Google Calendar Brings Time, Search Together - Google Calendar and SEO/SEM
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Gartner analyst Allen Weiner is intrigued by Google Calendar. “If it becomes successful, then it can also be the place to schedule a lot of content delivery. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to go to your calendar and say 10 a.m. every morning, ‘I would like to listen to a podcast’…and you listen to it through your calendar.” He’s right, that shouldn’t be difficult; RSS feeds for each calendar are already available.
I could go one better with that. One personalized search feature lets you save searches for particular keywords, and repeat them with just a few clicks. How hard would it be for Google to let you set it up so that searches for particular keywords are run every morning at a particular time, and have the top 30 results delivered to your email inbox? (This ought to be a piece of cake if you’re a Gmail user). If you’re an SEO, wouldn’t it be wonderfully convenient for you to be able to check your rankings in the SERPs every morning like this, without having to do a thing beyond the initial setup?
Of course, this isn’t the only way that SEOs can hope to benefit from Google Calendar down the line. First of all, there’s the obvious point that it’s another application to tie in loyal Google users. Gee, did someone say “portal”? As long as you’re on the site already, you’re more likely to use all of Google’s other features, like search. If you normally just go there to search, then set up a Google Calendar, you’re more likely to hang around for a while…and become a target for ads.
Speaking of ads, while Google currently isn’t planning to add advertising to Calendar, that’s an opportunity that would be hard for it to pass up. If your children have a soccer game and some of the parents are discussing where to go for food after the game, could you blame Google for putting up ads for local kid-friendly restaurants on the page? Evite.com already does something similar.
All in all, Google Calendar is a very solid, feature-rich, well-supported release. It’s not perfect, but if this is the beta version I’m looking forward to seeing the full release. You can expect it to be different and improved, since there’s a forum for discussing improvements and a number of analysts using it (even Matt Cutts) have picked some nits. But try it out yourself; I think you’ll be impressed.
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