Digital Marketing News Roundup 25 June 2019

The fast paced world of digital marketing is changing all the time. Staying up-to-date with the latest developments in content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimisation is an essential aspect impacting the success of your campaigns.Here are some of the latest stories in digital marketing, advertising, and promotion:

New Report Shows Best Time to Post on Social Media Timing has always been an important consideration in social media marketing, and a new report by Sprout Social highlights the best times to publish social media content for the highest levels of audience engagement. The study, which analysed the behaviours of 25,000 Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter users, found that in many cases, mid-week lunch times had the highest engagement rates as workers take time away from the desk to browse online. The anomalies were found to be the consumer goods and education industries, which both had higher engagement rates at the weekends. Google Updates Algorithm for June 2019 Between June 3rd and June 8th, Google rolled out its new June 2019 search algorithm update; the very first update to be pre-announced by the search engine giant. While Google has remained notoriously vague on exactly what changes were made, the introduction of video carousels suggests that video content is being given much more weight; an idea supported by reports that YouTube’s visibility grew by 25% following the update. It also appears that Google is prioritising site reputation as a ranking factor, with low value content news websites reporting the most notable drops in organic traffic. Google Re-Evaluates Ranking Factors Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller has confirmed that ‘relevance and quality’ have been given more weight as ranking factors following Google’s June 2019 algorithm update. Mueller claims that the update does not focus on anything very specific, but does take content relevance and quality into account. News website The Daily Mail has been one of the most publicly affected following the changes, with SEO Director Jesus Mendez claiming that the website experienced a 50% loss of traffic, in addition to a 90% drop in Google Discover traffic, showing the severity of changes. Security Flaws Found in SEO Plugins Digital marketers are being urged to carefully consider the tools that they use to improve visibility and boost awareness after security flaws were found in some of the most popular SEO WordPress plugins. SEO by RankMath was found to have major vulnerabilities according to a report by the WordPress Vulnerability Database, sparking the need for an urgent security update to be applied. It was found that cookie information and upload data could be extracted from the plugin, with RankMath publishing two updates on June 21st and June 23rd to fix the security problems.