Online video has been explored as marketing tool by large companies, and as a buzz-builder for content producers of all sizes. But what about small businesses: can they jump into the fray and get noticed by video audiences? The short answer is yes. Let’s look at some formats and how they can fit into your small business marketing plans.

Behind-the-scenes videos

The concept here is that people will be curious about topics that are related to your business, and that you can leverage their curiosity to inform them about your business. You’re basically playing the role of a Discovery Channel producer, looking for interesting tasks, processes, or people that are involved in your business. If you’re a clothing retailer, you’re shooting the prep area for a fashion show. If you’re a machinist, you’re showing-off the laser cutting machine and the stained-glass window you made with it.

From a search standpoint, the goal is to pick an interesting, creative topic that also happens to be squarely in the path of a search audience. If you’re a car mechanic, then “hypermiling” could be the hot keyphrase you’d want to focus on, because many people have become intrigued by the concept of extending their car’s fuel economy.

How-to videos

A close cousin to the behind-the-scenes approach, the idea behind producing a how-to video is to catch the attention of people who have some interest in your field, but have some immediate need that you can address. For example, a men’s clothing store can produce a video showing all the ways to properly knot a necktie. The person searching for this information may not be in the market for a new tie, but if you show them a few sharp designs, then you can count on some viewers visiting your site to see what you have in stock.

How-to videos are also ideal for contractors and other forms of skilled labor. Even your best customers will be inclined to try doing simpler tasks themselves. Producing a video on installing a shower head probably won’t cost you any business, but it will increase the odds of you becoming the go-to person for bigger jobs.

Play up your contribution

In this strategy, the goal is to piggyback on the fame of your customers. If your company makes accessories for the iPod, then this is your entire business model. However, less direct or significant contributors can also play-up their connection to a high-profile product or event.

A caterer at a charity event can tap into search traffic for that event, by taking the behind-the-scenes approach described above. And if a machinist created the molds for those iPod accessories, he could work with the accessory manufacturer to show the whole process start-to-finish. Then both companies could use the video.

Are you a local business?

In all these examples, there’s one hidden caveat: for businesses with a very local market, a strategy like this needs some extra help. There may be thousands of people checking out the necktie video, but how may of them are within driving range of your store? Obviously, if that business also ran an online store then the payoff would increase substantially.

But even if you are strictly local, you can still use online video and create visibility in your market. The trick is to couple your videos with a locally-targeted campaign, perhaps through Google AdWords. AdWords allows you to target your state, town, or even neighborhood, giving you a chance to attract viewers and drum-up business.

There are plenty of analytics tools available to help you measure traffic to your collection of videos. These range from the straightforward stats supplied by YouTube Insight to the complex dashboards available from TubeMogul.

One area where we’ve not seen much progress is competitor analysis. In conventional search marketing, we have a variety of tools to help us assess the competition. Visibility in natural search results can be measured by that old standby, WebPosition. PPC activity can be mined using aggregators like LongTailAdwords. And for those with mega-budgets, Hitwise offers a birds-eye-view of pretty much everything on the web.

But there’s nothing video specific. Fortunately, there’s plenty of video gadgetry out there that can be exploited to monitor your competition.

TimeTube

TimeTube is a project from Dipity, a start-up specializing in visualizing collections of information as timelines. In this case, Dipity turns a keyword search into a very intuitive timeline of posted YouTube videos. This is great for watching the development of a video collection from a certain user, or clustered around a particular topic.

For example, let’s say I’m a manufacturer of those half-size “netbook” laptops, and wondering how much hype there is in the market, and who’s receiving the most attention. Viewing YouTube videos through TimeTube is a great way to collect that information in a very intuitive and visually clean format. TimeTube doesn’t offer print capability, but one can string together screenshots and create a very comprehensive snapshot of the space.

Figure 1: A TimeTube snapshot for “netbook”, the generic term for the category, over the last six months. The most popular videos are shown as screenshots, with other clips captioned or flagged below.

Figure 2: A TimeTube snapshot for Asus EEE PC, the leader in the netbook category, shown over the same timespan.

Figure 3: A TimeTube snapshot for the HP Mininote, a newer competitor. Note that the level of activity is already comparable to the EEE, despite the fact that it was only launched in July.

Viral video chart

If you’re up against a competitor that triggers a lot of viral video activity (either directly, or through a fan base) then Viral Video Chart (VVC) can help you monitor that activity.

