Michael Martinez gave a great tip yesterday in his post about How to Leverage Sleeper Content. His suggestion was to pick an event or a date a couple years in the future, and start planning content for it now. His reasoning is that your competitors won’t be planning 2 years ahead. (Michael Gray wrote about the same kind of thinking in a post about “predictive SEO” a couple years ago. That’s an article well worth reading too.)

I thought it might be interesting to look at predictive SEO and content planning from a poker perspective. What kind of poker related sleeper content can you write about 2 years in advance?

An obvious choice is the 2011 World Series of Poker. You don’t necessarily have to write a page about the 2011 WSOP, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a page about the subject already launched and indexed. A lot of really smart SEO’s think that there is a big first mover advantage for sites that have the first ranking for a phrase. So it’s possible that this little post here might have an advantage for phrases like “2011 World Series of Poker schedule”, “WSOP Champion 2011″, “2011 World Series of Poker results”, and “2011 WSOP Events”. I might even rank for some phrases like “2011 WSOP qualifiers” and “2011 World Series of Poker satellites”.

But the World Series of Poker isn’t the only poker event coming up in 2011 or 2012 that you could plan for. I can think of at least two major online poker tournaments that might be a good fit for a date-specific query and some predictive SEO and poker content planning:

• The 2011 FTOPS – The Full Tilt Online Poker Series
• The 2011 WCOOP – The 2011 World Championship of Online (from PokerStars)

And you don’t even have to be that specific. You could get the jump on queries like “major poker tournaments in 2011″  or “poker events 2012″.

Other poker-related stuff coming up in the future? Well, there are poker movies and poker biopics. One is the Nicholas Cage – Amarillo Slim movie. This movie is still in pre-development, but when it does come out, the search term will matter. (When the 21 movie came out last year, I saw traffic on my blackjack sites quadruple and quintuple. And I wasn’t even targeting a lot of 21-movie-related queries. I just ranked high for stuff like “blackjack card counting”.)

Some poker-related movies haven’t been planned or launched yet, but you can bet that at least some of these movies will eventually make it into pre-production:

• A Doyle Brunson poker movie
• An Annie Duke poker movie
• A Phil Hellmuth poker movie
• A Daniel Negreanu poker movie
• A Chris Ferguson poker movie

This really is “predictive” SEO, because I’m making an actual prediction here. There will be more poker movies, and it’s just a question of who is in those movies. And I’m betting that some of those movies will come out in 2 or 3 years, so there will be “2011 poker movies” and “2012 poker movies”.

The example Michael Martinez used in his blog post was the phrase “Obama scandal”. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that the Absolute Poker cheating scandal was a really big news item and drove a lot of traffic to websites. There might or might not be a Full Tilt Poker cheating scandal or a PokerStars cheating scandal in the next few years, but if there is, who do you think is going to have the first-mover advantage on those phrases?

Poker content planning includes a lot more than predictive SEO and leveraging sleeper content, but those are the topics I felt like writing about today. Thanks to Michael Martinez and Grey Wolf for the inspiration for this post.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 9:28 am and is filed under Poker Content, Poker Keyword Research . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.