Jessica Wilson

Nadia Gonzalez

Britta Erickson

Hannah Usleman

Research Proposal

1. YakGear is a company that was founded in Houston, Texas by Bill Bragman in 2005. The goal

of this company is to provide its consumers with the best quality products while providing information

for a safe and fun paddling experience. YakGear’s mission is to provide a safe and unique outdoor

experience for their consumers, while providing them with the best quality products and customer

support. They provide products for fishing, kayaking, paddle-boarding and more, all while being

conscious of the environment around us. The website is used to showcase new products through

promotions like videos, blogs and other media. They offer a wide range of brands and products to fit

their active consumers’ needs. They also showcase how consumers are successfully using their products

through brand ambassadors.

2. Our client recently updated their website so that consumers can easily find them and purchase

items online as well as purchasing products in person at their warehouse or through stores that sell their

products. Since updating their website our client has experienced an increase of up to three times more

web traffic than before updating their website. The goal of this project is to see where this increase in

audience is coming from. The objective of this project is to measure how much traffic this new feature

of their website has brought in, and how to increase the websites SEO.

3. Yak Gear uses a plethora of strategies to communicate with their consumers. When you first

enter the webpage your greeted with a coupon for 10% off your first purchase. This invites new
customers to further explore the webpage while boosting sales. Another approach they take is through

informational videos. This gives them credibility to their consumers while helping those who are

searching for this information by providing them with free instruction. They are investing in their

consumers experience, this encourages people to purchase products and it builds brand loyalty. They

have successfully harnessed the power of social media by installing Instagram, Twitter, Youtube,

Facebook, and Pinterest widgets on their website. The hashtags #yourrules and #yakgear have been used

globally by satisfied customers, this reinforces the brands credibility. This also creates a personal

connection with their consumers. Their response rate is consistent with an average response within the

hour.

4. The outputs we will be measuring for this project is the web traffic that the 10% off banner

that they provide when consumers first visit their website attracts. We want to see if this 10% banner is

attracting more people to the YakGear website and if this is what is responsible for the increase in web

audience. The outtakes are consumers getting their purchase discounted.

5. We want to measure our community engagement and identify who our new audience is. Our

construct is figuring out who the new audience is and what is attracting them to the YakGear website.

YakGear also wants to focus on optimizing their ability to be found by their consumers globally and

efficiently on the web. Is their SEO’s responsible for this increase in web traffic, or is it something else?

This is what we will be focusing on in our project. This will help them better identify how to improve

brand loyalty, and figure out how to keep increasing their audiences.

6. ​Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO) Optimizing Scholarly Literature for

Google Scholar & Co.​ This article contains guidelines on how to optimize scholarly literature for

academic search engines in general, and for Google Scholar in particular. ​The Role and Importance of
Search Engine and Search Engine Optimization. ​This article is related to our construct because it

describes the role of SEO’s and how to increase them. This article has helped us reach our goal and

objective for this product. ​Affiliate Marketing for Entrepreneurs. ​This article is relating to the

mechanics of driving traffic to enhance business performance. This establishes a relationship in which a

merchant pays the affiliate for links that are generated from the affiliate site to the merchant site. This

article contains guidelines on how to increase your viewers for the brands website.

7. Yakgear is a brand that is globally recognized by consumers because they share their

experiences through their website, and experiences of those from all over the globe. Since the update of

their website they have tripled their audiences and are curious to see where this audience is coming

from. To answer this research question we will use google analytics to see where this audience is

coming from. We will use the 10% off your first purchase banner to see if this is bringing in new

consumers. We can see that the majority is coming from organic searches and direct searches. A large

number of people are being referred to their website or are paid searches could be the cause of this rise

in traffic. One way YakGear could help to further increase their web traffic is to be more active and

interactive with their consumers through their social media platforms. Search Engine Optimization will

help us discover keywords that the brand might be lacking on when consumers are needing to search for

specific outdoor equipments and other needs. Yakgear hopes to be one of the top brands to pop up on

searches that represent their company’s name- for example “kayak” and “outdoor equipment”- and

figure out how can we increase our SEO for Yakgear. We will use Google Analytics to determine this.

By looking at the pages most visited on the website we could help increase the SEO’s by incorporating

more keywords like “Kayak Gear Accessories,” “Kayak Paddles & Accessories” “Kayak seats”. This
could help Yakgear appear as a consumers first top three searches online and one of the most visited

pages more often into the websites main page.

8. Location is a key variable in this project because this company operates globally; we want to

make sure we are serving people who support us around the world in a consumer centered and efficient

manner. We will be looking at the location tab in analytics to better our understanding of where our

consumers are coming from. If we have a large audience in a certain country, it would benefit our

company to advertise there to increase their web traffic. It will also help to provide our client with a

better understanding our where their audience is concentrated. Conversions of course are important to

every type of business but it is especially important to YakGear, considering they restructured their

online store in the last year. We want to make sure it is producing more revenue for the company.

Demographics are are also another important key variable to us, specifically because we want to

understand all of our new website users. In the last year we have gained a substantial amount of website

visits, but who are our new customers, and how can we better serve them? It is important for our client

to understand what demographics are engaging with their company so that they can appeal to the

audiences that are visiting their web pages. Consumer behavior is a key variable we want to measure

because we want to improve the rate in which people are not giving up at checkout; sometimes people

drop off right before they make a purchase and we would like to know why and how we can improve

our service.

9. ​Beel, J., & Gipp, B., & Wilde, E. (January 2010). Academic Search Engine Optimization

(ASEO). ​Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar & Co,​Volume 41, (Issue 2), pp. 176-190.

Retrieved from ​https://www.utpjournals.press/author/Wilde%2C+Erik​.

 Dixit, S. & Kesarwani, H. (2018). Driving Traffic and Customer Activity Through Affiliate

Marketing.​ Affiliate Marketing for Entrepreneurs: The Mechanics of Driving Traffic to Enhance

Business Performance, ​Retrieved from

https://www.igi-global.com/chapter/affiliate-marketing-for-entrepreneurs/182994​.

Jain, A. (May-June 2013). The Role and Importance of Search Engine and Search Engine

Optimization.​ International Journal of Emerging Trends & Technology in Computer Science,​ Volume 2,

(Issue 3), pp. 99-102. Retrieved from

http://www.ijettcs.org/Volume2Issue3/IJETTCS-2013-05-28-057.pdf​.

Aswani, R. & Kar, A. & Ilavarasan, V. & Dwivedi, Y. (2018). ​Search engine marketing is not

all gold: Insights from Twitter and SEOclerks

https://ac.els-cdn.com/S0268401217304048/1-s2.0-S0268401217304048-main.pdf?_tid=69beb92d-ec68

-427f-a58e-28d3451b8e54&acdnat=1524160422_34449de21e376b5bd84b5abc77d0ae37

Shetty, R (2018). Internet Advertising--Consumer Acquisition Hierarchy of Value. ​Being Mad​,

Google Scholar, 19 Jan. 2018,

https://beingmad.org/internet-advertising-consumer-acquisition-hierarchy-of-value/

10.

Time Table
02/ 15 Identified the client; YakGear.

02/19 Spoke with client on the phone. Confirmed they would work with us on project. Gave us
access to their google docs.
02/22 In class research proposal consultation.

02/26 Spoke with client on the phone and identified goals and objectives of project.

02/27 Group meeting to discuss and work on presentation.

03/01 Turn in research proposal.