Why Your SEO Isn’t Working, And It’s Not The Team’s Fault via @sejournal, @billhunt

Over the years, I have been asked to audit numerous enterprise search programs, transforming them into world-class solutions.

Time and again, I found that the SEO teams were smart, capable, and executing the playbook, but the results weren’t materializing.

Rankings were volatile. Organic traffic plateaued. The executive team grew frustrated. Eventually, someone asked the inevitable: “Is our SEO team underperforming?”

Most of the time, the answer was no. The team wasn’t failing; the system around them was.

This article explores the structural, organizational, and leadership-level reasons why SEO fails inside even the most sophisticated enterprises.

Spoiler: It has little to do with keyword research or broken links, and everything to do with the invisible walls that constrain real performance.

It builds on themes from my article, “The New Role Of SEO In The Age Of AI,” where I explore how SEO is evolving into a broader organizational discipline, one rooted in systems thinking, structured content, and strategic alignment.

Misdiagnosing The Problem: SEO As A Siloed Function

In most companies, SEO is still viewed as a tactical function buried within marketing. It’s rarely integrated into upstream product planning, development processes, or digital governance.

So, when organic traffic and performance lag, leadership looks at the SEO team’s workflows, agency partners, or performance dashboard, but not at the system that surrounds them.

That’s like blaming the pit crew when the car hasn’t been upgraded in years.

5 Structural Reasons SEO Doesn’t Deliver

And now, in the AI era, there’s a new layer of complexity: the platform itself may be working against you.

Generative engines and search assistants are not just routing traffic; they’re rewriting how discovery happens.

If your content isn’t structured to be consumed and credited by AI, then even the best efforts by your SEO team won’t yield results.

Visibility isn’t just earned through optimization; it’s granted by systems trained to synthesize, summarize, and, sometimes, sidestep attribution entirely.

Here are the most common issues I see inside underperforming organizations:

1. No Executive Ownership Of Visibility

Every SEO team has the all-too-common story of being uninformed about a technical or content update until after it has already occurred, and then being expected to recover the lost performance magically.

That wasn’t an isolated oversight; it was an artifact of a siloed organization that didn’t truly value SEO.

When significant changes to the site’s architecture, platforms, or content workflows occur without input from search specialists, visibility suffers, regardless of the team’s skill level.

SEO success often hinges on decisions made far outside the SEO team’s control: site architecture, content management system (CMS) capabilities, translation workflows, and legal restrictions.

If no one at the leadership level owns findability as an outcome, SEO efforts get buried under technical debt and decision inertia.

2. Misaligned Incentives

SEO is a long-game discipline, but quarterly performance, traffic deltas, and campaign outcomes are the metrics most teams focus on.

When teams are rewarded for volume, not visibility, they focus on what’s easy to publish, not what’s hard to get discovered.

3. Content Without Strategy

In today’s search landscape, content must not only be helpful, but it must also be interpretable by machines. AI systems increasingly determine what gets surfaced, cited, or synthesized into answers.

If your content lacks structure, clarity, or semantic relevance, it may never reach the end user. This isn’t a failure of effort; it’s a failure to adapt to how visibility is brokered in an AI-first environment.

Companies often produce massive volumes of content with little to no strategy for discoverability, relevance, or user need.

One of the biggest mindset shifts needed is moving from “just accurate” to “genuinely helpful” content information that not only ranks but also resolves a user’s need, aligns with their search intent, and builds trust across formats and platforms.

If content isn’t structured for AI interpretation, indexed efficiently, or mapped to actual search behavior, it’s noise, not value.

4. Tech Bottlenecks And CMS Handcuffs

The SEO team may know what needs to be fixed, but can’t implement changes due to rigid CMS limitations, lack of dev resources, or cross-team politics.

SEO becomes a report generator, not a performance enabler.

5. Lack Of A Visibility Operating Model

Few organizations have a system for aligning product, content, UX, dev, and analytics around shared visibility goals.