VVC is intended as a what’s-hot guide to those strangely irresistible kitten videos. But it also has a search function, allowing you to dig-up past and present videos that have gone viral around a topic of interest. Each video includes a historical chart, plotting the rise and eventual fall of blogger interest in that clip. The site also include concise one-liner assessments of the video’s performance, such as “This video went really viral, but it’s pretty old news now.”

Figure 4: Video Viral Chart page for a video of the recent Esquire magazine cover, printed in animated e-ink. Note the spike, showing blogger activity around this video.

Google Alerts

While TimeTube and VVC can provide a historical perspective, Google Alerts is great for keeping tabs on new content. Alerts can be set-up to monitor specific keyphrases, and can also be set to focus exclusively on video results.

Alerts are great for detecting new competitor activity, as well as monitoring user-generated videos that test or compare those products against your own.

Figure 5: Google Alerts can be set-up to specifically look for video content, delivering HTML-formatted e-mails that are easy to skim through.

Sherwood Stranieri is Director of Natural Search at SMG Search, a dedicated search unit of Starcom MediaVest Group. Based in Chicago, SMG Search creates integrated search strategies for some of the world’s largest companies. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Although Google Universal Search (GUS) is still very much in flux, it’s been a part of the SEO landscape for a while now. In that time, there have been some good studies about how often GUS presents video results, and some research into how it ranks videos versus text pages.

One aspect of GUS that’s been mentioned anecdotally is its preference for videos hosted by other Google properties: YouTube and Google Video. A few explanations have been offered for this behavior:

1) Google Video and YouTube have the largest archive of videos on the Web, so the odds of these two sites having a relevant video in their inventory is much higher than for other portals.

2) The indexing technology behind GUS has to be custom-tuned for each video portal, and naturally the Google properties are the best understood by GUS developers.

3) The YouTube and Google Video pages were designed from the start with search engines in mind, and so they are easier to index.

These all sound very reasonable. Yet there’s another possibility:

4) Google may be cultivating a walled garden, where searchers are kept in the system to keep spinning the turnstiles and create more ad revenue.

But before we label them with a scarlet G, let’s take a look at some Universal Search results and see what portion of video listings actually come from Google properties.

Did someone say scarlett?

To see what GUS’s preferences are, let’s choose a list of search terms that are likely to result in GUS-driven video listings. Celebrities are a natural, and I hit the jackpot at UGO: The 50 Hottest Actresses Under 25. Everyone on this list should be well represented in the video portals. And just to be sure, I appended “…video” to each name before running the searches. Including Ms. Johansson.

This translates into a very typical SEO competitor analysis: there are 17 non-Google portals competing against the two Google properties for video listings in Universal Search. We looked at the top three pages in search results for each of the 50 actresses.

Findings

Surprisingly, even for up-to-the-minute pop culture searches, only 7 of the 17 competing portals displayed any results in GUS. Let’s take a closer look at the resulting chart.

Two sets of figures are represented. The height of the bars indicates the number of listings each portal received, out of 50 actress/video searches. Taller bars mean better coverage. The numbers shown on each bar represent the average position that these listings achieved in search results – lower numbers mean higher rankings and better visibility.

Take a minute to review this, and you’ll see that it’s a mixed bag. Looking just at the bars, YouTube performs the best, but not by an astounding margin.

Look at the average ranking numbers, and the difference is more dramatic. YouTube is leaps and bounds ahead of any rival, with a killer combination of higher rankings and broader coverage.

Google Video is another story: for this class of search terms, this property doesn’t offer much.

Conclusions

• The range of content being indexed is playing a role here: many portals aren’t displaying any results, even for these very specific searches. This could be due to indexing problems, or a simple lack of inventory.
• There’s clear support for the perception that YouTube dominates GUS video listings.
• The very high average ranking for YouTube definitely raises an eyebrow. It’s pretty clear that even if Google’s algorithm is being objective, it’s been trained to respond to the characteristics that YouTube has in spades. It’s debatable whether this is a “bias” or just good design – take a Sphinn and let me know what you think…

Sherwood Stranieri is Director of Natural Search at SMG Search, a dedicated search unit of Starcom MediaVest Group. Based in Chicago, SMG Search creates integrated search strategies for some of the world’s largest companies. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

A new survey from ClipBlast! about how people find video content has started a discussion about search and how it relates to entertainment content. In the survey, ClipBlast! asked 1000 online consumers if they had a preferred method for finding video content on the Web.

