Becoming the #1 Answer for Smart Speakers
Client: A large, established online publisher in the food and recipe niche.
Challenges We Faced
The client’s traffic was declining as users shifted from screens to smart speakers for cooking help:
Losing Traffic to Snippets
Competitors were winning “Position 0” for all major recipe and cooking questions.
Not Optimized for Smart Speakers
Their content was not being picked up by Google Assistant or Alexa for queries like “How to bake chicken” or “Recipe for [X].”
Poor Content Structure
Recipes were buried in long, personal blog posts, not in a machine-readable format.
Slow Mobile Page Speed
The site was bloated with ads and large images, providing a poor, slow experience for users in the kitchen.
No Recipe or How-To Schema
The site was not using the specific structured data needed for Google to understand its content.
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Our Approach – How We Solved These Challenges
Featured Snippet & Answer Engine Optimization
Our entire strategy focused on winning “Position 0.”
We reformatted all top recipe pages, placing a concise, clear answer (e.g., “The best way to…”) at the very top.
SEO for Voice Search on Smart Speakers
We prioritized simple, direct, and conversational content that would sound natural when read aloud by a device.
Technical SEO (for Voice)
A massive effort to improve Core Web Vitals & Page Speed. We compressed images, deferred non-critical JavaScript, and streamlined the site’s code to load instantly.
Schema Markup Implementation
Implemented Recipe schema across all 2,000+ recipe pages, including cooking times, ingredients, and steps.
Used HowTo schema for all cooking technique guides (e.g., “How to dice an onion”).
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Featured Snippet Wins (“Recipe”) | 40 | 650+ | +1525% |
| Smart Speaker Answer Rate | ~1% | 15% | +1400% |
| Organic Traffic | 110,000/mo | 165,000/mo | +50% |
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Advice for Marketers & Brand Owners
- Structure your data! For voice search, using specific schema like Recipe or HowTo is the most important thing you can do.
- Speed is everything. A voice search user will not wait. Your page must load instantly.
- Answer first, story later. Put the concise, clear answer at the very top of your page.
- Write for the ear, not just the eye. Read your content aloud. Does it sound natural and conversational?
Extra Factors That Made It Work
- The aggressive implementation of Recipe schema was a primary driver of success.
- A “user-first” redesign that prioritized page speed and put the answer at the top.
- Rank tracking for SERP features, not just keywords, to monitor our snippet wins.
