I'll admit it, I just love Hipmunk. In this post I'm going to outline an SEO strategy for them for all to see. I thought it would be interesting to get hands-on with a particular site (not something we do often here on the moz blog) and potentially handy for the Hipmunk team too! Interestingly there's a question of if they should even be investing in SEO at all right now but we'll get to that later :)
What is Hipmunk?
Hipmunk is a disruptive startup with a mission of making travel booking easy and fast. Their primary feature is a beautiful and intuitive UI for booking flights:
Once you use it once you'll be hooked. I was!
What Does SEO Look Like for Hipmunk?
We all know that SEO is links + content + social but how does that relate to the flight search space? Well for starters the space is fiercely competitive. Here are some of the biggest terms they'd like to target:
There are lots of established brands ranking already for these terms and with good reason, they're looking for a piece of that nice juicy keyword volume pie! What about some slightly less competitive keywords?
Yikes! Still pretty competitive even for these mid/long tail terms. So what's the plan batman?
Domain Authority FTW
So how are we going to compete with the big boys in this space? Well it's going to be the long hard slog of brand building and domain authority. Rand sums it up in one of my favourite graphics:
Earning links using great content is crucial to long term success. Fortunately, Hipmunk seems to be doing a great job of getting those strong trusted links. Just take a look at their press page! Their UI and core product is the great content that's earning them press mentions here which is awesome. Making a core product that is good enough to earn links is the win-win of online marketing. But those crazy cats over at Hipmunk get up to a little bit of linkbait too:
So it seems that Hipmunk don't really need any help link building! Take a look at the following graph (from MajesticSEO) which shows that hipmunk.com is almost gaining as many links per month as the big players like kayak.com and cheapflights.com:
Unfortunately, if we look at this chart in a cumulative view we see why Hipmunk is going to have a hard time:
TL;DR - keep doing what you're doing Hipmunk! This brand building/PR/domain authority building will pay off in the long run.
SEO in 2011 Benefits Hipmunk
However, there's one trick hidden up that cute little chipmunk's sleeve which is going to play in their favour. In a post-panda world we all know that cute animals as logos make you rank higher. Wait, that's not quite right. What I mean is that in a post-panda world Google is rewarding user engagement. I'm going to hypothesize that user engagement and brand loyalty is off the charts for Hipmunk - based on my own experience and the experience of my friends once you've used it once there's no competition....
Hand in hand with this is a strong social influence:
This strong user engagement and social signals will hopefully give Hipmunk a shot at ranking for the big money terms.
Building Out Scaleable Content
Behind almost every single successful SEO strategy is a plan for scaleable quality content. Patrick McKenzie argues very persuasively on this topic in his great startup SEO blog post. So how does this fit into the Hipmunk roadmap? There's clearly not a lot of scalebale content going on right now:
It's pretty obvious that in this niche the right kind of scaleable content is going to be focused on location-based searches. There's a lot of search volume for these kinds of phrases:
As I see it there are two main routes to go down with this type of scaleable content - one is powered by people, one is powered by machines.
Option 1 - Niche Destination Guides
One option to build out this scaleable content is to put together niche destination guides. They already successfully published a Grand Rapids guide (though with a lousy title tag...)
This is a strategy that I could see working - especially if you can publish content that's of a higher quality than most things out there. This guide was crowd-sourced from locals, if you can replicate that for other tertiary locations you might be onto something. Of course I'd look at trying to drop a pre-populated CTA on those pages to give people a quick and easy route into the flight search:
If you're going to go down this route I'd suggest starting with the uncompetitive locations and gradually getting more competitive as you progress. It's going to be a long hard slog but if you can make sure each niche destination guide gets some buzz and local PR as well (this guide was published just after Grand Rapids was named one of America's dying cities in the press) then you're still turning the bigger picture flywheel while simultaneously building out content that will earn links and rankings over time.
