How to Optimize Your Site for Siri Search

With local search firmly on the rise, Siri is just another way of capitalize on the rapidly growing mobile market, especially for local businesses.

It is understood that 56% of “on the go” mobile searches have local intent. As voice command continues to become common practice, optimizing for services like Siri will become even more important.

Even if you don’t receive any extra traffic from Siri, these are all good practices that will aid your online marketing regardless.

 

How to Optimize Your Site for Siri Search

 

Be mobile friendly

This is probably one of the biggest factors to consider when optimizing your site for Siri, after all Siri is a mobile-based application.  If your website doesn’t provide a fluid mobile experience, Siri’s not going to want to send its users to your site.

What action should you take?

Run a Google Mobile Friendly check to see if your site is mobile friendly, and how you can improve your “user experience” on mobiles.

 

Focus Your Efforts on Yelp

Siri will often ignore search results & head straight for listings on Yelp & other local directories.  If you’re business isn’t listed in these places, you probably won’t be found by Siri. Furthermore if you lack substantial, quality reviews you won’t be favored by Siri either.

What action should you take?

Make sure that your business is accurately listed on Yelp, Google Places & Yahoo Places & actively encourage your customers to leave positive reviews.

 

Spend more time on social media

Siri has been known to pull its information from social media sites too.  If you aren’t active on most of the major social networks you could be ignored by Siri.

What action should you take?

Keep up an active membership of the major social networks, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn etc. Make sure that your profile is fully complete & includes valuable information such as: company address, phone number etc.

 

Add rich snippets to your web pages

Rich snippets (also known as structured data) add extra value to your search page listings.  In addition to your title & description structured data includes information such as your company telephone number, address &  any reviews.  Rich Snippets give Siri a much better chance at finding the information people search for the most, they don’t take long to add & will help your site to stand out in the search results with or without Siri.

What action should you take?

Use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper to determine which snippets you should add to your web pages, where & how to add them.

 

Add your business to Apple Maps

One of the biggest uses for Siri is directions.  Users might searching for somewhere to eat, a car repair shop or a specific store, whatever it is Siri relies on Apple Maps to help get you there.   If your business isn’t listed on Apple Maps you’re not just going to lose out on Siri users but IOS users in general.

What action should you take?

Make sure your business is listed on Apple Maps with correct information, phone numbers etc.   You can check or add your listing with Apple Maps Connect a service which has been rolled out for small businesses over the past year.