Do you know how Alexa and Siri decides which website to pull when they are asked a question?
Researches from digital strategy agency iProspect shine their opinion on how it works according to a study they conducted, The Future is voice activated.
This are the items they mentioned a website should have to be chosen by the smart assistants Alexa and Siri:
The first one is that the site must be popular online already. For now it seems that being popular keeps giving and giving.
The site should have a solid reputation. The quality of smart assistants answers it’s very important for the platforms to have authority and avoid user turnover for bad responses. Sites should have reputable links.
The site’s optimized for conversational queries. Better be prepared to respond to longer queries in conversational format. One of the first steps you can take it’s implement schema in your pages. Google has some documentation on how to do it and the website is schema.org.

It loads quickly. Conversations have this immediacy, people are expecting responses faster than traditional web pages, where there is usually visual cue on the loading process. If your site content doesn’t change often, cache it. Be careful, as Phil Karlton said:

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

Wanted to put this quote there today.

Last one is The site’s content is the same language the user speaks.
We don’t know for sure how Alexa or Siri picks a website to pull. Definitely this is a nice guidelines either way for your sites. Note that in this list, the biggest change is optimization for conversational queries and there is nothing about ranking being said, but surely there has to be some kind of way to prioritize websites, but also skills and actions. As we move towards a more voice activated world, it will become increasingly important to have content optimized for voiced queries.
Find the study in the episode notes at voicefirstweekly.com/flashbriefing/86.

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