Without a repeatable model and clearly identified roles, data handoffs, and escalation paths, SEO success is ad hoc and unsustainable.

It’s Not A Talent Problem. It’s A Systems Problem

Most SEO teams are aware of what needs to happen. But, unless they’re empowered structurally — with access, authority, and allies — they’re set up to fail.

It’s like asking a builder to construct a skyscraper with no blueprints, a shared plan, or the ability to move materials.

When executives recognize this as a systems issue, not a personnel one, transformation becomes possible.

What The C-Suite Should Be Asking Instead

Rather than “Why isn’t our SEO working?” leadership should be asking:

• Who owns visibility at the organizational level?
• Do our teams have a shared model for findability?
• Are we rewarding the behaviors that lead to durable visibility, or just short-term volume?
• Can our content and site architecture be understood by AI engines, as well as by humans?
• Are our internal key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with these new external discovery realities?

Reframing SEO As Infrastructure, Not Just A Channel

Modern SEO now sits at the intersection of content strategy, data modeling, and AI accessibility.

If you’re not designing your digital presence to be ingested by large language models or cited by answer engines, you’re ceding control to the platforms.

You’re optimizing for a web that no longer exists, and leaving performance on the table for competitors who’ve embraced AI-mode discoverability.

The most successful organizations treat SEO like digital infrastructure, a foundational capability embedded into everything from product design to knowledge management.

They invest in:

• Schema and structured data governance.
• Visibility Service Level Agreements (SLAs) across departments.
• Shared taxonomies and content architectures.
• Measurement frameworks that include AI surfacing and non-click impact.
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Final Thought: Clear The Path, Then Judge Performance

If your SEO isn’t delivering, don’t start by blaming the team. Start by auditing the system around them. Fix the structural blockers. Build the operating model. Assign executive ownership.

Then, and only then, can you ask whether the team is performing because even the best F1 driver can’t win a race if the vehicle they’ve been given is unreliable, outdated, or built without alignment between the systems.

Editor’s note: This article is the first in a series from Bill Hunt set to be published monthly. Each article will build on the others.

The series offers a clear, differentiated voice to speak the language of senior leadership while honoring the technical integrity of search.

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Featured Image: Zamrznuti tonovi/Shutterstock

A Guide To Enterprise SEO Strategy For SaaS Brands

The SaaS business model offers incredible scalability as well as profitability – but only when paired with the right marketing growth strategy.

Knowing that the cost of hosting cloud-based applications decreases as user volume increases, SaaS brands must focus on rapid subscriber growth to stay competitive and bring costs down.

Many CMOs default to paid acquisition for predictable traffic and conversions, but I have seen that this approach has a critical flaw: the moment ad spend stops, so does the traffic, causing new customer growth to tank.

Today, there are also longer sales cycles, more choices, and a high customer acquisition cost (CAC). While paid acquisition does play a critical role in pipeline development, it’s not a sustainable long-term growth engine.

To achieve sustainable, long-term growth, SaaS CMOs must look beyond the short-term wins of paid advertising.

Consider SEO as not just another marketing channel, but the foundational strategy that builds organic momentum, lowers CAC, and will compound over time.

I believe that investing in SEO ensures that brands will consistently attract high-intent users, strengthen domain authority, and increase demand generation – without relying on an ever-expanding ad budget.

For CMOs looking to build a resilient growth engine, investing in SEO means ensuring your brand is consistently visible to the right buyers and decision makers, exactly when they’re searching for solutions like yours.

The SEO strategies I list below will improve your overall marketing efforts, whether you market your company using PPC, email, or social media.

With this in mind, I’d like to discuss some of the unique challenges that SaaS CMOs face in the digital space and ways SEO can help them overcome these challenges.

Then, I’ll provide tips to help you improve your online presence and grow your business.

