With SEO becoming harder every year, delivering long-term success is the only way agencies can generate positive ROI for clients. This session will look at how SEO has changed recently and how brands need to adapt and future proof their SEO campaigns with a view to delivering 5+ year sustainability.

1. Being

2. SEO
Tactic
Lifecycle
Spammers Early adopters Hit it hard Been & gone LOL
Affiliates Early adopters Winning Profit Fast Moving
Agencies Small Scaling Hammering it Trying to Stop
In-house No awareness Awareness Awaiting Signoff Awaiting
Resource

3. How did we get in this mess?

4. Do it the easy way

6. Clients
Has budget,
needs
results fast
Has budget
& is happy
to wait for
results
No budget,
happy to wait
for results
No budget,
needs
results fast

8. SEO’s need links, so we use a tool to buy them in bulk

10. Matt Cutts gets
upset about
paid links
SEO’s ignore him
and continue to
adopt paid links
as a strategy for
the next 9 years

12. Syndication

15. Social media allows SEO’s to build more natural links
Rather than working on great content, we form an underground voting group & use it to
control all the social sites

18. SEO’s created platforms
to make it really easy to
buy as many paid blog
posts as we could afford

22. Maybe Google is onto
something here…

24. 4 years after Matt Cutts warned us about paid links, the SEO industry starts
to realise they are too risky, so we decide to build free links instead. Of
course, we automate this using link networks & tools

26. SEO’s notice that guest blogging is
a more natural way of building
links
We create a community where
people too lazy to write content
themselves can find SEO’s willing
to post terrible content onto
equally terrible blogs.
No money changes hands, what
could go wrong?

28. “Content is king”
Bill Gates, CEO, Microsoft

33. Most people were thankful that
they didn’t get this message and
carried on with building natural
links with guest blog posts

39. Being

46. "For example, if you're to look at sites
that are popular, for example porn sites
are very popular, but people tend not to
link to porn sites.
On the other hand, if you take something
like the Wisconsin real estate board,
probably not a ton of people go there,
but quite a few people do link to
government websites."

48. Thank you!
Get in touch: patrick@branded3.com
@patrickaltoft