Oh, ma... Holly would (search if Holly could find the search box!)

Tomorrow I’ll be moderating a panel at OMMA Hollywood. Here’s the session overview:

Content Owners: Using On-Site Search to Drive Revenue (OMMA Search)
Location: Studio A, Mezzanine Level (2nd Floor)

There are a number of ways to use insights from search activity on your site to drive revenue. We’ll discuss how seeing what people are looking for can inform your site architecture, content layout and product selection decision. We’ll also share best practices for submitting your on-site search results to the search engines so you can have more pages included in their indices. Finally, we’ll cover practical tips for mining on-site search data to improve paid search campaign performance.

Moderator
Aaron Goldman, Consultant, Resolution Media

Panelists
Karen Brophy, VP, Product Management, Tribune.com
Jeremy Barnes, Manager, Digital Strategy, Acquity Group
Christopher Knoch, Principal SEM Consultant, Omniture
Esmee Williams, VP of Brand Marketing, AllRecipes

To be clear, when we refer to on-site search, we’re talking about search engines on a publisher’s site, not mass search engines like Google and Yahoo that drive traffic to content sites. It gets confusing because both Google and Yahoo have tools available for content publishers to easily add a search box onto their sites so we’re not disregarding them altogether in this discussion.

This topic is quite timely for me as I recently installed Google custom search engines on all of my blogs. See that pretty box up there on the top of the right rail? Fancy, aye? And, best of all, it's free!

An interesting stat I came across in prepping for this panel is that SLI Systems Research showed that 87% of retailers are currently using onsite search. This should come as no surprise. But onsite search is not just for retailers. Any and all content publishers can take advantage of onsite search to help their audience access their content and, ultimately, drive profit. I look forward to tomorrow’s discussion as we flesh out just how this can be done. If you’re at OMMA, definitely come by and show some love.