Unique Digital Challenges For SaaS Companies

1. Scaling Growth Efficiently In SaaS

SaaS CMOs and marketers face a tough challenge in scaling SaaS businesses fast enough and to a comfortable degree in order to offset the cost of hosting their cloud applications.

To achieve a lower cost of total ownership (TCO), SaaS companies need to build an effective network scale that:

• Acquires new customers constantly.
• Retains existing ones.
• Entices customers to communicate with one another using the software to build a full-fledged network.

Unfortunately, paid advertising only contributes to the cost of this model and fails to bring on new customers outside of this narrow window of focus.

Not to mention that SaaS companies take different approaches to pricing and monetization, often choosing between freemium, subscription, or usage-based models to align with customer needs.

Expansion revenue plays a key role in growth. Upselling encourages customers to move to higher-tier plans, while cross-selling introduces them to other products or services.

The right combination of these strategies can drive sustainable revenue while keeping customers engaged.

What’s needed for this is an omnichannel marketing strategy that builds awareness organically and through multiple channels.

2. Balancing Customer Support & Self-Service Models

Many SaaS providers use varying business models, including self-service, managed service, and automated service models for customer support.

These models relate to the amount of support the SaaS vendor provides, greatly affecting the cost of managing and running their platforms.

SaaS companies now use AI-driven automation and personalization to enhance customer service. AI-powered chatbots handle routine inquiries, providing instant responses and freeing up support teams for more complex requests.

Personalization at scale ensures that customers receive solutions based on their history, preferences, and behavior, improving satisfaction and retention.

I have seen how SaaS companies integrate AI into customer service. By doing so, they streamline operations, improve response times, and deliver a better support experience.

AI-powered automation can also streamline repetitive tasks like email campaigns, lead scoring, and customer segmentation.

Personalization at scale can improve how your messaging resonates with users and prospects, improving engagement and conversion rates overall.

But if your SaaS platform has a notoriously high learning curve, such as Salesforce, and you use a self-service model for customer support, you may need to invest heavily in educational materials and tutorials to assist customers as they learn about your additional products and services.

3. Maximizing LTV: Acquisition Vs. Retention Focus

While we focus heavily on customer acquisition to grow the network of a SaaS provider, keeping customers on the network is equally important.

Whether you rely on a one-time purchase or a subscription model, constantly iterating with new products, releases, and continual customer support is critical for maintaining steady growth for your business and improving retention through product stickiness and value-driven marketing.

For this reason, SaaS companies need to invest in a wide-range marketing strategy that appeals to new and existing customers in different ways, reducing churn through onboarding, engagement, and proactive support.

4. Protecting & Leveraging Your Brand In Search

Most of your keywords may be branded, which can be difficult to scale if no one is aware of your software or brand.

For this reason, a mix of PPC, link building, and high-level content will be critical to growing your brand’s name and people’s affiliation with your products, along with positioning your brand as an authority in the industry.

5. Aligning SEO With Buyer Journeys & Intent Signals

Finally, when you’re dealing with branded products and multiple keywords, it can be difficult to decipher intent.

As we’ll discuss, strategically optimizing your funnel and content around intent will be important for your overall SEO strategy.

Benefits Of SEO For Sustainable SaaS Growth

Since SaaS companies rely on building economies of scale to reduce costs and increase profit, a long-term strategy like organic SEO makes the most sense for SaaS businesses.

Some of the benefits of SEO for SaaS include:

• Sustainable, Scalable Growth: Building a predictable pipeline of high-intent leads without reliance on paid acquisition.
• Lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): Reducing dependency on expensive PPC campaigns and improving marketing efficiency.
• Stronger Brand Authority & Visibility: Dominating search results, positioning your brand as the go-to solution in your industry.
• Higher Customer Retention & Engagement: Using authoritative content to educate users, improve onboarding, and reduce churn.
• Enhanced Omnichannel Performance: Improving conversion rates across paid, social, and email by aligning messaging with organic search insights.

