It has been a busy year for the team here at Colewood so far and we have some exciting things to share with you in Q1’s agency round-up. After welcoming the new year what feels like only yesterday, the team have hit the ground running and accomplished amazing things over the last three months. We’ve said hello to new team members, new roles and new opportunities this year so far, setting 2023 up to be an exciting year of prosperity.
Say hello to Laura and Matthew!
To kick things off, we want to say an official hello to our wonderful new starters.
The SEO team welcomed Laura Moody to their team, entering a new role as Senior SEO Strategist back in January. Since then, Laura has introduced some innovative campaigns, insightful reporting and impressive strategies for our SEO clients, allowing us and them to excel even higher when it comes to organic search.
Matthew Jones recently joined the PPC team as a Paid Account Manager, providing the team and his clients with valuable insight into how to level up their paid search campaigns.
Graduate Schemes Complete for Katie and Ben
Not only do we have two new starters, but two of our existing graduates have now progressed into new full-time roles. We want to say a huge well done to Katie Rhodes and Ben Robinson on the completion of their graduate scheme with Colewood. After working with each department, Katie and Ben have chosen which team they want to progress on as they continue their career at Colewood.
Following her passion, Katie is now a full-time Email Marketing Strategist within the email team. Katie’s unlimited creativity and out-of-the-box thinking bring exciting new campaigns to our email clients, making her a valuable asset to the team. After spending 3 months in this department as part of her graduate scheme, Katie knew straight away that this career path was the one for her.
Ben’s talent for paid search has led him to pursue a career on our Paid team and is now a full-time Paid Account Manager. Head of Paid Search, Paul, recognised the remarkable talent Ben had for paid search and is thrilled to welcome Ben to the team. Ben’s keen eye for detail and understanding of paid advertising helps him deliver high-performing paid campaign clients.
Stephen, Paul and Olivia take London…
Some of the Colewood Digital team headed down to the capital to meet with a prestigious high street client to discuss how Colewood can take its online presence to the next level. Since it was Olivia’s first venture to London, plenty of sightseeing was also on the list for the trio, who visited Buckingham Palace, Big Ben and the London Eye.
WTSFest
We’re always looking at ways we can develop our skills further and continue to learn, and that’s why our Senior SEO Strategist, Laura, headed down to London for the WTSFest event, which welcomes women in tech SEO from all across the country to come together and expand their knowledge.
Laura had the amazing opportunity to sit in on some incredibly insightful talks from industry leaders sharing their wealth of knowledge. Some of her top talks from the event were the Neuroscience of Search talk by Giulia Panozzo who is a customer acquisition director at StockX, the Data Storytelling talk by Lazarina Stoy, who works as an SEO & Data Science Consultant and Leader at Intrepid Digital, and the Image SEO talks by Myriam Jessier, who is part of an SEO expert duo with Pragm. These talks gave a much bigger understanding of the strategy and marketing side of SEO, along with content-specific information for the team. Laura has returned to the office overflowing with valuable knowledge she shared with the SEO team, giving an edge to all our SEO campaigns.
NEC Birmingham – January Furniture Show
Not only did the Colewood team head to the big smoke a couple of times this quarter, but our Business Development Team also had the amazing opportunity to visit Birmingham for the January Furniture Show! Aside from admiring all the beautiful furniture showcased at the event, the team also had a great day catching up with clients and their suppliers, gaining an interesting insight into how our client’s businesses work.
There was also plenty of time for meeting lots of new faces, and familiar faces, especially for our Senior Business Development Executive and die-hard Boro fan, John Paul, who met the legendary Bryan Robson! What a highlight of the day, chatting business and football (mostly business of course 😉)
We are a Klaviyo Partner!
Our email marketing team have been working incredibly hard and are always striving to meet the ever-changing needs and demands of our clients. We can now proudly announce we are a Klaviyo partner, offering clients access to this innovative platform and providing them with the tools they need to succeed in their email marketing efforts.
A Month of Milestones!
We couldn’t round up the quarter without giving some well-deserved recognition to some long-standing members of the team who celebrated some impressive milestones at Colewood just last month.
We want to say a huge congratulations and happy FIVE YEARS to Paul Taylor and Stephen Hall. We’re incredibly grateful for the vast wealth of knowledge these two bring to their departments and the wider team here at Colewood. We truly are lucky to have such wonderful gentlemen heading up our paid search and business development departments.
PPC Account Manager Shauna Hannan has also recently celebrated a remarkable milestone of 4 impressive years at Colewood Digital. Shauna is a true asset to the Paid Search team and brings years worth of valuable experience and expertise to the table. Well done Shauna!
Industry News
In the ever-changing world of digital marketing and with technology and software advancing at increasing rates, the team at Colewood Digital always have an eye out for any changes and updates that could impact our efforts. We’ve rounded up the most important updates, tech launches and more so that you don’t have to.
(Another) Google Core Update
The SEO team will be keeping a close eye on their search term rankings in the coming weeks as Google has confirmed a core update was completed on 28th March. Core updates are broad, significant changes to the Google algorithm, which means key search terms can be impacted. Google completes these core updates to ensure it is always providing the most helpful, relevant content to its users. Our SEO team always strive to hit their E-E-A-T scores and they’re confident their content will pass the test of Google’s algorithm.
More AI advances…
Open AI released GPT4 in March, their best and most advanced system yet. The new AI model aims to produce safer and more useful responses for its users. So far, users can access this on the ChatGPT Plus membership or join a waiting list.
Amidst the breakthrough of Open AI’s Chat GPT, Google launched their very own AI platform called Bard. Google introduced Bard as a creative and helpful collaborator that is designed to bring ideas to life by supercharging information and boost productivity.
Plenty of Paid Search updates
The PPC team have been busy this quarter with some PMax updates. Google have confirmed that users can now add account level negative keywords to their performance max campaigns, along with allowing campaign level brand exclusions. Experiments are also now available for PMax campaigns. An update is coming which will allow page feeds, giving advertisers more control over dynamic search ads. Lastly for PMax, the video creation tool has been released which gives much bigger control over assets within these campaigns.
The team are also excited about the latest Search Ads update which allows them to drive new customers by bidding for new customers as part of the ad or setting the ad to gain new customers only.
Google Discovery ads have been updated with new features to help brands stand out on the most engaging ad surfaces for better results.
Tik Tok have also announced they’re entering the search market, however, this is not yet launched, so the team will be keeping a close eye on this one.
And that’s a wrap!
After such a fast-paced start to 2023, we’re more than ready to keeping it up for the rest of the year. Here’s to many more firsts, many more milestones and an incredible 2023.