Of those surveyed, almost half had no preferred method, indicating that many consumers either have limited experience with online video, or possibly no experience they could recall. So while YouTube has exploded in popularity, and broadband adoption continues to climb, many consumers simply lack familiarity with this space.

Of the respondents that did have a preferred method, the breakout is quite interesting:

Among the 530 respondents who had a definite opinion, "discovery" is the primary means that they get to video online (28 percent), followed closely by recommendations from friends (27 percent). Some 22 percent rely on search engines. Roughly 10 percent get video from people they know only online – through social networks and the like. Relatively smaller percentages receive video from unsolicited email and RSS feeds, to which they have subscribed (5 percent, respectively).

The results, when looked at in isolation from the rest of the Web, aren’t that surprising. There’s a general consensus that the popularity of video is largely driven by word-of-mouth, so the fact that 37% of consumers hear about videos through friends (”real” or “virtual”) makes intuitive sense.

Also, the 28% who cited discovery is not surprising: this is the web equivalent of channel surfing. Portals such as YouTube provide multiple opportunities for viewers to discover video content: channels, categorization, related videos identified via tagging, and so on.

But the search figure is very interesting, particularly when viewed against the backdrop of overall web behavior. At this point, video usage is common enough that one would expect to see a strong correlation between video consumption and web behavior in general – they’re basically the same people. A comScore report released last month supports this, finding that 73% of U.S. Internet users watched online video in February.

But we don’t actually see a convergence of behavior when it comes to video search. ClipBlast! found that only 22% of online video users prefer search engines for finding new videos, standing in sharp contrast to general web behavior. Multiple studies have cited search engines as the starting point for most web users, across a variety of content categories and scenarios. So why don’t we see that behavior in the video space?

One could argue that video search, as a technology, hasn’t evolved to the point where it’s considered a reliable way to find video content. Certainly a number of vendors are making strides in this area, but for most consumers (who use YouTube/Google) there isn’t that surefire "I’m Feeling Lucky" confidence that we’ve come to expect from web search.

That could be a valid argument, but are there any other factors at play? Could there be anything specific to the online video experience that differentiates it from other forms of web content? Certainly, we see variations in conventional media. People consume print media very differently from television, and that difference might have an analog in the online space.

One aspect of the video web to consider is the fact that, right now at least, video is largely an entertainment medium. This stands in stark contrast to the broader web, which offers a mix of entertainment, information, commerce, and social interaction. The information gap may start to close as people become more familiar with broadcast news clips and how-to sites such as Howcast. But for now, video is mostly about diversion, and that may not sync well with typical search behavior.

In fact, even the word "diversion" hints at the contradiction: searching involves a focused effort to achieve a goal, whereas diversion is literally the opposite.

Sherwood Stranieri is Director of Natural Search at SMG Search, a dedicated search unit of Starcom MediaVest Group. Based in Chicago, SMG Search creates integrated search strategies for some of the world’s largest companies. The Video Search column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

Although YouTube hit pop-culture status just a couple years ago, online video has been a staple of corporate and content websites for quite a bit longer. In that time, web designers have tried many approaches to viewing experience, trying to combine compelling content with a user-friendly interface.

After many experiments with plug-ins and third-party players, most designers settled on the concept of an all-in-one Flash-based player. These players deliver a device-like experience, using TiVo, iTunes and even BMW’s iDrive as models for a self-contained, easy-to-use interface. All-in-one players usually combine a viewing screen, playback controls, “related video” links, and often an ad banner. The player works by using Flash’s ability to pull video directly off the server, so that from a user standpoint clips can be played back seamlessly.

Now that YouTube et al. have entered the game, there’s a newfound enthusiasm for video content, but it’s also changed the game somewhat. The potential viewing audience is now much larger than the group of visitors already on your site. In fact, video has reached the point where it behaves like an independent marketing channel, offering content to users who may never visit your website.

This is both a blessing and a curse. While access to new audiences is great, the trade-off is that it’s becoming much more difficult to track these people. Their YouTube activity is off your radar screen, at least as far as conventional web analytics are concerned.

