Welcome to this months online marketing report covering March 2016. If you have not read one of these reports before the idea is to keep the read time under 2 minutes and only tell you what you need to know to help your website perform better.
If you have missed previous reports they are still relevant and worthwhile quickly going through them, here is a link: Online Marketing Report
Right, let’s get going, grab yourself a Coffee and enjoy the read!
2 Minute Online Marketing Report
Google Signals
I guess the biggest news this month was the admission from Google of the top two signals Google uses to help rank web pages. If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook you would have seen our posts on this. The two signals are Links and Content, we don’t know which is number 1 and 2 but we know it’s those too.
Movement in the Ranking results
At the tail end of March (26-28th) we think Google performed an update/refresh however we are not currently sure what was updated. We know it wasn’t the Penguin algorithm update we have been waiting for.
The Penguin Algorithm
Google have said that they understand the implications that the Penguin algorithm update could have for many websites, therefore they will not release the latest Penguin algorithm update until it is ready and they are happy with it.
The new update when it arrives will be continuously running, this will help if the websites ranking positions have dropped you should be able to identify the links that may have caused this. This is great news for us when it is live, just make sure you or your SEO agency is monitoring your rankings well and your link building.
It will not be instant but will relatively quick.
More information about the Penguin algorithm came out this month. Some website owners who have been penalised by the last Penguin update and are currently waiting (… and waiting) for the next update have asked Google to manually run the algorithm on their sites. Google however, can not run the algorithm manually so they will just have to wait.
Google User Experiences
Google have been rolling out many different small UX changes to their sites, we haven’t listed them here as they don’t affect how your website performs in search engines, which is what these blog post are about. Also, it would probably be longer than our 2 minute read limit.
A Google Ranking Signal, or not
Google have confirmed that people clicking on search results do not affect page ranking, what might happen though is that Google might see a trend of people clicking on a link and give it a temporary ranking benefit, but very temporary!
Bad SEO = Bad results
Google also mentioned in a recent interview that websites tend to get penalised due to Bad SEO, good SEO agencies perform a great service so it is now even more important to choose the right SEO agency.
Sites ranking 10th perform better than 9th
Google this month said that since the movement of the PPC Adwords adverts from the right of the search results websites that rank 10th perform better than pages that are ranked 8th or 9th.
Pay-Per-Click Adwords News
Some PPC Adwords news was announced this month. Google will be redesigning the whole Adwords website and service. It will take 12-18 months to do and they are not starting for about year.
You can buy Yahoo!
Finally Yahoo! is up for sale. If you wish to bid for the search engine/online service you have until 11th April to send in your bid. Good Luck!