OI, YOU! READ THIS BLOG! Did that work? Hmm probably not. You see, you can't just broadcast your content to people anymore and hope that they'll care enough about it to engage with it. No, in order to capture an audience's attention these days you must be producing top-notch creative content in order to snatch their attention away from your competition.
Creative content = more shares, more likes and a hyper-engaged audience who are amplifying and promoting your content for you. Happy days. But how does creating great content relate to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? We caught up with Ian McKee (Social and PR Director of AgencyUK) ahead of his talk at the Digital Gaggle conference to find out....
Hey Ian! At Digital Gaggle this month, you'll be talking about why creative content is key to cutting it in competitive SEO. The public perception is often that search engine optimisation is about ticking technical boxes, why is creativity important?
Ian: Search engines are increasingly moving away from technical signifiers of content's authority towards more behavioural based ones. They want to see how people share, interact, link to and engage with your content, and all of those factors are things that require creativity. As long as you still have the technical elements in place, if you come at your SEO strategy thinking more like a creative that wants to engage with people, you'll produce better results.
You’ve worked on some really exciting projects for a variety of clients including Ladbrokes, Welsh Lamb and Chang Beer. Have you had any which have really stuck out and provided some amazing results?
Ian: As an agency we've worked with Welsh Lamb for a number of years now, it's been amazing to see how the positioning we've created for the brand and channels we've chosen have impacted brand perception, awareness and ultimately sales. In terms of SEO work I'll be touching on some of what we've done in my talk, but one of my favourite campaigns has been with Westfield Health. We've run a campaign called Walking Lunch with them for the last two years, encouraging people to get walking in their lunchbreaks. We've managed to get thousands of people on their feet, and log steps that stretch the entire circumference of earth twice over now.
Finally, for anyone who hasn’t bagged their ticket to Digital Gaggle yet, can you sum up in one sentence why they shouldn’t miss out on hearing your talk? Or, what takeaways marketers will learn from attending your talk?
Ian: A lot of marketers can assume SEO is an unfathomably technical dark art which they can never hope to grasp. The thing is as search engine's algorithms have become more complex, I think our job as marketers has become simpler — just create great content. So I'm hoping to demonstrate that's the case, with some practical examples and advice that can be taken away and implemented.