Option 2 - Just Buy This One Flight Data
The second option I see for scaleable content comes in the form of machines. While there are many formats this could take, one angle I particularly like is inspired by Just Buy This One (disclaimer: Reevoo are a Distilled client). The premise here is to use big data to make your decision process incredibly easy. The buying cycle here is for electronics:
But this principle could just as easily apply to flight search. Looking at the common destinations it would be easy to build out a similar "just buy this one" experience for flights. For example, analysing the most common flight patterns for various destinations would result in the ability for you to predict with confidence the "best" destinations and flight options for those destinations and provide a "book now" button that inspires confidence. The key here is confidence and you'd need to make it clear that if the user is looking for a flight with certain parameters (maybe flights from San Francisco to New York this weekend) then this flight is the least agony (a metric that Hipmunk uses extensively that's a combination of price and hassle).
Using this approach you would have to start at the opposite end of the spectrum and start with the most popular locations to ensure enough data to build a good user experience on those pages.
When Should Hipmunk Invest in SEO?
For many startups deciding when to invest in SEO is a tricky issue. You want to invest early to start building the foundations but in many cases you won't have the link authority to see direct ROI over the short term for your SEO investment.
The truth of it is that their team is likely busy working on other things right now. How should they prioritize these projects above what they already have going on? The harsh reality is that this space is competitive. There are big budgets being thrown about and even if Hipmunk were to roll out some of these pages they're unlikely to see an ROI from search just yet. They just don't have the links to compete with the established players right now.
Of course, it's never too soon to roll out pages that are good for users and I believe there are heavy overlaps between marketing and SEO here - these pages would be great PR and can gain them a bunch of links and exposure (especially with local press - a PR opportunity a lot of people overlook). Ultimately, the sooner that they can start building out their main site with pages aimed at specific keywords the sooner they'll be able to rank for these keywords. At some point further down the line SEO is going to be a very significant traffic driver for them and they should look at investing for that opportunity as soon as possible.
TL;DR Keep Up The Link Building - Oh And One More Thing
So in summary - I hope this makes the SEO roadmap slightly clearer for Hipmunk. Certainly the brand building, social and PR work that's going on right now is the best thing you can be doing so keep that up. Just don't forget that at some point you'll want to look at rolling out scaleable, indexable content focused around all those location terms. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but someday.
Oh and one more thing while I'm here - you should really put the words "flight search" on your homepage so that Google can see them. You're ranking 17th for [flight search] right now and you'd likely get a bump for putting the words on page.
Disclaimer: Neither I, Tom Critchlow, nor Distilled have any affiliation with Hipmunk. I met with Alexis Ohanian (an advisor to Hipmunk) for coffee in preparation for writing this post but all thoughts herein are my own (for better or for worse!) and motivated by the love of the 'munk.
A post where you pick one website and use it as a case is a great idea. This could be a recurring thing like the whiteboard friday.
Back in 2010 there has been many webinars with site reviews of websites from seomoz users.
It would be great if those kind of webinars would be again more constantly - https://www.seomoz.org/webinars/2010#pro - but as I just see - they were for pros only....
Bingo! :) Thanks for this webinar link as my company have the pro account i can access to this... Thanks for that!
I experimented with this similarly on one of my business's blogs "The SEO Analyst" ( https://www.seoproim.com/seo-analyst/ ). If you would like me to do something similar to what Tom has provided - I would gladly accept. Just email me the URL @ [email protected].
Cute animals as logos make you rank higher? Hmm... I'm in the middle of rebranding...
Great post. Travel is one of the toughest verticals and I always like to see ideas for ranking sites in highly competitive niches.
My only critique is that even with crowdsourcing for their content, that's still a lot of content to create and manage even if they are letting users do the heavy lifting. Most startups don't have a dedicated resource for content creation or management and if they were to setup guides for every city in the US with a larger population than Grand Rapids, that's 123 additional pages to create right off the bat. If they took the same concept to international cities, it's approximately 2,000 pages and international travel is far more lucrative than domestic.
Even if they setup every single page, they would have to have a good architecture in place to make sure each one was able to be found by search engines and users.
Yep - completely agree there. That's why I make the point that they may not be ready to invest in SEO just yet. To compete across the mid/long-tail they're going to have to invest serious time/money so it's no easy opportunity. That said, the sooner they can begin the sooner they'll start to see results but SEO is a long-term game especially in this space.
