Swashbuckling SEO for entertainment keywords

SEO Junkies enjoyed a staff outing last night to go and see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. The cinema was packed out with movie fans wanting to catch the latest exploits of Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl and it was interesting to see the range of people who were going to see the film – a range of people who quite probably had searched for the cinema tickets, movie release times or maybe even some of the merchandise and fancy dress costumes we saw, through Google or one of the other SE’s. In some ways the outing last night was a working trip as we have a number of clients whose products and services are heavily tied into the ebb and flow of popular properties in entertainment – meaning that our own work in Search Engine Optimisation also follows, or rather leads, these release dates.

Optimising websites for such companies is a fascinating business as there is nearly always the need to get some keyword to the first page of Google “Like, yesterday”. Pirates of the Caribbean is a case in point. The range of potential SEO keywords for Pirates of the Caribbean is huge (Pirate Party Decorations , Pirates of the Caribbean Toys etc), but one thing they all have in common is that they need to be optimised for well before the release of the film in order for the client to receive the maximum traffic from that keyword.

How fast any keyword can be pushed to the top of the SERPs depends largely on the competition for that keyword, how effective is the SEO team working on that site, how much authority that site has and how early they started working on that keyword.

A good ball park timescale is 9 weeks to ensure that a keyword reaches the top and those weeks must be filled with hard work on the SEO: copywriting, on page work and off page promotion of the most relevant pages of the website to make sure that when that movie hits the cinemas, it is your site that has the top spot and gains the most traffic from the efforts.