Got a nifty haul of stories that you’ll want to drop in your marketing meetings this week, so let’s get to
it.
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In 2020, voice search will make up half of all searches
So says Comscore. Between Google Assistant, Alexa, Siri, Google Home, and search functions built into traditional search engines, more and more people are searching the Web with spoken queries.
As the way people search changes, so should our content strategy when it comes to SEO.
Brian Dean at Backlinko pulled together results from analyzing 10,000 Google Home queries, which gives us some insight on how page load speed, HTTPS, and domain authority correlate to voice search results.
Plus, it looks like the typical voice search result is only 29 words long. But how long is the average article these results are pulled from? More on that in a minute …Plus, it looks like the typical voice search result is only 29 words long. But how long is the average article these results are
pulled from? More on that in a minute …
Twitter wants to be healthier, whatever that means
Twitter is a great place to make connections.
Twitter is also a great place to find out what those connections were very angry about yesterday.
The quip-based debate platform wants to be a good thing for humans, so they’re taking steps to avoid the social apocalypse. Or as they put it, "We’re committing to helping increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation around the world, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable toward progress."
But what does "health" mean?
Well, they’re not exactly sure. So they’re accepting submissions from academics who want to take a stab at defining it. It’s going to be a dream project for one team of researchers, and it’s going to be fun to see what comes out of it.
I have no idea what they’ll find. Cortico did a similar research project and found four key indicators of public conversational health—Twitter’s probably going to get a lot more specific.
If your brand relies on Twitter at all, this is something you’ll want to keep an eye on. You can bet that the findings from this study will bring about some changes to the platform. A smart marketer will be thinking about ways branded content contributes to the social conversations that these social media networks want to host.
So long, and thanks for all the Whiteboard Fridays
SEO demigod Rand Fishkin left Moz last week and has started a new company: Sparktoro. This coming-soon product will help marketers discover who their audience truly follows and what their audience reads. I’m on the waiting list to learn more—you might like to join me.
Rand
gives two pieces of advice that strategic marketers probably already knew to be true. But hey, it’s one thing to know you’re right—it’s another to hear it from an expert. Here they are:
"Video served as a dramatic accelerant for my personal brand, vastly more than I ever expected."
"Tricks, hacks, and individual point solutions never made a big impact for us (and honestly, they’ve never made a big impact for any other
company I’ve worked with or advised, either). […] For years I thought that the one right move would accelerate growth or the one right feature would make everyone love our product. But in fact, it’s when the whole became better than the sum of its parts that magic happened."
Word count and voice search
So the typical voice search result from Google Home is just 29 words
long. That’s not very long—it’s about the length of the Gettysburg address’ opening sentence.
So if voice search is getting more prevalent and voice results are short, what should we do about content length?
In Brian Dean’s study, he found that the average article that voice search results came from is about 2,300 words long.
Why?
Probably because long-form content has more "matches" to voice search results. There are more sentences to choose from, and presumably, a higher likelihood that Google will latch on to one.
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We’re working on a ton of great content for you on the Overthink Group blog. We have a post on the basics of B2B SEO strategy coming out this week, as well as some guides on remarketing, Rankbrain, and SERP features.
