When we saw John Mueller from Google mentioned there was no “SEO trivia” game for Google Home, and how easy it was we knew we needed to spring into action to be the first, or at least one of the first. We love playing with our Google Home at Elite Strategies so when we heard there wasn’t an SEO Trivia app, it was a no-brainer.

Game on, John!

Our previous “SEO quiz” was such a huge success that we knew making an SEO quiz or trivia game with Google Home would be really fun.

There was no real coding involved, although some knowledge of scripting is required if you want to be able to program in advanced features like custom tones etc.

The requirements for submitting an app for Google Home or Google assistant are just as stringent as submitting an app for Google Play. Everything counts, spelling and grammar included.

Our first few versions were completely denied because the title did not contain the correct name. It always helps to be the first in your niche to do something..or one of the first!

The Google Home SEO Trivia Game

To be honest, this was really just a test. We knew eventually our clients might want their own version of this so we wanted to get started by testing on our own.

How to Play

To play the SEO Trivia game for Google Home simply say “OK Google, Play SEO Trivia game.” or you can just say “OK Google, Play SEO Trivia” If that doesn’t work try pronouncing SEO as “see-oh” but you shouldn’t have a problem. With all things voice related, try to speak slowly and clearly.

The game is structured like this:

  • you are asked 4-5 questions at a time
  • most questions are one word answers
  • most answers are True/False or Multiple choice

You can play this game on your Google Home or any Android 6.0 device with Google App / Assistant installed. You can play with your voice, or you can play the text version as well.

The text version is pretty straightforward, you just answer by clicking on the answers provided. It will respond to you as you play the game.

Making an App for Google Home

Google really made this process quite simple to make a Trivia game. All it takes is the ability to follow directions and craft a spreadsheet.

We had a few challenges migrating our primary SEO quiz from normal format to “voice format.” For instance, many of our questions required the test taker to respond with a full sentence answer. While that may work on Google Home, it poses a number of different problems such as the way someone might phrase an answer, etc. It was best for us to craft questions so that the answers are e.g.

  • Danny Sullivan
  • Google Search Console
  • Twitter Cards
  • meta description tag
  • True
  • False

Basically, it works best if the answers are pretty much static.

Start by going to Google Actions for developers, and sign in. You need a Google Developer account, which you can get a free version up to a few projects. Then “create a new project” from there just give it a name.

From there just follow Google’s guides on how to create a Trivia app for Google home. My only advice is to follow the directions verbatim. 

We were denied two times for really minuscule reasons:

The other cool thing is once your app is published, you can start to add in some cool addons on the backend. I haven’t even begun to explore all of the addons they have, but some of them look really cool!

If you want, you can test your app out on the Google simulator.This is a great part of the developer console to check out how your app works before you launch it.

That’s about it for now. If you have any questions for us, let us know but really we are looking for feedback on our SEO Trivia Game! Toodles!