FAST Forward '09

I will be presenting a case study on our client AutoTrader.com at the FAST Forward '09 conference in Las Vegas next Tuesday, February 10th. The topic of my presentation is how search and analytics data can inform site design and user experience. AutoTrader.com has created new pages on their site with two purposes in mind. First, they want to improve their SEO rankings. Second, they want to improve the user experience. Post-search users, who have already told Google what they want, should not be taken to the home page. Once we know what a user is searching for, we can provide them with a better page that attempts to guess their next steps using analytics data from Omniture. SEO is not about rankings; it's about dollars. This is also a CFO-friendly project because AutoTrader.com did not have to invest in additional content. Rather they're rendering existing content in a new way that provides incremental benefits simultaneously to both the site and to users.