In about an hour I will be joining my friend and colleague Taylor Hill to give an informal talk to members of my local merchant’s association about Social Networking and SEO, and how each can be used to grow a business.  I am looking forward to it!

For those who would like to follow along with the notes (there won’t be any slideshow for this one) you can download the PDF here.

In economic down times, businesses have more and more to do to generate the same levels of revenue, with fewer and fewer resources allocated to those tasks. It’s no secret that marketing activities are usually one of the last areas to be affected, because marketing is (correctly) viewed as the one activity that can still have a bottom-line impact.

But not just any run-of-the-mill marketing activities. After all, marketing dollars have to be stretched too. The holy grail of recession marketing is figuring out how to separate the most expensive, least profitable prospects from the prospects who are eager and willing to do business today, perhaps even at a premium. So how does this happen?

Stand up and be the expert in your market.

It is generally accepted that recognized experts make more than others for the same basic work. It is also generally true that experts stay busier, with fewer recession-related dips in business.  With such compelling reasons to demonstrate your expertise, what steps can you take today to begin doing just that?  Here’s our list:

1. Start Podcasting. A simple, sustainable, 5-minute podcast production every week with one central point that touches on your area of expertise; that seminal item that you get paid to know or do for your clients. Use the podcast as a teaser to demonstrate the many solid reasons your prospects should be calling you today.
2. Release regular Video Tutorials that address the most painful problems your prospects face. If done artfully, the unspoken conclusion of these short, pointed video productions is that you are capable of providing the solution they desperately need.
3. Create a Blog. If you do either or both of the items above, then you will be using a blog to do it, anyway.  A blog post twice a week builds a record of authority, both for human visitors and (perhaps even more importantly) for Google.
4. Get your best customers to go on the record by testifying to the value of your expertise. A written testimonial, or better yet, a video testimonial can be a compelling badge of expertise.
5. Begin Publicly Speaking. Anywhere. Anytime. In front of any audience with your market’s focus. This is a long-play strategy, however.  If you signed up today to speak for a group, it might be 5-6 months before the actual engagement.

Expertise is currency. And those that can demonstrate it to their market stand to reap rewards far greater than money alone.

How does video help with SERPs when Google can’t digest the content? Here’s one answer. We know that Google is getting better at understanding how much time someone spends on a page. Bounce rates factor into Google’s value assessment of page relevance. So video can help keep a person on a site for longer, which in turn communicates a higher value message to Google, thus increasing SERPs for page content. We have been testing this strategy, and we are seeing it work.

From PubCon this week, there have been some interesting speculations about the future ranking of sites that do not contain any video. Bruce Clay predicts the rapid shift toward heavily favoring sites that employ video and other Engagement Object Level tools during the first quarter of 2009. All the more reason, during challenging economic times, to make sure you aren’t finding your site becoming irrelevant to Googlebot.

Recently Google refined its algorithm (that mystical unknowable divine fate by which we all live and die) and I was pleased to learn that our SEO and content strategy efforts on behalf of our clients and even our own site have yielded positive results in page rank, organic search results and traffic. We are proving that a video strategy, when combined with other best practices, really can propel a site to higher places.

To that end, we are making a shift in our basic assumptions of web site design, and will be focusing much more on making SEO decisions from the beginning, partnering for much of this work with Taylor Hill, a consultant with a good and growing track record for helping new and existing sites fare better under the omnipotent rule of Google.

We have been following these kinds of stories closely. To most who are familiar with how search works, with content relevance being determined almost exclusively from textual cues, the idea that video could help a web site rank higher in search engines is a bit incredulous. But nonetheless, Google continues to favor web sites that employ video on pages, and articles abound as to the reasons why. And while surrounding video with textual cues and keyword proximity is the best way to tell Google and your visitor what a video is about, every effort should be made to make the video content as relevant and as targeted as possible.

It has been our observation that a video production does an amazing job of converting visitors, and getting them to sit still on a site, engaged in a brand message for much longer than they normally would be inclined (as much as 70% click rate!). But the fact that search engines seem to actually be looking for pages with video makes this content strategy all the more appealing.