Welcome to ‘What Happened in Search’.
Packed full of the week’s search marketing news each Friday, this week we explore SEO winners and losers, social media ad revenues and our lessons from BrightonSEO.
BATTLEGROUND
addmustard’s SEO team uses searchmetrics to analyse which sites came out on top, and which didn’t fare so well, in last week’s natural search.
Written by our Junior SEO Analyst, Dina Mouhandes, here’s this week’s Battleground.
WINNERS
soundcloud.com
SoundCloud has made the most progress in terms of visibility this week. The site saw a massive increase during August, probably due to news of PRS reportedly taking legal action against the company. This site then suffered a decline before a rapid increase in visibility this week, most likely because of the news that a deal between Soundcloud and Universal Music Group is being challenged as a result of the PRS issue in August.
monarch.co.uk
Last week the Monarch site saw a huge decrease in its overall gain. However, this week Monarch’s visibility has rapidly increased again. The previous issue is most likely due to a technical glitch.
theregister.co.uk
The Register has seen a gradual increase in search engine visibility. The cause of this is likely due to onsite enhancements and the expansion of good, quality content.
LOSERS
youtube-mp3.org
youtube-mp3.org has gained steady visibility, but this week a rapid drop has affected the site. This site is an mp3 converter for YouTube videos. One assumption could be complaints received regarding the site’s legal factors, as it allows users to freely take videos from YouTube. Other potential causes are a penalty from Google or a technical fault. addmustard will continue to monitor.
friv.com
Similarly, friv.com had made steady gains and this week has rapidly dropped off. It seems the .com and .co.uk sites are competing against each other. The .co.uk has seen increased visibility, therefore .com is being cannibalised.
promopro.co.uk
promopro.co.uk has suffered a massive decline in visibility, as the site has changed from a top level domain name ‘promopro.co.uk’ to a sub domain ‘uk.promopro.com’. Therefore, the previous domain is being cannibalised.
BRIGHTONSEO: THE LESSONS
addmustard’s SEO team once again hit the last of 2015’s BrightonSEO conferences.
With a packed schedule, and plenty of hot air to boot, finding the events worthy of addmustard’s time was no mean feat.
For their post-conference debrief, the team steered away from the traditional summary format, and have written about their top three lessons taken from the day.
The biggest topics being discussed were mobile (surprise, surprise), local search and relationships.
With insights from the likes of Gary Illyes and Dave Trott, read Alice, Dina and Tom’s take on the events of BrightonSEO.
SOCIAL SALES
Social network ad revenues are growing faster than anticipated, according to eMarketer’s new forecast.
Spend is likely to reach $25.14 billion globally this year, with Facebook (inclusive of Instagram) expected to account for almost 65% of this.
According to the forecast, ad spend growth on the top three players differs greatly.
Twitter’s ad revenues are due to grow 61.8% – down from 66.9% predicted in April this year, which has been put down to slowing user growth and a lack of mass market opportunities for advertisers.
APP HAPPY
Apps generate the highest engagement rates, a recent comScore study has revealed.
Mobile accounts for 62% of time spent on digital media – time spent on mobile apps is up 90% vs 2013, accounting for 54% of share across all devices. Mobile browser usage has grown 53% in terms of minutes.
Desktop is still growing, but at a much lower rate, with a 16% increase from 2013, and takes up a 38% share of time spent on digital media.
comScore compared the top 1,000 mobile apps versus the top 1,000 mobile web properties. The measurement firm found that although apps have a much smaller reach than mobile, engagement is far higher.
BEEFING UP
This week Instagram announced that it has reached the 400 million active monthly user mark, with 75% of those users living outside the US.
The news, which puts Instagram ahead of Twitter in terms of monthly active users, comes as Instagram is rolling out improved ad capabilities and integration with the Facebook platform.