I’ve decided to go James Lipton (sorry, no Will Ferrell impersonation) style and create a section for marketers to answer 5 questions about search. The inaugural interview is with Reid Ichiki, Senior Manager, Internet Marketing, for Hawaiian Airlines. Reid is currently responsible for all Online Advertising – multiple platforms that generate traffic and revenue to www.HawaiianAirlines.com. He supervises the affiliates program as well as Search Engine Optimization. In addition to this, he manages the On-Site Marketing of the site, Promotional themes and any new route web initiatives.

Prior to coming on board with Hawaiian Airlines, Reid managed Fortune 500 clients in the Financial sector at Google. During his 3+ years, he provided sales and client services for strategic West Coast clients helping them achieve record goals with various Google products (AdWords, Print, TV and Radio).

Here are our 5 questions…
1. What do you like about search?
The most beneficial aspect about search marketing is the reach, real time, customizable, accountable and it works!

2. How do you search?
I only use Google (is there any other way…snickering). A background which includes Google, I know Google indexes more pages, accurately and all results will be relevant.

3. What does search do for you that other tactics don’t?
Search is very customizable and performs in real time! We can dial this platform into a certain frequency and establish great returns. I see search as a huge dial, where we can turn it up or down at our flexibility.

4. How important is search in your marketing mix?
Search is a crucial piece of our platform. I love search! I wish we could get more users searching and purchasing.

5. Let’s do some word association
Ask.com - "Jeeves! Where’d you go?"
Organic Search - "Everyone needs this"
Video Search - "YouTube"
Google - "The king"
Yahoo! - "Older and sophisticated"
Live Search - "Still coming. We need more converters here."
Personalized search - "iGoogle!"
Google killer - "What is this...smiling"
Social search - "MySpace"

AboutUs.org  is a wiki whose goal is to create a free Internet resource containing information about websites.  Launched in 2006, AboutUs.org was pre-populated with information about many different websites.  As user participation has increased over the past year, so has the visibility of AboutUs.org pages within search engine results. While not as powerful as Wikipedia, AboutUs.org seems to provide real value at the local level, where smaller businesses often have less than stellar websites.

So you may be asking, what’s the value of AboutUs.org?  Well for starters, it is always a good idea to keep track of any open source site that has information about your business to make sure your site is being properly represented. From an SEO perspective, we are seeing some value in the links coming from AboutUs.org.  When structuring your page, be aware of keywords you are targeting and hyperlink them back to relevant sections of your site.  AboutUs.org does not seem to monitor self promotion like Wikipedia.  From a reputation management perspective, sites like AboutUS.org give you the ability to create content about your site that can potentially push less than positive information that may be showing up in search engines further down in the search results.

Article by Ray Rosti

It’s well known and documented that the landing page can have an effect on user behavior. However, the debate still goes on as to whether driving consumers directly to the end of the conversion funnel, rather than giving them a full customer journey, will influence the propensity to complete a desired action.

Here at AA|RF UK we decided to investigate this proposition further. With one client in mind, a large national retailer here in the UK, we wanted to see the difference in appointment bookings from the homepage versus the first step of the appointments booking process.

With the stage set, it was time to implement the test itself. Using the same copy – a generic appointment-driving message (Fig: 1), the landing page was rotated 50:50 between the above two mentioned pages.

Fig: 1

Plan and Design at <>
book an appointment online now with
our expert design consultants!
www.<...>co.uk

Results from the initial one month test period look promising in that landing visitors on Step 1 of the booking process drove up appointment volume by 31% compared to the homepage. So it would seem that driving consumers directly to the beginning of the conversion process will increase the likelihood of them to convert. Could this be because the visitor journey isn’t as important as once thought, or that by showing visitors the start of the process they’re more likely to return to it at the end of their visit? At this stage, it’s difficult to say which of the above is true; however, it poses an interesting topic and an impetus to investigate this further by looking at on-site behavior in order to find out whether visitors are just landing and booking an appointment or navigating through the site - looking at product ranges and really taking in the full online brand experience.

Article by David Chase

AA|RF, VP and Search discipline lead, Matt Greitzer discusses the interesting trend of “Search as Research.”

We all understand the importance of analytics and search, but in many ways there is so much confusion and challenges that many give up or settle.  Anyone struggling with this should read “Web Analytics—Taming Digital Chaos.”  This is a white paper that was authored by Web Analytics Lead, Rocco Albano.

SES NY kicked off this week and the folks at Search Engine Land provided great coverage of the sessions.  VP of SEO and Web Analytics for AA|RF will be speaking on two panels at the event.