Tom, you've forced my hand. Hipmunk have long been on my "list to pitch" SEO to for too long! But now this is out, I feel I've just got to push some of my ideas I've had brewing for months in the travel and flight search sector.
First confession - I'm a jetrosexual. I love anything and everything to do with planes. After screaming babies, I'm possibly the most irritating person you want to be sat next to on a plane. You know, the kind that reels off useless facts and takes photos like there's not tomorrow. Confession over, you can see why I'd love to work with Hipmunk :]
The ideas…
(which I had written down on a piece of paper. At the top "created at 1.07am on 7th Dec 2010" - I knew it would come in handy!)
Someone needs to create for travel search what Amazon created for e-commerce - community-curated buying suggestions. Yes, there will always be a need for the cheapest flight which is easy to measure, but as Hipmunk are showing through 'agony' searches etc. folks are looking further than just price. Here in the UK, Virgin Atlantic were the first to install a premium economy. BA closely followed with their own plus the worlds first flatbed in business. That's expensive… and proves it's not all about price. London - Sydney for instance… a 24-hour haul, and you don't want to be in uncomfortable seats with surly service for that length of time, do you?
I think Oyster-style reviews by journalists across trunk routes (London - New York, Sydney - Los Angeles etc.) would be effective, but difficult to scale. It would need to be supplemented by awesome user generated content.
One of my favourite content-curation strategies is to work with forums distilling their wisdoms into smaller, digestible guides. Currently working on an epic YOUmoz post on that very topic… (keep y'all eyes peeled for some actionable tips!)
Plenty of great flying-related resources:
Flyertalk.com - worlds largest community of Frequent Fliers (big money here). Huge market here and with the right system, people will do crazy things for miles. Awesome documentary: https://vimeo.com/7167640
Airlines.net - The forums here are packed with jet nuts, but take a look at this one in particular: https://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/trip_reports/ - users upload photo-essays of their experiences in mind-numbing detail. Typical poses include the legroom shot, the aircraft bathroom shot and of course each and every airline meal. The great thing is previous high-quality reports set the standard for future contributors.
My favourite example over the years: https://ww.airliners.net/aviation-forums/trip_reports/read.main/108420/
Airline Quality - Skytrax (one company that runs airline/airport awards) runs https://www.airlinequality.com/ which gathers airline reviews from beyond just jet-geeks.
SeatGuru, SeatExpert etc. - all the websites displaying the best and worst seats on major aircraft.
If you could condense all these features into one, with an idiot-proof interface, then grow and incentivize a community to do the content-creation legwork for you, you'd win.
Corporate travel however is one other giant market expedia or Kayak don't appear to have a hold on it? I've always wondered if some kind of app to calculate estimated prices of commonly travelled routes (like Seattle-New York and Seattle-London) in order to work out which airline you're best off earning frequent flier miles with, then evening adding calculations off other ways of accruing miles like shopping for groceries with X and staying at Y Hotels. Or something for small businesses to work off - being in the valley, my guess is they'd have already been approached about that?
Wouldn't it be great for one app to recommend the best route with the best airline, on the best flight (with the best aircraft) in the best seat with the most reasonable price?
Argh! I'll do a proper pitch someday and maybe ship them something in the post ;)
Hipmunk - if you're reading this and liking it, you should checkout a handful of SEO resources I've created:
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-definitive-guide-to-awesome-web-content
https://www.distilled.net/linkbait-guide/
https://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-your-linkbait-fails-and-how-to-fix-it
https://www.seomoz.org/ugc/growing-up-in-the-seo-ninjahood
I've turned 18 today, and live in the UK so may not be the perfect person to action this, but some kind of strategy work would be pretty schweeeet no? This is tip-of-the-iceberg stuffs - perhaps a summer internship in sunny California? I'm on twitter @edfryed :]
</aviation nerd>
Ed. As always you put me to shame. Epic post is epic. Love your ideas, especially about extending the definition of agony that they've already come up with...