I want to note that high-value content doesn’t just fuel SEO. It also enhances other channels, providing compelling material for nurturing campaigns, retargeting, and demand generation across paid media and email for both acquisition and retention.

More importantly, SEO isn’t just about ranking – it’s about owning the conversation around your software.

Strengthening brand visibility in organic search ensures that when decision-makers actively seek solutions, your SaaS brand is front and center in the search engines for long-tail searches.

So, by establishing yourself as a thought leader and building a loyal customer base using a mix of content and SEO, you can build out a wide-scale network of users that reduce hosting costs and accelerate your growth.

To get started, let’s discuss seven actionable SEO strategies for CMOs of SaaS brands.

7 Actionable Ways To Scale SaaS Businesses With SEO

1. Lay The SEO Foundation For Scalable Growth

First and foremost, you need to build a user-friendly site where people can download your products, contact customer support, and read content.

Some technical fundamentals your website needs include:

Many of these technical factors are binary in Google’s eyes – pass or fail – making them non-negotiable table stakes for achieving high-quality search visibility.

Once your SEO foundation is in place, securing top rankings for authoritative content becomes significantly easier, while also ensuring visitors stay engaged and receive value once they arrive.

2. Align SEO Strategy With Customer Insights & Intent

Next, your team should develop a list of buyer personas you will pursue using multiple conversion tools. Input for buyer personas could be based on the following sources:

• Sales and marketing teams.
• Existing analytics sources (e.g., Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or Paid Media Channels).
• Customer service representatives.
• Direct feedback from customer surveys and interviews.

Now, your buyer personas or avatars will differ whether you’re targeting a B2C or B2B space.

In a B2C space, your buyer persona will be based on several demographic and psychographic inputs, including:

• Location.
• Age.
• Interests.
• Occupation.
• Education level.

For example, if you were selling photo editing software, you would likely create separate avatars for professional and freelance photographers and hobbyists.

On the other hand, your B2B persona will likely target specific people in an organization, such as managers, key decision-makers, founders, or daily users.

For example, one marketing campaign and persona may focus on a software solution for sales teams and managers.

At the same time, another campaign in the SEO space may target SEO managers looking to switch from existing products.

Once you have a list of buyer personas and avatars, you can create strategic campaigns with actionable solutions that appeal to these personas on both paid and organic channels.

3. Drive Conversions With Full-Funnel SEO

As a SaaS CMO, you will likely need to create separate content for separate buyer’s personas, but also for new and existing customers.

In terms of acquisition, creating specific content at each stage of your individual sales funnel will increase your chances of conversion.

Awareness

Create awareness that the user has a problem and that your software can solve it. Common marketing materials include:

• Blog posts.
• Guest posts.
• Press releases.
• Boosted social media posts.
• Paid advertisements.

Interest

Build interest in your products and find ways to engage with users.

For example, encouraging users to sign up for your newsletter or email service can be a great way to engage with users over time.

At this stage, you could send emails to users or hit them with a pop-up advertising a free ebook, case studies, testimonials, white paper, or any other high-level content that speaks to your products while encouraging user-generated content and community engagement.

Evaluation/Decision

Engage with users further to push them closer to a conversion. Some common tactics include:

• Free trials.
• Limited consultations.
• Free demos.
• Free beta testing.

Purchase And Loyalty

Once a user has purchased one of your products, continue to engage them with special offers or educational content that improves their user experience and delivers satisfaction.

Hopefully, at this stage, you can generate strong brand loyalty, encouraging word-of-mouth advertising to grow your network.

4. Prioritize High-Impact Keywords For Business Growth

Since the acquisition cost for early-stage SaaS providers is incredibly high, it’s important to curate a strategic organic keyword strategy that brings qualified traffic to your website.

