Everyone wants more web traffic, right?
What if I told you there was a fairly simple thing you can do to get more traffic from Google?
In this post we are going to talk about how to use Google’s conversational search to get more web traffic.
What is conversational search?
Back at the end of May in 2013, Google introduced conversational search.
Basically, conversational search is the ability to either speak or type in a question and have Google present you with results based on it.
Conversational search was really the end product of combining several updates, such as the speak your search and previous query functionalities. They also have now added knowledge graph, which basically is a way that Google can straight up answer your search rather than just showing a list of web pages in results.
So if you asked, “When does Star Wars The Force Awakens come out in theaters,” knowledge graph would answer with the following:
Actually, that search isn’t all that helpful as the movie really doesn’t open in most theaters until December 18th, 2015, but you get the idea. Also, that answer isn’t wrong, as that was the initial release of the film when they had the big premiere.
How does conversational search work?
Whereas in the past you were basically entering keywords and then getting results based on those, conversational search is Google’s new way of acknowledging that something is a question and understanding what you are searching for on a higher level.
So before, if you typed in a search of “Who was the tallest president,” Google would have looked at each word as an equal part of your search. You could have put president in quotes to make sure that word was included in results, which would have been really helpful, but basically you would have been better off just typing tallest president.
You really had to know how to use Google and/or search engines to be able to use them effectively. Now, with conversational search, you can just ask a question. Google will recognize that you are asking a question and try to give you an exact answer if possible, or at least give you better results that aren’t giving equal weight to words like “how to” or “what is.”
How to use conversational search to get more traffic from search engines?
Now that we’ve kind of covered what conversational search is and how it works, you of course now want to know how to use it to get more traffic.
Discussing Suggested Queries
First, there are the suggested queries that Google shows when you start to type a query. Whereas before we had to guess what people were searching for as Google Keywords Tool and AdWords won’t tell us, we can now use the suggested searches to first make an educated guess about what people are searching for, and then to see the top four searches.
To do this, figure out the question you think users are asking about your topic, and just start to type it into Google. You will get four suggested searches right away. You can take those four suggested searches and stick them into the Google Keyword Tool to see how many people are searching for them.
If a search has enough volume, and/or is something you would be able to show up in search results for (as in it isn’t too competitive), then the next step is that you can use that exact search in your content. While Google has become smarter at identifying queries and specific words, it still is really helpful to be an exact match for a search, and if you have the exact question people are searching for along with a good answer, Google might use you in knowledge graph or put you as the first result in that results page.
Adding exact search queries into your content
Next, we need to know how to use the search info we’ve taken from Google’s suggested search queries and use it to get traffic. There are a lot of ways to do this. You might use the question as your post title and then spend the post answering it. I find that works, but results in shorter posts that Google isn’t crazy about for other long tail searches.
A better option is to have long posts that answer lots of questions on a subject, and also contain lots of keywords about that subject. For instance, this post that I am writing has several questions that people are searching for written into it. I might get exact match traffic based on just having those questions. I also will get traffic because this is a longer post that has a few keywords used a lot which will bring in some long tail traffic.
I’ve found that this method of answering questions in your content is super effective in bringing in traffic. For you affiliate marketers out there, this works especially well if you are talking about a product. Just answer all the questions about that product that you can and you’ll gain some traffic from conversational search as, inevitably, users will ask those same questions. I should also mention that, while a lot of people know about this new approach to getting search engine traffic, not a lot of sites seem to be taking this approach.
I hope that, having read this post, you are now able to use Google’s conversational search to get more web traffic!