Also Airbnb should totally recruit some of those flying geeks to write content for them.
I really like the introduction of case studies to the blog. Reading thoughts behind strategies and getting insight into the process is often more useful than just reading the final suggestions.
(And great additions by Ed. Always impressed by what you Distilled guys come up with as a team ;)
I'll be honest, Tom, I'm a little confused as to how option 2 is going to help with SEO. I agree that UX and conversion are inextricably tied to SEO, but it was framed as an SEO suggestion. How is this going to help them rank?
Hey - good point I could have fleshed that out a bit more. It helps them by giving them pages for their top queries (like "flights to san francisco") that would actually deserve to rank and generate them links. These pages would be a great UI as well as having in-built linkbait and therefore would give them the opportunity to try and capture some of that head term traffic.
Great article Tom and great that you are providing a real example, in a super competitive space. When I read your post I was thinking about an article I recently read about PR consultants not really getting how important a part they could play in developing their clients profile online.
PR consultants are great for building relationships offline. From my experience of them (one my great friends has been a Travel PR consultant for many years), they are brilliant at starting and maintaining relationships - offline. When it comes to online presence, PR consultants generally don't think about such things as anchor text. They are great at creating the content, and working their contact list hard, they just need some direction. Having gone through Hipmunks Press section, they would do well to revisit those PR consultants/journalists and provide them with new anchor text, in return for a new story, with additional rich long-tail keyword anchor text.
On another note, to really gain momentum in the travel industry, its important to be a networking offline. This industry thrives on networking and meeting real people. Its a hard slog for sure, but a very good excuse to travel to the various tourist industry events around the world, and partner up with specialists. Specialists = exceptional content opportunities = google love. AAAAH.
I keep trying to close my ears to the "networking offline" thing. Don't know how long I can keep it up.
The irony Johann, is that I've attended more networking events with my clients in their various industries, than I have in my own industry - SEO. I wasn't trying to acquire new clients btw - in case you're wondering.
Its a great way to understand the industry of ones clients. In fact, one of my clients is a video production company in London (saturated market or what right!!!!), and they are now making great headway from my advice to create a regular Music Video Production event based on the contacts they already know in the industry. This has led to video content, which can be optimized, back link opportunities via invitations to journalists in music and much more. Its worth it for sure.
Just realised you are part of DoHop.com - and apologies if I sounded patronizing.
I like how you use great brand association on your homepage. Can I recommend that those icons are linked to somewhere else on your site i.e. testimonials - there is a measurable outcome from that... whatdoyareckon?
No, you are absoloutely right, off-line networking is something we are learning the value of just recently and need to more of.
And yes, we should link to the testimonials that go with the brands (I assume you are referring to the Frommer's, BBC ... logos).
I have to admit that I felt an SEOrgasm reading your post Tom.
Yes... this is how to brainstorm ideas that can lead your site to the success. Yes, then (and citing you again), you have to get shit done... and it is there where the real problem is. In fact, even though you have been able to elaborate the greatest strategy, it will remain that - a beautiful strategy on the paper - if you don't assure the cohoperation of your client, whose first brick is to convince him to think on a larger period of time and not just on the short frame, while - that's sure - crafting the milestones of your strategy in order to obtain certain objectives also in short and middle term.
About the core topic: DA and Brand as a strategy in order to really compete against the established SERP order. I agree with you that finally that is the only real way to win the game, especially if we think how Google loves brands (and - on a larger perspective - enthities). Because of this I remind you this WBF about What is it a Brand for Google? by Rand.
Ciao :)
There must be people who are against SEOrgasms...
OT - They need to learn how to parse dates typed into the textboxes. I type 09-23-2011 and it shows me flights for Oct. 9 instead of Sep 23.
They actually have a pretty interesting and active blog at https://blog.hipmunk.com. Does the subdomain have a penalty as compared to a subdirectory?
(Off-topic: Making readers create a new SEOMoz account on a form with six fields and a confirmation email just to leave a comment is going a bit too far in the direction of paranoia/email harvesting. Why don't you just use one of the bazillion identity systems out there?)