Some strategies to generate high-converting keywords and to use them appropriately include:

• Target a list of your highest-converting PPC keywords.
• Analyze what keywords competitors are bidding on and targeting organically.
• Optimize for informational keywords (e.g., photo editing software: “How to enhance a photo”).
• Leverage “integration” related terms if your software works with other products.
• Focus on benefits (e.g., increase, improvement, automation, etc.).
• List features (e.g., photo editing, red-eye removal, cropping, etc.).
• Segment target keywords by intent across your sales funnel (e.g., informational keywords at the top-of-the-funnel and keywords about features/benefits for mid-funnel content).
• Optimize for lower volume, niche keywords with less competition to carve out market share.

5. Strengthen Domain Authority With Strategic Content Clusters

Once you have a list of keywords and an actionable content strategy for your funnel put in place, it’s time to execute.

Since SaaS products are fairly sophisticated and highly competitive, it’s ideal to follow Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) to craft your content.

In addition, I also recommend creating topic clusters around topics with similar content to reinforce the main topic, generate authority, and answer as many user questions as possible.

HubSpot is a good example of a blog and SaaS platform that creates highly sophisticated content clusters around its main products, including blogs and user tutorials.

To create a topic cluster, start with a seed keyword that serves as the main topic, such as “Photography,” and create a series of related topics.

For example, Adobe provides a series of photography tips designed to educate users about and sell their products, such as Photoshop.

Screenshot from Adobe, March 2025

By creating rich resource content, you can build a community of people who come to your brand, not just for products but also for thoughtful advice.

As a bonus, leverage community forums to further engage and educate users with common troubleshooting concerns with your products.

6. Leverage Backlinks To Boost Credibility & Rankings

While backlinks are still a valuable ranking signal, I view backlinks as a more valuable promotion strategy.

If you follow my content tips above, you will create many linkable assets that naturally accrue backlinks and can be used for promotion to earn more.

For example, white papers, ebooks, surveys, studies, and tutorials are great resources for educating people and helping them cite information for their own research.

However, to gain early exposure and build links to content, follow these actionable tips below:

• Guest post on popular blogs and websites to generate buzz.
• Promote educational content on paid channels, such as Facebook and Google.
• Email educational content to relevant people in your industry to build awareness.
• Contact resource pages for links to your software.
• Conduct roundup interviews with industry professionals.
• Promote surveys and studies through press releases or paid channels.

7. Integrate SEO With Paid, Social & Product-Led Growth

Finally, combine all of these strategies into an omnichannel strategy.

Using a mix of PPC for brand exposure, content to build authority, and organic SEO to scale customer acquisition will provide the best strategy to scale an early-stage SaaS business.

Furthermore, promoting high-level content like a white paper over advertisements, email, social media, and all other channels is a great way to earn exposure, build links, and drive traffic to your site.

Combine your PPC and SEO keyword research to optimize your funnel and create a consistent marketing strategy that nurtures users from awareness to the decision stage.

Bottom Line

SEO and SaaS don’t just sound alike, but they truly do go together!

While paid advertising is essential for early brand visibility, a strong SEO strategy creates a sustainable path to reduce dependency on paid channels and scale your online presence organically.

Investing in SEO for enterprise SaaS brands should drive consistent, high-intent traffic while improving overall marketing efficiency and creating long-term ROI.

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Featured Image: SergeyBitos/Shutterstock

Voice Search Optimization At Scale: A Guide For Enterprise Marketers via @sejournal, @makhyan

Smartphones put the world at our fingertips. People have questions that need answering, as well as the services or products they need.

All of these things are just a search away, and now, we’ve seen a cosmic shift from traditional search to voice search and voice assistants.

Statistically, voice search and assistants are not something that enterprise marketers can ignore because:

• Almost half of U.S. internet users (48.7%) will use voice assistants, according to eMarketer forecast.
• 54% of consumers are leaning towards voice technology in the future.
• 49% of U.S. consumers use voice-enabled searches for local services.

Voice optimization at scale is what every business should be doing. For enterprises, the challenge is scale due to the wealth of content assets they control.

In this guide, we’ll take a look at specific tactics and optimizations that will support your voice strategy, including schema markup, keyword research, site speed, FAQs, Google Actions, and more.

