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Last spring I first heard the term "Tailgating for Search" and I wanted to try it out to see if it worked. Eventually, it got buried at the bottom of a very long "to do" list. Then a couple of months ago at the SMX conference I saw a speaker demonstrate the power of Google's Universal Results and thought it might be fun to try both out at the same time.
So on June 15th I spent perhaps 15 minutes creating an insanely easy screen capture video (I didn't even bother to do any audio) that lasted less than 30 seconds and then uploaded it to both YouTube and Google Video.
Before you watch the video it is good to understand my blogging "angle" - I love to blog about my competition. When I first started blogging over a year ago it was so hard and painful, then someone suggested that I write about what I know most - and since I study my competition a lot I started writing about them and (sometimes) spinning the posts to my favor. It is my blog, after all.
My housing rental site (which I work on part time) is small compared to my largest competitor, which is owned by a public company.
I knew that in mid-July my top competitor was redirecting their most popular site to their new flagship domain that didn't have any traffic (which I still think was a poor business decision). Knowing that a ton of people will notice the site gone from the Google rankings after the redirect, and might seek more information on the site's whereabouts, I thought I would position myself well for their missing domain name (tailgating).
After I created the simple video, I linked to it from my blog with the anchor text of my competition's URL. Four days later the Google Video appeared at number 4 in the Google results for those searching my competitors name. About a week later the actual video thumbnail (the universal result) appeared.
So what have I gained from this? I did not profit much from this simple experiment, other than a few new customers. But the "fun-factor" was off the charts! Over 1,000 people watched the video and about 50% of those actually came to my site for more information! Not bad for 15 minutes of work.
On a side note, part of my experiment was to see which video ranked higher, Google Video or YouTube with the same backlink and anchor text. I was a bit surprised that Google Video won.
Thanks Donna for letting me be a guest blogger.