I love Hipmunk too! But Bing Travel consistently scoops them on cheaper flights.
Nice analysis!
I remember my marketing class teacher she said, ‘To compete a brand you have to act like a brand at first!’ it’s pretty much applied here as DA and Branding seems to be the only way to compete with the established SERPs in Google and other search engines.
I believe Building content that is link worthy like white papers, info graphics and other related stuff that get links should be on their website and other then that being the press attraction and getting links from there is a great strategy.
Also it’s good to use the keyword on the home page as this is very natural to use exact match keyword within the website (up to certain density)
Good Strategy Over all!
I have been working on Airline SEO on and off for a long while, mostly just bits and pieces of strategy and consulting as I manager other verticals. I can say this but it is one of those things where you have all the big extablished players who are brands in the market and they have been building links for way 12 years.
I agree with sections of your strategy but you really need to hit all the niche areas hard, things like niche travel forums, niche airline review websites and other niche sections in the market still provide opportunity to assist the overall SEO project.
Also from a link building front - I notice some wikipedia links here for the hipmunk website:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Huffman
It could be an idea for these guys to also target other founder pages with relevant backlinks.
But overall great work so far I like what I see =)
Regarding when they should start doing SEO, surely creating quality pages is going to drive the links, so saying that they don't have the link authority yet isn't going to be a problem is it? Creating the content will give them link authority if it's good enough.
I love their video on creating the chipmunk. Surprisingly compelling! I never thought I'd be happy to watch someone design a chipmunk using vector graphics
I think adding video and using vseo would help. But I'm talking about 25+ videos featuring their mascot in a series of old fashioned comic book-style stories of our hero booking flights. VSEO would be vital! Plus they should give the munk his own Twitter and Facebook pages with contests to give away free trips. That is what we suggest the Munk should do from The Idea People. Long live the Munk!!
Jay
Interesting job, thank you for the info and for sharing it :D
Just some small advice. Have a look at your 404-page as well. It couldn't hurt to make it cute and cuddly with your logo. And some links back to your site might help. :-)
Tom, I'm so much so inspired by this post that I'm writing up my own version for [my fav local brand]. Obviously, they aren't doing it right. And i think this post is a great example of landing up a stint with brands esp. for new comers.
Thanks for stirring up the idea.
-Ashish
Nice analysis Tom and thanks for sharing this information...
I strongly believe that hipmunk would much better do if they invest their money on PR and whatever else is needed in order to get acquired by one of the biggest players than on SEO.
No matter how good you are it takes a lot of effort to achieve ranking that actually produces visits and as we all know, time equalls money. And probably this is going to be one of the most expensive SEO projects that we have heard of in 2011/2012.
Just try to sell the idea/business to someone else that already has the ranking, it just makes better business sense :D
Good idea about starting small and not going after the big markets right away. Does anyone have any other examples other travel sites that this can be applied to?
Hey Tom -
This might be a basic question, but looking at your regional example, how would you go about getting links for a project like that?
Also, any thoughts on how you'd come up with cost/benefit projections so that the hipmunk people jump on the project when you pitch it to them?
Contacting the companies listed on the regional pages would probably be enough. Ego-bait is often one of the most effective link building strategies.
Alternatively, Hipmunk could do some local nominations, prompting local business owners / local citizens to nominate and vote for the top attractions in the region. This requires a lot more resources in the beginning though. Probably someone to show up in the region and promote it.
Thanks for the answer Thogen- I actually thought of it, but figured there had to be more, figuring otherwise all this effort would be would be little more than a glorified reciprocal linking scheme
Hah, in that sense I can call the entire web a glorified reciprocal linking scheme
Great post. I am actually in the midst of doing SEO work for Hipmunk's competitor Dohop, dohop.com along with social media and marketing (and am a paying SEOmoz customer, no less, so felt it was ok to add the link).
This article is great, all I have to do now is substitute "Dohop" every time it says "Hipmunk", print it out and tape to my desk.
I will however challange your statement that "based on my own experience and the experience of my friends once you've used it once there's no competition". Dohop actually has superior technology to Hipmunk, and better prices. They have a different UI, but we are betting on people favoring cheap flights over their admittedly clever UI.
