How to Optimize Mobile Search for Voice, Barcodes and Images

Traditional tactics for search engine optimization will fade into a mobile-first world. The traditional behavior of typing key phrases in a search box is replaced by searches for voices, barcodes, and images.

Mobile searches have already overshadowed the office. Dark and long-tail searches will become more and more important. Think of a consumer – a cell phone and a wallet in hand – holding the product of a competitor. With a quick search by barcode or search for product images, she can search for better alternatives.

You can not type long-tail searches on mobile devices. But this difficulty also presents opportunities. In this post, I will discuss how to optimize mobile searches for voice, barcodes and images.

Voice Research

In December, Google's John Mueller asked for feedback on a potential new feature in Search Console to label voice searchers separately from the desktop, image, and mobile. It was a clue that we might soon have access to this feature.

So far, here is a solution for detecting voice searches that I've hacked with Google Data Studio.

The idea is that our word choices are usually different when we tap compared to when we speak. When we type, we normally use as few words as possible. We use many more words when we speak.

To detect voice searches, I've created a Google Data Studio report that you can clone and update. It lists keyword phrases that may be voice searches that your site displays in Google. (In "Using Google Data Studio for SEO", I explained how to create a report like this from scratch.)

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Let me explain. After using the Google Search Console connection in Data Studio, I dragged and dropped existing fields: Query, Clicks, Impressions, and Average Position . But, to identify long keyword phrases from mobile devices, I've created a new field, "Number of Words", and two filters, one for a minimum number of words, and another for Filter only mobile searches

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This is the code for the Number of words field.

 LENGTH (REGEXP_REPLACE (Query, "[^tnfr ]", "")) + 1 

To count words in search phrases, use this hint.

 REGEXP_REPLACE (Query, "[^tnfr ]", "") 

We eliminate all words and leave only spaces. Then we count spaces with LENGTH.

If you try to count words with spaces, you would be a short word. That's why we add 1 to the end.

We now want to filter the list to include only long sentences. The number of words differs among the websites. In the case of this example site, I found seven significant words. Again, my premise is that it's hard to type such long sentences in a mobile device. So, I guess long phrases of mobile search are spoken.

In addition, the sentences are for the most part questions and most of the time complete sentences, which also indicates that they are spoken.

The final filter will ensure that we see long sentences only from mobile devices. If necessary, we could also include searches on tablets.

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After these customization steps, you should have a report indicating the likely voice searches for which your site ranks on mobile, and whether these searches are generating traffic.

When I finalized the report (for an ecommerce client), I was surprised to find that well-ordered voice search keywords with correct impressions did not have any clicks. But, once I checked, it made sense. We did not write content or optimizations for these keywords. This is a huge missed opportunity for most retailers.

This report should also provide content ideas that have an application and for which your site is already classified.

As an aside, another interesting technique for attracting voice seekers is to write Actions for Google Assistant, instead of traditional content pages. These are applications to submit to Google. They usually require coding. In my next article, I will explain how to write a simple quiz application without code to provide personalized answers.

Search by barcode

Long-tail searches are not necessarily long. An example is people looking for SKUs, manufacturer numbers and similar product identifiers.

Again, it's hard to grab references in a mobile device. But it is easy to scan the barcode of a product.

Users of the Chrome app on an iPhone can tap and hold the Chrome icon to search for a barcode. For this example, I scanned the bar code of a book, which is an ISBN. It's simple and practical.

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Now, let's adapt the voice search techniques, above, to see if people are coming to your site from their phone using product identifier searches. The first step is to review your product numbers and find a regular expression that represents them.

For example, REI, the outdoor retailer, uses a six-digit product number. Thus, for REI, we would use " d {6}" to match exactly six numbers. If the identifiers start, say, with 1 to 5, we would use "[1-5] d {5}" instead. If your identifier uses letters and more or fewer numbers, you will need to adapt the regular expression. The hyphens are not likely to appear in search phrases, according to my experience.

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Instead of creating a new field and a filter, as we did with Word Count, above, we can create the filter directly. For the example site below, the SKUs have exactly five numbers. I've removed the mobile filter to be able to compare the desktop and mobile behavior with a pull-down.

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This report generated a number of desk searches for SKU numbers, but only a handful of mobiles. This is probably due to the fact that buyers are not familiar with the barcode analysis tool for the Chrome app, or that they are using the Amazon app instead.

If you find a decent number of SKU researchers, be sure to update the titles of your product pages to include them if you do not already do so. You can find a report to clone with this feature here.

Note that if your product identifiers could be confused with other identifiers, such as postcodes, they would not perform well in Google search because they would compete with irrelevant pages.

Reverse Image Search

Consumers are probably landing on your online store looking for images on desktops. Mobile researchers can do this too, without typing, using a Google feature called reverse image search.

Imagine a potential customer viewing a wallet on your mobile site in Google Chrome. Buyers can support and maintain the product image to perform an image search. When they do this, Google automatically fills in the image and description of the product, to search for other sites. There is no need to type.

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Unfortunately, connecting Google Data Studio to Google Search Console does not provide image search data. However, we can use the new Google Search Console performance report to get the information we need.

We can filter mobile image searches by selecting the type of image search, and also filter by Mobile Device. This would list the searches for moving images. We can approximate reverse image searches by filtering searches with very few search impressions, mostly a search.

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Focus on optimization opportunities in which you search for product images without clicks. Make sure all images in your main product have an alt text with the product name. Also make sure the names of the image files are relevant, not random letters and numbers.