Hello August and goodbye July! Once again, July’s been a pretty hectic month, with numerous office birthdays (Laura, Sam, Jonny, Michelle and Claudia), we’ve had our fair share of prosecco and shame. The countdown began for season seven of Game of Thrones, and a few of us rejoiced when Love Island finally came to an end (100% not our type on paper). July’s been a pretty great month, with our new SEO Executive Ben Wheatley joining the ever expanding team of Rice Ninjas, and we’ve had our fair share of pupper cuddles with Bex’s gorgeous pomeranian – Leo! You can check out his adorable Instagram account here.
Even though the digital marketing world has had to contend with the cutest doggo cuddles, it’s been a pretty exciting month. From PPC to digital PR, social media and SEO, there’s been a lot to keep up with. You should know the drill by now – grab a cuppa, put your feet up and check out these 10 amazing things that happened in digital marketing in July!
1. We’ve had some great Digital PR for some of our clients!
Just over three months ago Digital PR Specialist Mali Lewis joined the Rice team, and ever since we’ve been seeing some incredible results for some of our clients. We know this is a shameless plug for our Digital PR services, but if you’ve got it, flaunt it! We’ve seen amazing content in The Times and The Sun, with high-quality links back to our client’s sites, and we couldn’t be happier. Afterall, Digital PR is a great way to strengthen your business’s backlink profile and increase brand awareness… If you want to find out more, then check out the best PR stunts of 2017 so far!
2. Google is adding a ‘newsfeed’ to their site and app.
On July 19th the BBC reported that Google had added a ‘Facebook’ style newsfeed to its homepage, with the aim of showing users content that may interest them before they search. Similarly to other platforms such as Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook, users will be able to follow topics they are interested in, therefore tailoring the content they see to match their interests. The aim of this update is to make search as useful as possible. We’re interested to see where this is going, and what it means for the future of organic SEO! You can find out more here.
3. A search function has been added to Google’s dictionary box
Midway through July, TNW shared some news that search engine conglomerate Google had added a search function in their dictionary box. (We thought our screenshot was more appropriate…) This was a pretty quiet update, and TNW mentioned how it seemed a little counter intuitive – after all, you just need to enter another word in the search bar above with the command ‘define’ or ‘meaning’. However, we expect we’ll start to see synonyms, acronyms and sample sentences as this update develops! Want to find out more? Click here.
4. 3.7 million pages were analysed to find out what influences content rankings
Content marketing is a really important part of any business’s SEO strategy. Afterall, content is king…*queue eye rolls*. Cognitive SEO wanted to see just how much content influences rankings, so they analysed 3.7 million pages, 40,000 keywords and 4 million pieces of content, and found some incredible nuggets! They found that there was strong correlation between a high content performance scores and ranking on a high position – high performing content will almost give you a top ranking position in Google. This was an amazing study, and we think you should all check it out here.
5. We looked at ecommerce predictions for the rest of 2017
The past decade has opened up another world for brands to sell online, and with over 3.2 billion people in the world having access to the internet it’s no surprise that the world of e-commerce has taken off. From chatbots to social selling, we thought we’d have a go at staring into a crystal ball and make a few ecommerce predictions for the rest of 2017. You can check them out here.
6. 52% of people think that Google’s search results are biased
This month, Digital Examiner questioned 1,000 people for Google’s Consumer Confidence Report and the results were really interesting! 64% of respondents admitted that they didn’t know how Google made money from search, and 52% of people admitted that they felt Google’s results were biased (we’re thinking Clinton and Trump had a thing or two to do with this). You can find out more here.
7. AdWords got a new interface
This month, Google’s AdWords got a shiny new interface that has seven new features for PPC aficionados to trial and test! Search Engine Land agreed that the new interface wasn’t yet on par with the older version, but found these seven new features – you can check them out here!
8. WordStream released 7 nuggets of marketing wisdom from #MozCon
WordStream went to #MozCon in Seattle this month and gave us a round up of seven gold nuggets of wisdom that they had taken from the conference. One of our personal favourites was ‘you have to have s**t ideas in order to come up with great ideas’ – we could have told you that without going to the conference, but it’s nice to hear other SEO professionals saying it! Check out the other six nugs of info here.
9. Prime Day sellers saw a 60% increase in profits
This month Amazon held their annual 30-hour event, Prime Day. This was Amazon’s biggest sales day ever, with more people signing up for memberships than ever before. Amazon sellers had also seen a 60% increase in profit, a 92% increase in sales and a 66% increase in orders. The graph below shows 2-17 Prime Day’s sales per hour. Furbo Dog Camera claimed their daily sales on the site had increased over 500 times during Prime Day. Interested? Click here to have a peruse.
10. Facebook tests brands’ dynamic product ads in Marketplace
This month, Facebook started testing brands’ dynamic product ads amongst user’s product listings in their Marketplace. These ads look similar to Marketplace’s square-shaped organic listings and feature the image of a single product pulled from the product catalogues that participating advertisers have uploaded to Facebook. One reason for doing this was to relieve the pressure of ad loading on people’s Facebook feeds. We’re interested to see what this means for the future of Facebook advertising and sponsored posts… Check it out here.
