Us: “Okay, Google. How fast is voice search growing?”

Google: “According to comScore, 50% of searches will be performed through voice functions by 2020.”

Dang, fam. That’s a ton of searches. And that’s exactly why we gotta be on the ball with voice search…like right now. Luckily, Search Engine Journal is helping us get started. There’s a heck of a lot to cover so let’s dive right in.

How People Use Voice Search
The first thing you need to understand is we talk differently than we type. When speaking we tend to carry a more conversational tone. For example, using voice search one would say, “Where can I buy an Avocado peeler?” Whereas we would probably just type “avocado peeler” in a text search.

Essentially keep long-tail keyword phrases in mind.

What are People Searching for Using Voice Search
The most dominant search surrounds location. This could mean traffic updates, directions, local biz, or eatery info. You name it.

We also gotta talk about the upcoming holiday season. Last year, SEJ reported 25% of shoppers utilized voice assistants to locate emerging holiday deals and to research products. Oh, the opportunities.

Tips to optimize Voice Search content.

1. An awesome trick is adding keyword phrases into blog content and website copy. Just think about commonly asked questions regarding your business. Your ultimate goal should be to rank for Google’s paragraph answer featured snippet.
2. Voice search is the peanut butter to local SEO’s grape jelly. We’ll say it again the most popular reason people use voice search is for info on local biz. You want to take full advantage of Google My Business listing because this is where devices will look first to provide answers.
3. Voice search is like the great open ocean. Its potential is still wildly unknown. So how voice search is used today is incredibly important since that’s dictating the future.

You gotta understand the behaviors and keywords behind voice search for your industry. Mobile search will be your friend here. Look to mobile insights to get you started.

Want more detail? You know what to do!

Going hard with the SEO content today. Why? Because SEO is the most important piece of content marketing. For real. If you’re not SEOing your content, your kinda just wasting your time.

But SEO is confusing and complex and scary so a lot of marketers ignore it.

That’s why a dude by the name of Jason Zook decided to make SEO dead-simple. He had no knowledge of SEO before deciding he wanted to increase his organic traffic.

He tried some SEO tactics he read about and was able to drive 320,000 organic visitors to his website in 2017. We’d call that a success.

Here’s exactly what he did…

1. Write Helpful Or Entertaining Content. This approach to SEO isn’t about gaming some keywords. It’s about writing unique content that your audience will find helpful. Organic traffic shouldn’t be your goal. That should be a byproduct of creating killer content.
2. Find an article topic you actually care about. Forget about keywords. Find something you’re passionate about, or figure out a way to get passionate about your company, and write about that. People can feel passion in your writing. No passion and your writing will fall flat.
3. Hire an editor. Great writing is 43% writing, 71% editing (that doesn’t add up, but you probably didn’t notice). The point is, editors are almost more important than writers. Great content is not only written well, it’s also edited well.
4. Use your keyword and related keyword throughout your article. Okay, you do need to identify a target keyword. You can use SEMRush to identify the keyword you’re going after based on the difficulty of it. From there, use the keyword in the title, H2 heading, H3, bolded text, and your meta-description.
5. Bonus: Jason didn’t mention this, but we always recommend optimizing your URL extension too. It should be super short and just contain your keywords. For example, if your article is called, “The Complete Guide to Getting Amazing Instagram Engagement,” your URL extension should be /instagram-engagement

We didn’t even cover half of this one. TONS more to learn here…

Credit Karma is pretty known for having fun ads. And we appreciate a company who can keep that kind of reputation.

They recently released a string of ads that compare the easily attainable and the not so easily attainable. For example, if you’re an old guy, like our boss Rob (sorry Rob), the odds of getting approved for a credit card are more likely to happen than crushing the half pipe in a skatepark.

Makes sense, right? Well, the poor old soul in the commercial had to learn the hard way. But, ya know, YOLO right?