"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.

How to get your site in the Google UK index

This is a question emailed in by Peter Thomson, President of Thomson Bike Tours (http://www.thomsonbiketours.com/).

Peter asks "Our company website is well ranked in Google.com and much of our business is from the US, however, we would now like to increase our focus on the UK market. My question is how do we get our site listed on Google UK?"

To answer Peter's question we first of all we need to distinguish between Google UK and Google's UK index. If you go to Google.co.uk you will see that the default search setting is 'the web'. This is basically Google's main global index and usually returns the same results as Google.com. Your site does appear in this index.

However, if I make the same search again, but this time select 'pages from the UK', your site does not appear. This is a problem for you because a relatively significant percentage of UK consumers use the 'pages from the UK' option to narrow their search. As it stands, these potential customers will not find your website in the natural search results.

To get your site in the Google UK sites only index you must have one of two things; either a .co.uk domain, or a site hosted within the UK with a UK I.P. address. A word of warning though, just because you use a UK based hosting company does not guarantee that your site is physically hosted in the UK. This is because some hosting companies use offshore servers. It's definitely worth getting assurances on this before committing to new hosting services.