Voice Assistants are Changing Our Approach to Website Development

As technology progresses every day, we’re finding new ways to integrate devices into our everyday lives. One of the newest technological trends includes voice assistants looking things up for us instead of manually typing our questions into search engines.

These voice assistants have been used in our smart phones and computersfor years, in the form of Siri, Cortana and the Google Assistant. But now we’re seeing them play a more prominent role in our homes, with Amazon’s Echo, Google Home and Apple’s HomePod. When we have questions, we trust our knowledgeable voice assistants to have the answers.

So, how do voice assistants choose answers and how do you make sure they see your content? It’s a question our web developers have been faced with, and the answer is that it starts with the initial creation of your website.

In fact, we’ve had to adjust our own approach to developing websites because of the rising popularity of voice assistants, making our clients’ websites easy to find through both manual and voice searches.

You’ll notice that a lot of these adjustments are things that are important to being found through a manual search as well as a voice-activated one. But with the increasing use of voice assistants, these website elements are more important than ever if you want Siri or Alexa to choose your content as the most relevant answer. Especially since voice assistants only read off one answer, rather than showing a page full of results.

Here’s what we’ve determined to be the most impactful adjustments.

As we mentioned in the previous point, most voice-activated searches are in a longer, conversational tone, usually in the form of a question. Therefore, we’ve had to make sure the content we write answers many of the most common questions people have about products or services.

We start by identifying some of the most common questionsclients get from customers and try to incorporate both the questions and answers throughout the website. Quick, upfront answers to these questions will increase your chances of voice assistants choosing your content as the best answer.

Another way to increase visibility when someone searches with a voice assistant is to make sure local search identifiersare consistent throughout a site and in other listings. This includes your business’s name, address and phone number. That way, if people are searching for nearby businesses, your website shows up as a local option.

While this certainly isn’t something new, it is worth mentioning simply because of its importance in voice-assisted searches. This is equally as important to have on your website for voice-activated searches as it is for mobile or desktop searches. No matter how people are searching, you need to have accurate local identifiers throughout your website and other listings.

Voice assistants have the same functionality as traditional search engines, and they extract data the same way as well. That means they look at all the little details that go into your content and website elements, rather than just the text. Optimizing your metadata, which includes title tags, descriptions, image alt text, etc., increases the relevancy potential to what the users are searching for.

So, if you have more mentions of a keyword or phrase throughout different elements of your site, voice assistants are more likely to recognize your site as having an abundance of relevant information.

If you want voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and the Google Assistant to choose your website or content as the most relevant answer to a voice-activated search, there are adjustments that need to be made when creating your website. It’s something we now consider when developing new websites, and seems to be a trend that isn’t going away anytime soon. But with these elements incorporated into your website through content, local identifiers and metadata, you’ll have a much better chance of being recognized by voice assistants.