A Tale of Championship Manager vs SEO at ThinkVisibility

For those who had a 'misspent' youth playing Football Manager (formerly Championship Manager) for hours at a time, attempting to bring a football club from the depths of the lower leagues to Premiership, Champions League and Global supremacy, you will have appreciated this session from Kelvin Newman, creative director at SiteVisibility and A4u blogger.

SEO 'Radar' / Player Profiles

Relating his early career as a LLM (lower league manager) to his SEO strategy, Kelvin talked initially about the 'radar' - seen below on the Didier Drogba's profile...

Now - if you compare this radar aspect to SEO factors, an SEO radar could include:

• Link Building
• Link Volume
• Velocity of acquiring links
• Anchor text

plus a few others, which unfortunately you'll have had to be there to get those!

Game Theory / Football Transfers

The transfer market taught Kelvin all he needed to know about Game Theory. Defined on techtarget.com as:

'Game-theory research involves studies of the interactions among people or groups of people. Because people make use of an ever-increasing number and variety of technologies to achieve desired ends, game theory can be indirectly applied in practical pursuits such as engineering, information technology, and computer science'

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is an aspect of game theory that shows why two individuals might not agree, even if it appears that it is best to do so - link that to your SEO tactics!

LLM Experience / SEO targets and challenges

The Lower League Management experience on Championship Manager provided the groundings of Kelvin's work ethics. Yes - easier SEO campaigns pay the bills, however the harder something is, the more you appreciate it. Generally speaking, the psychological tendency to enjoy something more if you have paid more for it fits in with this theory. Taking on a difficult challenge creates a more satisfying end product.

Chaos Theory

Chaos Theory describes unpredictable behaviour in complex systems - AKA - the Google Algorithm.

Small changes to content, new links being discovered, or errors becoming system wide lead to massive changes in the results that a user sees.

Arousal influences decision making...!

I'm not going to go into too much detail here, but Kelvin's next area of enlightenment evolved around the contents of 'Freakonomics' – a series of books / blogs which is apparently a must read!

With tales of random and awkward questions posed to non-aroused and then semi-aroused individuals, those who were semi-aroused were showing 229% and 420% increases... I'll let you take a look at the book for more information!

To summarise the session, Kelvin told how emotions play a much bigger role in our decisions than you realise, and by using 'theories and processes' including behavioural economics, game theory and chaos theory, you'll be looking outside of your usual area of focus, opening new opportunities.

Presentation Deck from Kelvin's Session