But again, the article is very good, and I am looking forward to more of these hands-on types of articles. It makes for a more immersing read.
Great article. I too am a fan of the Munk! IMO their strenght is in social media and branding. I love visiting their facebook page, and participating in the cute question and pictures that they post.
Tom fantastic article, Thoughtful analysis and simple way you explain. Like you said SEO is mixup with Content+Links+social and it is true. We have to bring all this things together and execute the plan accordingly. Scalable quality content is require for any website and through addup relevant content on the subject to broaden the semantic footprint of the website to encompass more search engine traffic.
I like infographic and it is good option for SEO as well Tom. I would like to walk through my process of creating and launching a successful infographic.
I think SEO roadmap is clear for hipmunk.com and its truly great to see this type of article where we can see the all picture. Wonderful Article, you and Will did stupendous job.
-Hiren
Well I have to hand it to the people behind HipMunk as the site is very clean and intuative. But at the same time I have to quiver in fear at the size of balls the CEO must have to venture into such a competetive marketplace. But as Tom pointed out there are some good solid link building practices going on. I think the best way to win in a market place as competetive as this is not neccessarily through links but through social. I am seeing more and more instances of big companies being slain by the little guy that provides a more personal, easy to use service.
Good luck to them in the future.
Does anyone know how I can see when Google has indexed an article? Also how to check if an article is moving up for certain keywords?
Great to see how you'd approach SEO for a site like this. I'd say that it would be beneficial to start asap, even with such a competitive industry. A website such as theirs is quite complex in terms of structure and if they're failing to get it right now then the re-organisation will be a nightmare.
If they're going to break into such a competitive market, they need to get creative and work on doing something with social media that hasn't been done before!
Great article! It's always nice to get a little look into how other SEOs work and provide recommendations to clients (even if Hipmunk.com isn't really a client). I like it!
Thanks a lot for this really clear article. And for the comments to add on that. The local press is a perfect idea!
Yeah..Author gave a deep observation on this and it really works for him.Nice article..
Nice Article! And really as based on my experience today the things totally change for SEO. It just not link building & directory submission fare enough for a site now a days Press Coverage + Social Media is the best part of SEO 2.0.
It increase our ranking on search engines & to help in building brand.
Kudos Tom!
The website has got some serious web design issues. It doesn't have any professional look or feel to begin with. As soon as i visit the website, i get a feeling of a website designed for 2nd grade students. I will enter 'dance' in the text box, click on the button and boom, hipmunk will start dancing all over the screen. Seriously how many prospects will not bounce from this website within 4 seconds. When i click on the search button, i am sent to some excel spreadsheet type page. Once you are on this page, then you are on your own. You need to figure out how to move forward. So besides design issues the website has usability issues too. My suggestion would be to work on the design and usability first. Make it look like some serious flight booking website where people are comfortable sharing their credit card details.
I'll have to agree to disagree with you regards website design issues. Design is always subjective though and perhaps the design has not been designed for 1st grade students - or perhaps there is evidence that 1st grade design students like animals whilst booking flights - I don't know really. But without the market research that I'm sure they carried out, its hard to make a judgement call on that one. I was actually quite impressed that the Hipmunk does dance, when you type 'dance' into location box and you hit the search tab. On a serious note though, I do see where you're coming from and I think Tom alluded to this with his comment on including more written content on the home page. I reckon the site would do very well from having a 'how to use' video for sure, but personally speaking I understood the functionality - it's a great use of a familiar format Excel - that plenty of people use. I think its fairly intuitive IMHO.
If there was anything to add value on the search results page, it would be to state very clearly that when you book, you are booking the flight on the website of the airline in question e.g. Easyjet, and that they are partners. There could be a far better use of associative brands that they are partnered with on home page and so forth.
I agree that maybe it's not for everyone Himanshu but I think you go too far with your criticism. I disagree with your statement about bounce rate and UX - that's their entire business and they have worked incredibly hard to build something people love. Personally I find it incredibly easy to use and I know plenty of other people love it too. Still, that's the nature of design - it's subjective.
