Custom Content at Scale – Yahoo’s New SEO Play

Yahoo’s acquisition of start-up Associated Content on Monday (for more than $90 million!) was met with the standard range of web commentariat responses – praise, derision, skepticism, you name it.

Good or bad move, this acquisition shows that the big digital destination players are betting on mass custom content to intersect with explicit, expressed user interest.

So Who’s Associated Content?

Associated Content produces custom content – its army of freelance content creators is paired with an algorithm that analyzes search engine queries and social media sentiment to figure out the red hot link-bait content that people want (including video, audio, and slideshows). They create this content for what amount to a tenth (or less) of what you’d normally see from a freelancer just a few years ago.

Associated Content offers custom content development services on its own site (with a range of media units), custom micro-sites, and for brands’ sites themselves. This means that custom content, at scale, is within the reach of small and large brands alike.

What’s In It For Yahoo?

Yahoo’s content strategy (before this week, at least) centered around creating high-quality content to draw in repeat, engaged traffic and to sell a full range of online advertising against it. So, is Yahoo abandoning this model and giving in to competitive moves from Demand Media and AOL’s Seed.com? Will content quality suffer as Yahoo tries to “make it up in volume” with dirt-cheap, low-brow SEO fodder?

What’s not getting wide enough mention is the additional layer of editorial control that’s being applied to any content that will appear on a Yahoo branded property. This is the key lesson for brands who are thinking of playing in the custom content-at-scale space.

What Does This Means for Brands… and Agencies?

We hear the complaint all the time – where are we going to find enough content to fill our site / social media presence / micro-site? The update frequency demands of the Brand-as-Publisher position seem daunting and crushingly expensive.

Should brands resign themselves to being the funders of these mass content efforts, subsidizing the production costs (and profit) for portal/destination/gateway sites, with no more to show for it than the standard less-than-one percent click-through rates?

Brands don’t have to merely place ad units next to a piece of content in a major or niche site that valuable users find interesting – they can be that destination property, with all the rich, specific multimedia content. All this without having to spend millions of dollars.

Associated Content’s services for brand sites is a key strategic option for brand sites (and branded social media properties) looking to get serious about search engine optimization (SEO). The search spiders are looking for freshness, specificity, and the language that the searcher is using (so forget the brand-preferred jargon please).

It may be quicker and easier to toss some media budget at a PPC keyword campaign, but let’s not forget that the instant your budget is gone, that Page One placement you’ve been enjoying evaporates. Efforts to rank organically against long-tail keywords have a cumulative effect that takes a while to get going, but sticks around.

Getting attention online is hard – crazy hard. The options are many, and users are ruthless with their attention. Impatient with navel-gazing corporate narcissism. Quick to bail when their needs aren’t met.

The Content Strategy team at C-E works to complement brand-preferred messaging strategies with data gleaned from keyword research, social media sentiment analysis, and usability findings to form the strategic basis of a well-managed, comprehensive and engaging content plan. Matching that up with a reliable supply of web optimized content has been a major challenge – services like Associated Content offer a cost-effective way to pay off on these strategies.

Psst… C-E Folks…

Note: Erika Shoup, Midwest Account Executive for Associated Content, will be giving a capabilities presentation in 10#3 on Monday, May 24th, from 2:00-3:00, and an encore from 3:30-4:30 (for those who can’t make the first time slot). I encourage you to come by and check it out – whichever element of digital you touch (media, account management, social, production, etc.).

This post originally appeared on Campbell Ewald’s discontinued “The Next Engine” blog.