Welcome to this month’s Digital Marketing News Roundup! As ever, the digital marketing world has seen some dramatic changes in July, affecting both SEO and PPC. In this blog, we’ll go through these key changes, providing all the information you need to stay up to date.
How CTRs have been affected by AI overviews
We knew Click Through Rates would be at a detriment following the rise of AI overviews. A recent analysis has found that Google’s top organic CTRs have dropped from 28% to 19%, with this decrease being correlated to the advancement of AI overviews.
The decline steepens the further down the search results you go, and presumably, this trend will only continue as Google’s use of AI increases.
SEO has many factors that constantly fluctuate in how much weight they carry in terms of site ranking, based on trends and Google core updates. CTRs have been a crucial part of this for a long time now, and the near redundancy of these will change SEO experts’ strategy to rank highly in the SERPs completely.
Google’s June Core Update – Where are we now?
This core update ended up being a 16-day rollout, completing on the 17th of July. With speculation that it’s one of the biggest updates we’ve seen in some time.
Many sites saw negative results from this update – a significant decline in rankings and search visibility.
Another main change noticed is the SERP volatility spikes post-update, which is shown in SEMRush’s figure below:
This wavering stability of rankings creates an unpredictability of traffic and CTRs. Ensure you are monitoring traffic patterns and keeping an eye on the impact on your niche.
Read our recent blog on ranking drop diagnosis to better your understanding of why the traffic to your site has decreased.
A SERP Shakeup
SEMRush has recently concluded that 16% of the current top ten ranking URLs on Google weren’t even in the top 20 before the core update.
This massive shift in Google’s ranking strategy can severely hinder SEO experts due to the unpredictable change in approach necessary, rendering previously successful and established SEO practices ineffective.
Google MUVERA
On the 25th of June, Google announced MUVERA, a multi-vector via Fixed Dimensional Encodings (FDEs) retrieval algorithm. This algorithm’s main purpose is said to be to allow web-page retrieval to be more accurate, all with a higher degree of efficiency.
The MUVERA algorithm ranks fewer candidate pages, therefore only promoting the most relevant pages. This highlights just how important the quality of content being published must be these days to rank highly.
Instagram Indexing
This month, a whole new method of content discovery has arisen from Instagram’s Indexing update.
Search engines such as Google will now be able to index public posts and reels from a professional Instagram account, and therefore allow these to appear in the search results.
For example, Google Gemini’s recent Instagram posts are showing in the SERPs below. When you click through these links, no Instagram account is needed, therefore allowing their content to be viewed quickly and efficiently.
This extra channel of traffic to a site’s content is so important to its SEO strategy, as it can be a great opportunity to increase visibility beyond the Instagram platform, therefore reaching that wider audience.
Google Snippets Including Hyperlinks
Links such as “see more” are being tested in Google’s snippets, jumping to the related content that the meta description was lifted from on the webpage.
The Search Engine Roundtable collated several examples from the community showing this.
Google has tested similar features to this over recent years. Let’s see if this one sticks around!
Key Dates for your Marketing Diary
You don’t want to miss some of the upcoming dates this August, great marketing opportunities available that can be factored into your content strategies:
17th August: National Non-Profits Day
21st August: World Entrepreneurs Day
25th August: Summer Bank Holiday
28th August: National Thoughtfulness Day
Stay up to date with Wildcat Digital
Here at Wildcat Digital, it is our passion to support your ambition through clever digital marketing strategies, helping your business punch above its weight online.
Our dedicated and expert team is here to help you and your business get your foot in the door of SEO and PPC. Arrange a free consultation today.
Catch up with our last few Digital Marketing Roundups here:
Paul Pennington
SEO Account Director