However, your comment about following the crowd "Make it look like some serious flight booking website" is a long way off the mark imho. To be disruptive you need to do something different. Just look at the Google homepage...
"To be disruptive you need to do something different"
Yes. But not at the cost of loosing credibility. Everyone i have asked so far (including some remote usability testers) doubt the credibility of the business and they have range of negative opinions from childish to hookie. And i am sure that if more usability tests are carried out, the results will be more or less the same. The website doesn't give the confidence to a carry out a high value transaction like booking a flight, period.
OK, so I just went to hipmunk.com for the first time and was checking for my flights back to Canada for a visit.
Got some points here.
1) Damn that was fun
2) That squirrel can party with me anyday of the week.
3) I just bought my flight from one website without searching for hours for deals.
Thanks for sharing the 'munk love Tom.
Himanshu - I don't think you should make such absolute statements:
"The website doesn't give the confidence to a carry out a high value transaction like booking a flight, period."
You clearly are not a fan of the site and that's fine but to paint such a broad brush feels false - clearly some people disagree with you. Inc named them one of the best travel booking websites and I personally have booked many flights through them.
Not sure why you are shooting Himanshu down when he just lifted his own opinion! We've got a few companies in South Africa that also makes use of 'cute' characters.
https://www.hippo.co.za/default.asp?vdn=
That is an example of one.
The hippo used in these campaigns has got the tendency to work on my nerves and I tend to lose focus on what exactly is being offered.
Now towards Hipmunk; the baby blue being used portrays a baby nursery or something
SEOMoz is doing a good job with their character and they couple it with professional designs and layouts.
I'll partially agree and partially disagree with you.
I don't think the whimsical features on the page are always a bad thing. People have a lot more tolerance these days for a "cuter" feel.
From a conversion standpoint, I agree that there are some things that could be done. It could be more clear, for example, that I'm choosing the destination initially, followed by the return trip. They could make it a LOT easier to choose one-way flights - I actually don't even see how to look for a one-way flight. They could make it easier to look forward and backward a day or two after the search. And yes, they could add a little text explaining what you're doing at the moment, while replacing some of the arrows with English.
The site is new, and there's always a lot to do with a new business and new site. I'm a fan of the interface, and I think they've got a shot.
Joe, the site does offer forward/backward and one-way. Forward/backward is accomplished by the +/- after the date. One-way is simply not entering a return date.
I personally love the interface, and can't see myself ever going back to other search sites.
As for the interface, I think siimpler is better in the long run. As a relative newcomer to the Apple IPAD, I found myself frustrated at having only one button to do things. However, once you get the hang of it, it's great.
Thing is but some times cartoon characters and funny brand images can really make a difference I mean look at the likes of Geico car insurance. They have a little lizard thing as their brand image. People want to go to the website and feel as though it is something which they can relate to and feel a connection with an I think Hipmunk has done this quite well. I mean they do not have the old boring travel site look they have come into the market with something warm and friendly.
@Tom Critchlow
I want to add my experience to compete big competition in short time frame. I have that experience in direction of external links and some of on page factors.
It's quite interesting to know that Page authority will help us to compete big competitors. It's 100% true. I have good experience with it to compete big competitors and getting top 10 ranking in short time frame. (~45 Days)
How to work on Domain authority or page authority? And, how can we improve it? That's major questions for all SEO guys. I want to share some thing on it. I have started my work with 28 domain authority. I have focused on real time social media engagement, social signals, self social distribution.. That was my first to do task.
Then, I pumped myself to create natural external links rather than jump in to well develop or old practice excel sheet. I just gathered natural links with huge subscription, Google alerts and tried to develop links over there. I have developed my anchor links on fresh pages as well as some big authority pages by drill down that website. I never focused on Do follow or No follow aspects during this task. :) Just gathering quality + natural external links as fast as possible. Right now, I am focusing to maintain taste of my website and subject matter so it will help me to sustain current ranking.
This is my experience to compete in huge competition in short time frame. I am looking forward to read more inputs in same direction.