Finding a more direct path

As we talked about in a previous column, the most effective online video strategies are the ones where on-site and off-site videos dovetail. Off-site videos create the initial interest, and then drive people back to your on-site content.

But there’s a third leg to this bar stool: on-site videos can also function as a promotional tool by making these clips compatible with video search engines. While YouTube and other upload-type portals dominate right now, pure video search is rapidly gaining ground in the form of universal search functions offered by Google, Yahoo, and Ask.

With time, people will come to rely on universal search as a direct path to video content, making this an avenue that marketers will want to pursue.

Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight

The problem arises when we try to reconcile these new video search needs with existing all-in-one players. These players have scripts that allow them to communicate with their servers, something that search engines aren’t equipped to do. As a result, you could have a player that has access to thousands of clips, but none of them will be detected and cataloged by a search engine.

Websites that have achieved success in video search did so by taking a very different approach. Rather than delivering all clips through a single access point, they’ve done the opposite: individual landing pages for every video in their inventory. This reflects our newfound priority, which is to provide a variety of entry points that attract a wider viewing audience.

In case this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is exactly what YouTube does. Before YouTube was a Google property, one of its top priorities was to achieve widespread visibility in search results. They realized that the only way to get this done was to generate unique landing pages for all their videos, in the hope of attracting long-tail traffic for very specific searches. And it worked – they drew a huge audience, and got $1.6 billion for their efforts.

Balancing findability with usability

More traffic is great, but are we sacrificing too much in the name of popularity? Video landing pages would seem to eliminate all the usability advantages that all-in-one players offer. In place of a streamlined “device” we now have thousands of very conventional-looking webpages that, on the surface, look more unwieldy for users and developers alike.

But in practice, this isn’t the case. For example, these websites still incorporate “related video” links into the viewing screen. But they also supplement them with “related videos” on the page itself, because that’s what search engines will use to discover the rest of the site.

Redundant? Yes – but users don’t actually mind redundancy. Redundancy improves usability if it results in can’t-miss-it, don’t-make-me-think ease of use. For example, when a car company places the volume control on a steering wheel, they don’t delete it from the radio itself.

The bottom line

The trade-offs between player design versus search engine visibility seem to favor visibility. Most videos exist to attract attention, either to themselves or to accompanying advertisements. Therefore, the need to promote and increase visibility takes precedence.

In this new environment, companies using all-in-one players need to take a very serious second look at what they’ve gained, versus the opportunities they’re missing out on.

Sherwood Stranieri is Director of Natural Search at SMG Search, a dedicated search unit of Starcom MediaVest Group. Based in Chicago, SMG Search creates integrated search strategies for some of the world’s largest companies. The Video Search column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.

In the last SEL video search column, Eric Papczun described the dilemma faced by content producers that are striving to keep up with the insatiable demand for new video content. Producers are looking for efficient methods of discovering what online viewers are interested in, and then packaging their content to maximize exposure.

The example used was a television network, one that is mostly concerned with ongoing generation of new content. What’s interesting to note is that, of all the content producers vying for attention on YouTube, television networks are the ones with the most preexisting content to offer.

Dusting off the archives

Think of the volumes of material at networks’ disposal. A half-hour nightly news show that’s been on the air for 30 years has (minus commercials) about 3,500 hours of content to offer. Factor in the number of news stories that represents and you’re talking ten times as many clips, easily. And that’s just one show.

The question for owners of previously televised content is: how do we pick and choose archived content that’s relevant for search, and how do we process that content without breaking the bank? It’s a daunting issue, especially when you realize that the majority of these videos will be long tail at best.

The challenges are to a) find a cost-efficient way to plow through the backfill, and b) identify the attributes that make each clip interesting and relevant to a modern-day audience. These attributes will become the metadata we need to make sure this clip sees the light of day again.

Let’s try science

Talk to anyone with a technical background, and the first suggestion you’ll get is to try some form of automation. Scan the videos, find some way to tease out the choice nuggets of information, and pour all into some format that the engines can digest.

Easier said than done, but a few clever firms are taking a crack at it. Blinkx scans both the soundtrack and on-screen text and uses them as indexable content, the way a conventional engine uses on-page text. Google Video takes a shortcut, using the closed caption transcripts from broadcast TV clips as the source for its searchable text.

