SEO News

Mobile optimisation

• Almost three quarters (72%) of companies are planning to increase their spending on mobile channels this year, according to the Econsultancy / IBM Tealeaf Reducing Customer Struggle report.
• Three-quarters of organisations surveyed say that mobile is ‘important’ (42%) or ‘critical’ (32%) to their business objectives. Just 6% of respondents don’t consider mobile important.
• More than a quarter (27%) of responding organisations say their customers rate their brand’s mobile user experience as ‘good’ (23%) or ‘excellent’ (4%), up from a fifth in 2012.

What do you think are the most serious issues your customers encounter when they interact with your brand via a mobile device?

Google and ‘domain clustering’

• According to a study by Stickyeyes, Google has been looking to show more diverse results in the wake of Penguin 2.0.
• There are now, on average, 34.7 unique domains per 100 results as opposed to 19.3 before the uodate, meaning a number of terms weren’t fully impacted.
• 1,323 sites lost all their results. Only nine of these started with 10 or more results and 121 with three or more, possibly a combined blow along with the Penguin 2.0 update.
• 451 sites lost more than 50% of their results.
• 52% of the current index is occupied by new domains with 8,892 domains that didn’t rank now displaying.

Multi-platform news consumption

• According to the Reuters Digital News Survey, summed up nicely here, 29% of respondents (11,000 were surveyed) use a smartphone at least once a week for news.
• That figure rises to more than 40% for under 45s. 
• 30% of 25 – 34 year olads say their smartphone is thei main method of consuming news. 

Top 100 digital agencies

• The Top 100 Digital Agencies Report, sponsored by Sitecore, found that total fee income reported by the top 100 agencies this year is £1.18bn, up 23% from the £962m that these agencies earned last year.
• The research also found that creative activities drive the largest share of average agency fee income; it accounted for 17% of fees (or almost £203m). This was followed by technical development (14% / £168m), and marketing (12% / £148m).
• This year’s top 10 agencies were:

1. SapientNitro
2. LBi
3. AKQA
4. Engine
5. BAE Systems Detica
6. Salmon
7. Deloitte Digital
8. iProspect
9. RAPP
10. Wunderman Network UK

Most popular UK mobile commerce sites

• Stats from IMRG and Experian Hitwise show that Amazon is the most popular mobile retail site in the UK. 
• The Amazon UK and Amazon.com sites accounted for over 10% of mobile visits to retail sites in April 2013, with Argos receiving 2.3% of visits.
• Mobile now accounts for 20% of the UK online retail market, up from less than 1% in 2010.
• Mobile visits to online retail sites now account for almost one in three ecommerce site visits in the UK.

The data iceberg

• Our newly released State of Integrated Marketing Report found that many organizations are still in the process of building foundational capabilities around data.
• The chart below tracks the responses of companies with marketing budgets over $5MM, and looks at whether they have a current or planned capability across several data skill sets.

Percentage of traffic by Google search position

• According to a study by Chikita, the number one spot in Google’s organic results bags 33% of the clicks. 

Mobile email optimisation

• According to dotmailer’s Hitting The Mark study, two thirds of the UK’s top online retailers are failing to optimise email marketing for mobile.

Online retail sales

• According to the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index,  the online retail market grew by 16% year-on-year in May and by 5% on April 2013.
• Conversion rates rose to 4.9% (excluding travel) in May, up 20% compared to the same month in 2012 and 2011.
• However, average basket values were lower, at £77 from January to May 2013, down from £83 and £86 for the same period in 2012 and 2011 respectively. 

Mobile flight searches

• Greenlight stats show that were 3.2m online searches for flights last month, and more than 17% of these were made on mobiles. 
• Cheap flights’ was the most popular term searched for on Google UK, accounting for 17% of all flight searches, and 20% of all searches made on mobile.