March 02 2009
How To Leverage Sleeper Content
How would you feel if you woke up tomorrow morning and saw the news headline, “Latest Obama Scandal Rocks White House”? Elated? Disappointed? Nonchalant?
If you’re in the business of search engine optimization, wouldn’t you want to rank first for that query? Of course you would. So clearly knowing something about upcoming scandals in the Obama administration would helpful to you. I don’t know of any brewing scandals, except for the minor brouhahas over his political appointees, which seem to be par for the course.
Nonetheless, just by using this example topic to illustrate my point (before explaining it), I’ve set up this blog post to appear in at least a few queries about Barack Obama scandals, the scandals in the Barack Obama White House, and scandals from the Barack Obama presidency. It’s not so much that I have to know there will be scandals in the Barack Obama administration as I’m just preparing for the eventuality that there will be some scandals revolving around Barack Obama and/or people in his administration.
It’s only a matter of time before a real scandal erupts and Barack Obama has to do some ’splainin (or dodging, since Presidents often don’t ’splain so much as they hem, haw, and ignore the polite media inquiries).
Okay, the point of this article is that time is on your side. Pick a date in the future. It could be Christmas, New Year’s Day, or next Valentine’s Day. When do you think you’ll start creating content for those dates? Six months in advance? How about two years?
Why two years? Because your competitors don’t think that far ahead. Over the next two years you can build up a lot of content will become relevant when the clock ticks down to the right minute. Think of all the articles and links you will have built in that time.
This is called Event-driven SEO, and it is usually conducted on a short cycle, usually 3-6 months in advance. However, I’ve found that you can plan and begin executing a strategy as much as 1-2 years in advance. It gives you an advantage over people who come out of nowhere with immaculately designed single-topic Web sites. They bring in the design teams, copywriters, and maybe even user-generated content. You can play that game but if you don’t have a foundation to build on by the time you realize the query is competitive you’ve been left in the dust.
A lot of well-established topics have seasonal and date-range query spaces. Planning carefully for those seasons and date ranges helps you preposition content that can support more timely and up-to-date information.
In theory, if I ever optimize for an Obama scandal, I could come back to this article and use it (either by linking from it or TO it) to leverage it to my advantage.
Written by Michael Martinez