Here’s how to begin optimizing for voice searches, with a focus on enterprises.

Voice Optimization 101

Create Content And Voice Search Guidelines

Marketing teams should sit down with the content team or send guidelines outlining the importance of voice search optimization, incorporating these keywords and protocols to ensure optimization.

Enterprises should have SEO governance in place already.

However, you’ll need to revise your existing governance and protocols for voice search. In fact, you want to add entire sections that focus primarily on voice.

Why?

Content creators and teams are bound to make mistakes.

It’s up to your protocols to find issues with content by performing thorough content checks.

Analyzing content before it’s published should be part of your processes already.

If it’s not, you can add in:

• Thorough content review before posting.
• Optimization analysis.
• Comparing content to researched keywords and questions.

Guidelines are a key part of every aspect of enterprise marketing because team members can come and go so often.

Redefine Your Keyword Research To Incorporate Long-Tail Keywords

Here’s some good news: Assistants are smarter than ever before. Today’s voice assistants can understand a person’s voice even with:

• Background noise.
• Diverse accents.
• Dialects.

Hyper-personalization is prominent in the way assistants respond to users, which means enterprises must gather as much data and information about their ideal target market as possible.

You have to go the extra mile to understand your audience and their needs to optimize for voice.

For voice assistants, you have to push your SEO further because, instead of simple queries, people are asking complex questions to voice assistants like they would to a friend.

How?

Adding in more of the long-tail keywords that have long been neglected on the enterprise level.

Long-tail keywords often have lower search volumes and are less of a priority for enterprises that target high-value and high-traffic keywords. However, voice search is natural and longer than just one- or two-word phrases.

Your pages need to answer questions (just like featured snippets do) and should include:

• How do I use XYZ product?
• How much do XYZ products cost?
• How do I fix XYZ problem?
• Where.
• Who.
• What.
• Etc.

People using search are asking questions, and you need to answer them. Redefine your keyword research process to include more long-tail keywords and question keywords.

Create processes and procedures for SEO teams – internal and external – to incorporate questions into your current content creation process.

Multimodal Search Optimization And The Rise Of Visual Search

Visual search isn’t exactly new. You take a picture, pop it into Google Lens, and it tries to find a match for you.

For example, that adorable dog bed that you saw at your friend’s house? You can take a photo and search for the exact item on Google.

But, at the I/O developer conference in 2024, Google added something new to Google Lens.

• You shoot a video.
• Ask questions in the video.
• Get an answer back.

Users can take a video of their broken toilet and ask why the flange is stuck and what they need to fix it – all in video format. Google will now analyze the video and respond to you.

Vision language models (VLMs) are advancing, but enterprises will need to focus on other multimodal searches, too:

• Text-to-image search.
• Image-to-text search.
• Image-to-image search.

Envision an enterprise for high-end luxury apparel.

A user uploads an image of a floral pattern and adds the query, [floral dress in this style but with blue roses], and a return query may show your product.

Clear visuals with the proper description optimization may help the enterprise rank for this type of multimodal visual search.

Optimize For Site Speed And Mobile Experience

Voice searches come primarily from mobile and assistant devices.

Every enterprise must optimize heavily for mobile with:

• Responsive designs.
• Fast site speeds.

Your team should periodically run Google PageSpeed Insights to find issues slowing down your site and to improve load time.

Multimedia optimization is crucial, especially with the rise of multimodal search. Compressing images and videos, implementing lazy loading, and browser caching are all things that you can begin doing today to improve the mobile experience on your site(s).

See 10 Enterprise Page Speed Optimizations & Implementation Tips to learn more.

Optimize For Local Search To Boost Business

Local and regional optimizations are huge for businesses that operate locally.

Over 50% of people search for local businesses via voice search.

For example:

• Where is the nearest Subway near me?
• What grocery stores are open nearby?
• Where is the closest pharmacy?

