Important voice search ranking factors

Google Home and the Google Assistant are making inroads in the home smart speaker market. As a result, it is also a big part of SEO and marketers are working to understand how to get information to the Assistant. Here are some of the key findings from a recent study that looks at 10,000 Google Home responses and compared the data to desktop search results.

Page speed looks to be one of the most important factors. Voice search results almost always came from faster loading pages. It is not surprising considering how much Google pushes webmasters to focus on page load speeds.

When it comes to authority, Google looks more at domain authority than page authority for voice results.

It also looks like Scheme does not play a big a role as many assumed. According to the study, only 36% of results came from pages with schema:

“Although voice search result pages tend to use Schema slightly more often than your average web page, the difference is not significant. Also, 63.6% of voice search results don’t use Schema at all. Therefore, it’s unlikely that Schema has a direct impact on voice search rankings.”

Another interesting discovery is that the responses are almost always 29 words. However, Google looks to be condensing longer form content into 29 words for the assistant. It does not mean that snippets that are 29 words get priority.

Finally, HTTPS is as critical as page speed, as non-https sites did not get featured in any of the responses on the device.