In the beginning SEO was a conceptual issue. Agencies had to explain the concept to clients. Sites that followed the concept were doing it – meta tags, etc.
Then SEO became technical – and something of a dart art. Sites had to be built right. Site designers, largely, didn’t know how.
The greatest and most horrible era of SEO – the numbers. This brought transparency and ROI. This also brought BO. Account managers project managed. Safety zones were formed.
Is this a new era? A renaissance. Account managers to have ideas that engage and capture people – that provoke discussion and are shared.
Art and ideas is subjective. What’s the difference between two bits of art?Above – one is a Turner Price entry from 2010. The other is on sale at Etsy for £10. Which is which?
So… guys, how do we cope?
Here’s what my agency did – I know, I was there. Let’s look at some other agencies a little later on.
The first of two interest areas of note – Outreach, outreach targets authors directly. Great way to build relationships, exposure and quality signals. If you have BO this also means links.
The last of two – platform outreach. This means working with all the digital assets a client has; web pages, videos, PDFs, news and it means sharing them in strategic places in order to spark coversation, to try and reach Authors and in some ways this is the new digital heartbeat of brands.
Outreach has problems – it’s hard to scale and clients don’t always/can’t always provide the right sort of freedom and assets. Scale brings process, process ruins quality and outreach risks becoming production line guest posting.
Content sharing has problems too. Can the boutique SEO agencies – who often have superb SEO staff – produce it. Can other agencies produce it at cost – and if they do, are they robbing Peter to pay for Paul?
A real problem is that although some authors count as brands – very few brands count as authors. What do you do when your authors leave?
A look at what other, clever, agencies are up to.
Started ages ago – good move – byStickyeyes. They contacted me once. Allowed a nofollow link – which I liked. Wonder what the client thought?
Bloggabase – only 75% ready. It’s from 10 Yetis and 10 Yetis have recently formed a partnership with Bronco.
Found this – Distilled Creative. Is this a better domain to outreach from? Agency brands must now be client friendly and blogger/community friendly.
Whole new agency types being set up. Did Kevin and Chelsea leave SEO? They just evolved with it.
New specialists springing up. Work with previous era of agencies.