You’ll want to review the enterprise’s Google and other local listings.

Listings should always include the company’s operating hours, short blurbs, and photos.

Complete listings make it easier for searchers to reach out to your business or visit it in person.

Terms may include “near me” phrases, or they can be specific, such as [car manufacturers in Detroit].

One tip crucial to an enterprise’s success when optimizing for local is to account for regional or area slang.

Your research teams should understand local slang and dialects that may be used in a search.

For example, [where can I get the best soda in Boston] will change to [where can I get the best pop in Ohio] due to regional slang.

Internal teams should help you create these distinctions before moving into new markets to help content creation and search engine optimization teams maximize local voice search potential.

In the last few years, voice assistants have nearly doubled. From your iPhone and Android to Alexa and other platforms, assistants are everywhere.

Personal preferences are taken into consideration, as well as your location across all three types of searches:

1. Discovery: Find a plumber in Atlanta, Georgia.
2. Direct: Call Bill’s 24/7 Plumbing and Septic.
3. Knowledge: Why is my water turning brown in Atlanta?

Conversational phrasing must be considered across all enterprise offices to help capture as much local search traffic as possible.

Enterprises must do more for voice searches than just claim and optimize their listings on Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, and other local directories.

You need to focus on long-tail keywords, refine your keyword research even further, and try to add context to your content.

Master Schema Markup To Add Content Context

Leveraging schema is crucial to help search engines make sense of an enterprise’s site content. Review and incorporate schema markup guidelines to help boost voice search.

A few tips that can help you master schema are:

• Start using Google’s Speakable Schema (beta) for sections of your text that are best for Google Assistant and voice search.
• Use analytics to help understand keywords and phrases customers are using.
• Find speakable snippets in new and old content to add schema.
• Think of your content in a conversational way to enhance context.

Schema markup, when used properly, can help add context to the content on each site and allow for greater voice search potential.

Speakable Schema lets you fine-tune your control over how voice assistants highlight your content. For example:

{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "WebPage",
"name": "Ludwig’s homepage",
"Speakable":
{
"@type": "SpeakableSpecification",
"cssSelector": ["intro", "summary"]
},
"url": "http://www.example.com"
}

Using JSON, you can add the speakable structured data to make your intro and summary speakable. You can adjust this for any cssSelector you like.

Enterprises are also finding greater success with voice when adding structured data for:

• Product information.
• Pricing.
• Availability.

As an enterprise, a bump of 1% to 2% traffic from search can add significant revenue to your bottom line. Schema.org has examples of how to use schema for ecommerce using microdata, RFDa, structure, and JSON-LD.

Add FAQ Sections Into Key Pages

Remember how you need to add questions to your keyword research?

It can be challenging to find ways to add questions to pages without interrupting the natural flow of your content.

How can you overcome this? Frequently asked questions.

FAQs can add immense value to your pages and help you start improving your voice search optimization.

One way to begin incorporating this is to:

• Perform a full content audit on the site(s).
• Identify pages and blogs where you can answer questions.
• Start adding FAQs to the most important pages and pages with the most potential.

Since you’re optimizing for voice search, answering questions in conversational tones is crucial.

Begin The Transition To Conversational Language

Content creators have heard about tone and consistency for decades.

“Speak the customer’s language” is often repeated across industries.

However, when dealing with voice search, a shift toward a conversational tone is emerging.

As it turns out, the stuffy “business tone” isn’t how most people use their Google Assistant or Amazon Echo.

You’ll need to ensure content teams are on board with these changes.

A quick meeting to reinforce conversational tones and maybe an update to briefs sent to writers can help drastically.

An excellent way to adjust content to be conversational is to have:

• Editors review all content.
• Read content aloud.

Small changes, and if you can add in spoken words and slang, can make a world of difference when trying to create more conversational content.

While there will always be traditional typed searches, enterprises and marketers should focus on the possibilities that voice search has to offer.

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Featured Image: fizkes/Shutterstock