Robin Fishley's Brighton SEO takeaway: - Align your content strategy with your business strategy

1. Robin Fishley
Saatchi & Saatchi
Brands, Search and Content
A new way to think about search, ethics and the future

3. “We did search in 2007,
it was rubbish”

4. What brands need to understand is that searching is still the
biggest channel and searching is ALMOST ALWAYS the first step in a
purpose driven environment
Search serves a dual purpose: relevancy and visibility
All this search value hinges around the content we create and curate

5. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible

6. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Fodder Good
Greatness

7. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Fodder Good
Greatness
What SEO’s Think of Their Web Content

8. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Fodder Good
Greatness
What the Media Agency Thinks

9. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Fodder Good
Greatness
What Ad Agency Agencies Think

10. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Fodder Good
Greatness
meh
What Brands Think of “SEO” content

11. Actually content is a lot more complex than this.

12. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Good
Greatness
SPAM
Fodder

13. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Good
Greatness
SPAM
Fodder
CONTENT
MILL

14. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Good
Greatness
SPAM
CONTENT
MILL
WELL EXECUTED SEARCH
CONTENT
Fodder

15. Impossible
RelevantIrrelevant
Possible
Madness
Good
Greatness
SPAM
CONTENT
MILL
WELL EXECUTED SEARCH
CONTENT
Fodder
GREAT ADVERTISING

16. Most brands don’t understand what content is,
or even what they need from their content.
That’s our job.

17. Reminder: Content is anything, fact or fiction that has been released to an
audience that provides a benefit either entertaining or educational. Anything an
entity (person or brand) purposefully communicates is then classified as
“content”.
This definition stretches to cover big budget Christmas ads through to a tweet.
Metacontent is a deeper construct: Hashtag, Trend, Meme – but its still content.

18. How do we make search content
great content

19. 1: Align

21. Brand Hierarchies

22. Align the content strategy with the brand hierarchy,
business needs and organizational structure

23. 2: Clearly Define the Role of the content

24. Role and responsibility of your Content:
Purposeful
• Relevant and Beneficial (to both the User and to the Brand)
• Mulitfunctional (obviously)
Honest
• Unambiguous (don’t trick people)
• Ethical
• Not a sweatshop
Current & Future Proof
• Up to Date
• Evolving
• Forward Compatible

25. Purpose:
• Clients often don’t know the purpose of their content
• We need to help define that purpose
Future Proofing
• How will google be treating this type of content in the future
• If we project current trends – and imagine that one day everyone will have
perfectly optimized sites and perfect outreach strategies – what are the
things that will differentiate us form them?
Thinking outside of the traditional constraints of context, volume and
technical aspects

26. An example of Multifunctional Content
Nutritional Information chart:
Need not be a grid of numbers, use the opportunity to teach the customers about
the benefit of each of the elements on the nutritional chart. i.e.
* foods that are high in phosphorous help improve your bone density and growth
– phosphorous is good for you - a serving of our biscuits contain 10% of your
daily RDA of phosphorous but children are encouraged to eat twice the amount of
phosphorous.

27. 3: Think about the greater good

28. Content is not simply a conduit?
Google will have to use more and more constructs to figure out the best
results to show for queries.
Once Search Engines delve deeper into actually “understanding” content -
then it will be able to apply different types of ranking signals to ascertain the
value of said content.
One of these ranking signals will be ethics i.e. what is the value of this
information to the world as a whole. How does this value compare with the
rest of the competitors in the pile. What would happen if everybody in the
world had this knowledge and used it. Would it make sense to rank this
piece of content higher than that one?

29. Will Algorithms ever use ethical evaluation of content?
Applying rules like Kantian universality to ideas and
precepts contained within content
Machine learning could easily define content and its goal –
a page rank adaptation could be applied to this network to
create an additional universality rank.