This works well for non-fiction videos, where useful keywords come up in the actual dialog. But fiction is a different story: a 5-minute clip from The Breakfast Club will never mention John Cusack, Molly Ringwald, or Peter Gabriel.

Don’t needlessly date yourself

There are other subtleties to video tagging that are very difficult for a machine to anticipate. What’s hot today might not be tomorrow. PBS would have a problem processing all those old documentaries talking about the “greenhouse effect,” because while there’s huge demand for the topic, it’s now referred to as “global warming.” As in conventional search, keyword usage changes over time, and videos with a long shelf life may need to be earmarked for a more current topic.

In fact, this is where we connect back to new content producers and their needs. In this industry, we’ve all experienced the turbulence that comes when search engines change the rules. What won the game yesterday doesn’t even compete today. So it will be with video search engines, and the time may come when you uncover the New Best Practices and have to re-tag your content to accommodate them.

Sweating to the oldies (sorry)

Automation promises efficiency and scalability, but it doesn’t give us the magic we need. If we want our video tagging to reflect the most relevant choices available to us, we need to add some sweat equity into the process. To make judgment calls, we need human reviewers.

This is not an endeavor to be taken lightly. If 10,000 videos each need 10 minutes of someone’s time to be viewed, lightly researched, and tagged, that’s enough hours to employ someone full-time for almost a year. One salary, one benefits package, one cubicle… it all sounds like an expensive project, one that could easily be dismissed as no viable. But that’s an old way of looking at labor.

Share the workload

There are plenty of new methods for distributing tasks that are both more efficient and also better at finding the lowest-cost, highest-quality workers. Portals like Elance, Odesk and Mechanical Turk (which requires some explaining) are great resources – not just for obtaining cheap labor, but also managing projects and building sustainable teams. Outsourcing may be a dirty word in some circles, but this is a genuine case of a job that simply can’t get done through other means.

Not that outsourcing always implies offshoring. Jason Calacanis of Mahalo fame (infamy?) recently published a series of tips for start-ups, and the one that really struck me was:

Outsource to middle America: There are tons of brilliant people living between San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York who don’t live in a $4,000 one bedroom apartment and pay $8 to dry clean a shirt – hire them!

Take a layered approach

The most sensible plan for a large-scale video tagging project is to take a layered approach. Use automation to make that first pass, extracting whatever information is available. Use that info to prioritize the videos that have the most promise, and then feed them to your staff of reviewers for that vital human input. With the right methods and processes in place, you can revive a dusty library of shows and turn them into the historical/retro/vintage clips that are sometimes laughable, sometimes insightful, but always click-worthy.

Sherwood Stranieri is Director of Natural Search at SMG Search, a dedicated search unit of Starcom MediaVest Group. Based in Chicago, SMG Search creates integrated search strategies for some of the world’s largest companies. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Grant Crowell’s article about video promotions through Internet Yellow Page programs raises a point that’s probably on the mind of any serious marketer. The hype surrounding online video is deafening, and getting louder: its bizarre mix of content, the experiments by mainstream broadcasters, the sporadic announcements of success from vendors and agencies. But really: does video pay off? Are there ways to generate a measurable business outcome? And if so, what exactly are we measuring?

Follow the crowd

Let’s start with the fact that, as with any marketing channels, you have to go where the audience is. Right now, viewers flock to portal sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Metacafe. The challenge for marketers is that these video portals are not a controlled environment:

• Videos are hosted by the portal site, so your web analytics can’t collect traffic info

• Videos are played on the portal site, so getting traffic back to your site is an issue
• No control over playback (if you’re a content producer, your commercials won’t play first)
• No control over blog-style feedback from the portal’s viewing audience. (You can turn it off, but that’s about it)

Services such as TubeMogul can help you collect metrics from these sites. Views, comments, and favorites can be counted and compiled into baseball cards-style tables. But while this is a useful way to measure activity, there’s no action being performed that you can tie to a business outcome: no sign-ups, no PDF downloads, no purchases.

Make the crowd follow you

To get those actions, you need to get viewers back to your site. Fortunately, viewer behavior hints at the ideal method. Online videos are like Lay’s potato chips: the typical viewer can’t just watch one. The promise of more video content can bring them back to your website. This sort of teaser strategy can take many forms:

• Watermarks on the video itself give the user a next step, particularly in conjunction with a final frame containing your full URL

• You can also replicate this info in the text description area that accompanies the video on most portals
• In addition to providing URL info, you can give them a reason to visit your site. When you upload your Brad Pitt video to YouTube, you’ll want to mention that there’s an Angelina Jolie video back on your website—both in the description, and in the video itself.

