will provide a list of top three pizza delivery services in NYC.
This means optimizing your website for local searches can give you a wider reach and therefore a higher chance to get noticed by Google Assistant. As a blogger, you’ll need to get very creative with your content strategy to use this feature of the Voice Search AI. Don’t forget that such queries often include phrases like ‘near me’.