"67% of online searches are driven by an offline "impression"

According to David Feldman from Iprospect, speaking at SMX Travel@PhoCusWright, 67% of online searches are driven by an offline "impression" such as word-of-mouth, TV, Radio, brochures etc.

In other words, online searches are heavily impacted by offline marketing activities. Most search marketers are aware of the power of offline promotion to drive traffic to websites, but 67% does seem to be a suprisingly high percentage.

Presumably this is a global average and includes the huge volume of searches that are stimulated by news and media coverage. For example, the most used search phrases at any one time are often related to news events or to celebrity names.

The percentage of traffic to most travel websites that has been generated by offline "impressions" is likely to be much less than 67%.

Marketing on multi-language search engines

A client of mine who prefers to remain anonymous was recently approached by an agency offering to increase the visibility of their website on multilingual search engines without having to translate their website. Their service involves creating a translated and optimised version of the home page in as many languages as required. The client asked for our views on the value of this type of service and whether we thought it would be effective. This is our response;

Clearly, if you want to sell your holidays into other language markets then translating and optimising your site in the local languages would be a key part of this.

However, there are some issues with the proposed approach that need to be considered;

1. The first thing to make clear is that if your site is ranked well in the English language versions of the major search properties then it will also be ranked in the foreign search engines. For example, if you go to Google Spain (http://www.google.es/) and just type in your company name (or a phrase that your site ranks well for in Google.com) you will see your site appear in the listings. This is because the default setting of the foreign language versions of most major search engines is the global database. This is the same in any language version of Google (and other major search engines).

There are 2 other search options; 'Pages in Spanish' and 'Pages from Spain'. If you make the same search after selecting either of these 2 options your site will not appear. To appear in a 'Pages in Spanish' search you need to have some Spanish content on your website. To appear in a 'Pages from Spain' search you need to have an .es domain or have your site hosted in Spain. So, just optimising one site page will only allow you to enter the 'Pages in Spanish' option index, not 'Pages from Spain' index.

2. Translating and optimising just one site page will only allow you to effectively target 2 or 3 search phrases, so your exposure will be very limited. If a business is serious about wanting to access the German market, for example, then a much greater number of site pages need to be translated into German and then optimised in order to create any real level of exposure for your target search phrases.

3. You also need to take into account that if you are marketing to a foreign language audience you are likely to need to have staff within your company that can deal with enquiries in that language, otherwise you are unlikely to convert many of the enquiries.

If you are serious about wanting to market your business on foreign language search engines simply optimising your home page into various languages is not an effective way of doing this. We would recommend that you have your website professionally translated into the target languages, and then optimised by search marketing experts native in those languages.

AJAX & SEO - Are they compatible?

Many travel and holiday websites are now utilising AJAX. AJAX is not new, but it is developing into a major buzzword in IT departments and at web developers. It's also a potential source of friction between IT/development and marketing.

AJAX is short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, a development technique designed to create interactive web applications. AJAX makes web pages faster loading and more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server so that the whole page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability. One of the "classic" AJAX applications that most people are familiar with is Google Maps.

There are some major benefits to implementing AJAX on a travel or holiday websites. It can assist in delivering an improved user experience through faster loading, improved page interactivity and enhanced visual presentation. There is also the benefit of reduced bandwidth usage as smaller packets of data are downloaded rather than whole web pages.

However, there is a price to pay for delivering this enhanced user experience. The problem is that search engines can't see your AJAX delivered content or navigation as they are unable to run the javascript code necessary to generate the html content. If the search engines cannot access your content or follow your navigational links you could be seriously restricting your site's exposure in the search engines.

There is no doubt that AJAX is here to stay, at least until something better comes along. It's also likely that the major search engines will become more adept at spidering and indexing AJAX generated content. However, until they do, the simple solution is to avoid using AJAX where it is not needed on your site. If you do intend to use AJAX make sure that your IT department or web developer create real links and html content to feed the spiders with.