TIMA February Seminar

I will be presenting at the TIMA February Seminar next Wednesday, February 25th in Raleigh, NC. The topic will be How Search Marketing Can Help You Weather the Tough Economy. Advertisers are cutting back spending, and increasingly they are forced to justify every dollar. There is a parallel shift of dollars from offline to online media, as online can be tracked more effectively. My presentation will cover PPC, SEO, and analytics, and I will provide actionable tactics to attendees on ways they can improve their online marketing. There are a number of great free tools available from Google. If you are in the Raleigh area, you can register here.

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.

Analytics

You're only as good as what you can measure, especially if you're a search marketing agency trying to prove ROI to your client. There are a number of high end Analytics solutions in the marketplace including Omniture. On the SEO side, it's important to be able to know exactly where you stand today, how your users behave on your website, and what changes to make next. Unlike SEM, SEO requires a significant investment of time and money, and it can take several months to see an impact. That said, hope is not a strategy, and you need to adapt in order to drive incremental traffic to your site. The best free offering is Google Analytics. Google gives this information away with the hope that you will spend money on AdWords to drive traffic to your site. Paid search works, and the more you can measure, the better off both of you will be. Implementing analytics software is not a simple process, and it has created a big market for analytics consulting. It is important to do this job right, because if your analytics is wrong, you're making decisions off of bad data. A good place to start learning is the Google Analytics Blog.

Google Travel

BusinessWeek is reporting that Google will be expanding its travel offering through enhancements to Google Maps. Travel search is an interesting vertical because there are a lot of ways to search for the same information. In addition, when searching to book travel, there can be significant price differences between sites, and of course, prices change on a regular basis. My personal favorite is Kayak.com, a travel search engine that searches multiple sites at once. For full disclosure, Comcast, my former employer, uses Kayak as its online travel partner. What differentiates Kayak from the online travel agents like Orbitz and Expedia is that you can book your travel through the travel provider's own website, many of which guarantee the lowest available rate. It is surprising that despite all of the advances online, there are still challenges to booking travel. It will be interesting to see if Google gets into the travel search space. So far, they have avoided this vertical, which BusinessWeek points out is a $90 billion+ global ad and sales market. My guess is that whatever they develop will offer more advertising opportunities, which is their core business.