A clever approach to voice search, SERP Bounce – or about unusual positioning techniques

You can write a book about mobile positioning, but if I were to tell you what is most important to achieve the effect, you would immediately stop reading the details. In my opinion these are page speed, stickiness/dwell time as well as perfectly matched to the device context content and page itself. In a word: work at the bottom. In this article, however, we will focus on techniques less typical, often labor-intensive, but giving measurable results.

So, how to smartly play with voice search?

One great way to rank higher for voice searches is to simply have answers to the questions your users are asking. It turns out that we can find a lot of patterns of such questions using special tools, and then we can answer them better than the competition. It is about adding context to the answer and taking it to the next level, e.g.: additional video and transcription.

Sources of questions that we can analyze we have quite a few, it is worth starting with:

1. Experimental version of the cont.ai (currently closed BETA) allows you to search for all queries that appear on pages in search results for an analyzed keyword.

2. Tools that analyze the autocomplete mechanism, such as keywordtool.io, ubersuggest or Answer The Public allow you to generate lists of questions. These tools support question construction in Polish language.

3. In addition Semstorm, Senuto and Semrush have millions of keywords in their database. Just analyze your competitor’s keyword report and filter them by how, where, when, etc. You’ll get hints for search queries and a formula for how your competitors achieved high positions. The latter tool is a good choice in foreign markets.

4. Databases on Answer The Public.onet.pl and Quora relevant to our topic.

SERP Bounce and missed opportunities

Part of the algorithm that determines search ranking is evaluating the quality of the landing page in terms of user behavior. To put it simply: if your website causes the user to return to Google more often than other results and continue searching for the same topic, be prepared to lose your won positions. With Google Analytics you can check exactly how such interaction looks like by comparing the dimension of the entry page with the pair source/medium: google/organic. Looking at the rejection rate and other traffic parameters you can select candidates for analysis, which will be completed in Google Search Console. Partially analyzing the keywords leading to a given subpage, you can consider whether poor traffic parameters are the effect of random keywords or maybe valuable ones that lacked a solid answer for you in the form of context and content. Google Search Console will show you more missed opportunities: pages that Googlebot visits but does not add to the search engine index and keywords with low CTR due to poorly written title and page description. You will also find words for which your position is either too low to generate a lot of clicks. For mobile this means items as low as 4-5 upwards.

Proven and cheap technologies

Design mobile-first sites and ask yourself if you really need a site that will look great on desktop and be a nightmare to optimize for mobile. If you start from the right side, you will see that it is possible to combine efficiency, functionality and speed. For clients with smaller budgets, I hint that the technologies are already there. For example, ready-made skins cost $25-50, wordpress is a free system, and most optimizations are a matter of running a few plugins. Additionally, we can choose developers with quite decent hourly rates, we can also find companies that specialize exclusively in optimizing the speed of such a website and hosting created for the mentioned platform.

However, such a solution has several pitfalls:

1. WordPress needs to be constantly updated to be resilient to vulnerabilities.

2. When buying a skin, test its key pages on the web.dev or by using Lighhouse hidden in Google Chrome under the 12 button. Most of them look good, but speed is their very weak point.

3. Always test a new website with a crawler. Sitebulb or Screaming Frog will allow you to catch errors before Googlebot sees them.

4. Plan the migration from the old site with the help of an SEO specialist. You may lose a lot on such migration: just lose a few subpages, change too many URLs without redirects and you may wake up with significant traffic drops.

5. In the first days after launching the site, analyzing reports in Google Search Console making sure that everything went ok.