The important things to count with video

Once viewers are back on your site, you can bring all your site metrics to bear. Play the landing page game, as you would for any other marketing campaign. Here are some key items to look at:

Click-through ratio. As with banner ads, CTR is a metric that helps us monitor the bottleneck between YouTube activity and on-site activity. Even with a great teaser strategy, only a small percentage of viewers will actually come back to you. But you can test your videos for click-through, and rotate out the underperformers.

Conversion events. Once a viewer clicks through to your landing page, this is where conversion events (on-site video plays, sign-ups, purchases) can occur. Deciding which conversion events to place on your landing page is a fine art, but you can rely on your previous landing page experiences to give you a head start.

On-site activity. Even if incoming viewers avoid your conversion events, their subsequent actions can teach you a lot about their wants and needs. Their tendency to drift off to certain content areas, or to jump ship when they hit a particular page, can help you fine-tune your site’s structure and messaging.

Experienced marketers will note that nothing in these three bullets is a new invention – and that’s the point. Online video can function like any other form of promotional outreach: pulling interested visitors back to your site, giving you a chance to make your pitch, and allowing you to quantify the result.

Sherwood Stranieri is Director of Natural Search at SMG Search, a dedicated search unit of Starcom MediaVest Group. Based in Chicago, SMG Search creates integrated search strategies for some of the world’s largest companies. The Video Search column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

The need to promote an annual event occurs… that’s right: once a year, every single year. Yes, each event comes and goes. But unlike the real world, where we just celebrated our annual Independence Day holiday here in the U.S., there’s no need to pop all the balloons and tear-down the “4th of July Fireworks” sign.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has a lot of strengths when compared to other marketing channels. SEO can build long-term equity for a website, providing a cost-effective supplement to paid search ads, media buys, and many other forms of online advertising. But one area where SEO has traditionally fallen short is with seasonal or event-driven promotions.

SEO practitioners know that preparing a website to rank in search results takes a lot of time and effort. Even after the changes are made, the search engines still need to digest the new pages and adjust rankings accordingly. Because of this lag time, SEO isn’t usually considered a front-line technique for promotions that come and go.

I’ve recently come across a couple instances that counter that wisdom, and have forced me to reconsider SEO for seasonal work. The key to using SEO effectively is to recognize that recurring events, or promotions that occur in a sequence, are not actually temporary.

July 4th occurs once a year, every year. So if you’re in the business of fireworks or annual 4th of July events, get ready for it… and stay ready for it.

The web has infinite room for stashing-away landing pages or micro sites that promote seasonal events. These sites can be left live, with messaging in place to inform off-season visitors that the event is no longer in progress.

Once we accept this idea of a permanent placeholder, we can then consider the use of SEO as a long-term, year-over-year tactic for gaining ground in search engine results.

Keep in mind: SEO only produces impressions when people actually conduct a search. So there’s no need to worry about getting swamped with off-season traffic. But when that traffic does materialize, you will be ready to catch it with a well-ranked site.

What about promotions that aren’t recurring? Marketers frequently push one-time events into the limelight. Celebrity endorsements are an ideal example: a famous personality is contracted to act as a spokesperson for a fixed period of time. The Super Bowl is a popular time for this marketing technique. That endorsement deal may get renewed, but often it’s just a one-time occurrence—so how could we possibly capitalize on that?

One aspect of search engines that we can leverage is the fact that they treat webpages like real estate. Once your URLs have been cataloged, they can provide you with a valuable time-to-market advantage when you need exposure for some new content.

Marketers who rely on one-time promotions often produce a series of them. By parking your new promotion on the same real estate as the previous one, you can derive some advantage in terms of getting fast exposure, even if the two promotions don’t share any content. Conceptually, it’s very similar to the seasonal aisle in a department store.

So SEO can be used for temporary promotions, if we can find ways to create permanent place holders for them on the web. The key is to prepare in advance, and to take every opportunity to reuse your internet real estate to support future campaigns.

Sherwood Stranieri is a contributing writer to Search Engine Land, and Search Marketing Director at Catalyst Online and oversees SEO strategies for several Fortune 1000 companies.