By now I am sure that you have all seen adverts such as the one above for the Google search app. The app is available on both Android and iOS, you can also use voice search on your desktop/laptop if you are using Chrome for your browser. I’ve been using it recently and found something useful in relation to Search Engine Results Pages.
When search engines and directories first started to appear in the mid to late 90’s users would tend to type full sentences or questions into the search box of their preferred search engine. If you typed a query such as “Find me a creative design agency in Blackburn” then you were just as likely to receive results relating to the phrase “Find me” as you were to find the website of everybody’s favourite digital agency in Lancashire. Today there are only really two big players left in search, Google and Bing (neither of which existed prior to 1998), and we are all used to just typing in keywords rather than whole sentences.
What’s So Good About Voice Search?
I’ve been using voice search for a few weeks now and I can see the advantages of it. First of all it is easier to speak a query rather than type it. It also means that you tend to ask a question rather than just use a series of keywords, so it is a more natural search experience. One of the things that I have discovered is the usefulness of using Schema mark-up within your website to increase your sites visibility to search engines.
What is Schema Mark-Up?
Schema mark-up is a way of telling search engines what various parts of a webpage relate to. This helps search engines better understand what a webpage is about and helps the search engine to index the site more accurately.
How Does Schema Mark-Up Work?
You add special tags, as described at shema.org, to describe the data that is contained within the tag. I’ll use a real life example to demonstrate this. While testing the Google app I asked Google “Find me a creative design agency in Blackburn”. I have shown you the result below:
As you can see TPW are the number 1 result in the organic listing. So far, so good. Next I asked Google “Find me an address for TPW creative design” and this was the result:
This is where it becomes interesting. Google is telling me the exact address for TPW without me having to visit the website and search for the address I am looking for.
Next I asked for the TPW telephone number and this was the result:
As you can see from the screenshot above Google tells me the telephone number. What you cannot tell immediately from the screenshot is that Google was also telling me the phone number. Note the blue speaker icon in the top right of the image.
This search was carried out on a smartphone and so the telephone number is clickable allowing me to call the number, again without all the hassle of trying to find the number on a webpage. The same search carried out on a tablet or desktop/laptop will still speak the telephone number but the number is not an active link.
At first I thought that the information was being drawn from TPW’s listings on various Google Properties such as Google My Business. However, having conducted similar searches for a variety of companies both large and small I realised that this was not the case. Deeper investigation showed that the information was being derived from the Schema mark-up within the sites website.
Clever as search engines are they struggle to understand the meaning of a webpage. They don’t know if the address on your page is actually an address or just some random words and numbers. Schema mark-up helps to organise certain aspects of your page content.
We have used the Local Business schema as laid out at Schema.org. Using this we are able to define the name of the company, the address and the telephone number. This helps search engines such as Google to understand the meaning of the data that is on the page and that is the reason that I can find the address and telephone number so easily on Google.
There are two ways to look at this. The first is to say that it is a negative thing as it stops somebody visiting your website and potentially seeing something that attracts their attention. I would counter this by saying that it allows user to find the information they want more easily and this gives a better user experience. A better user experience is more likely to the user wanting to use your services again in the future.
Finally I’ll just point out that I conducted a variety of searches on a combination of a desktop PC, iPad, iPhone 5S and a HTC One phone. At times they were all scattered across my desk with the Google app open and when I said “OK Google” to activate the app the iPhone was the quickest to respond.