If you place banner ads and promotional notices all over your website, but skip the search results, you’re missing a lucrative showcase for your holiday marketing efforts. Many online shoppers don’t browse retail sites using navigation – their shopping expeditions start with site search. So they’ll never see your promos if they’re only placed on product pages, unless you also add them to search results.

This “searchandising” strategy should be a key part of your holiday marketing efforts. Here’s how to make the most of searchandising to promote popular and best-selling products.

• Keyword-specific banners: Link banner ads to popular keywords so that the banners are displayed on the same page as relevant search results. This way, shoppers see your special offers or promotions at the same time they are searching for relevant products.

• Include promotions in search results: Encourage shoppers to click through on results by including relevant promotions right inside of search results themselves. For instance, highlight sales and discounts within results – and if makes sense, place these results at the top of the list.

• Promote similar products: Connect the most popular search terms with similar top sellers, broadening the range of products a shopper can view. This improves the chances that customers will find the product they need, even if they haven’t entered the exact search term.
• Cross-sell: While you have a shopper’s attention on the search results page, take the opportunity to suggest other products that they may like, in a similar vein to the product they have searched for. Your search results could include a “you might like this also” section. For example, if someone searches for flannel sheets, your search results can include flannel robes or bed pillows.

Imagine the holiday-shopping customers who show up at your website to buy piles of gifts, only to discover that your online storefront doesn’t have the red sweater/popular new toolset/cute baby toy they’ve been searching for. They’ll quickly leave your site, taking the potential sales with them – and you’ll never know they were there.

That is, you won’t know that they came to your site, searched, and left unless you scan your search data for clues to shoppers’ wants and needs. Your site search information contains a gold mine of information about holiday shoppers’ gift-buying habits, and a little sleuthing can help you determine which products to add or promote, and how to ensure that gift-givers find what they need on your site.

Look for products, or variations on products, that you don’t currently carry. Granted, given the demands of inventory and ordering, it may not be possible this late in the season to add to stock. However, you may discover that customers are searching for a product that you already carry, but in a different size or color – and it may be easy for you to simply order this variation from a supplier. Additionally, they may be using a search term you hadn’t thought of, so they may not be finding something that’s available on your site. Make sure your product descriptions match the search terms of your customers.

Look for spelling variations for products you already carry. If your customers spell it “ifone case” and what you sell is an “iPhone case,” their searches may not yield the desired products. You’ll find these common misspellings by checking your site search data. Make sure to optimize your site search so that misspelled queries still turn up the correct results. (And consider adding Auto Complete to your site search, which will suggest search terms as customers type – this is a big help for hard-to-spell items.)

Look for popular searches that may not result in high sales. If customers repeatedly search for certain items, but your sales figures don’t show a corresponding uptick in sales, you may need to promote these items more aggressively.

Improve SEO campaigns to bring shoppers to your site. Keyword research is critical to any SEO effort, and your customers’ search terms provide one of the best sources of SEO terms. Using data from site search can save time and provide additional targeted keywords – not merely educated guesses about what customers are searching for – in order to drive traffic to your site.

By taking a few minutes to analyze search data, you can uncover valuable information about holiday shoppers’ buying habits. If you have any questions about these tips, please email us at info@sli-systems.com.

The busy holiday shopping season is already underway – but it’s not too late to make small improvements that will make it easier for shoppers to find their way around on your site, as well as see critical shipping and promotional messages that can impact their purchasing decisions. Below are some tips for ways you can help visitors find the items they seek more quickly and easily on your site – whether through your search box or by navigating their way around. With some minor tweaks here and there, and showing necessary information in site search results, you can capture higher conversions during the holidays and beyond.

• Offer a gift finder – a gift finder is really a fancy way to provide a refinement option and helps customers shop for people on their lists by inputting various criteria (gender, price range, brand preferences, etc.) to narrow results to fit those specifications. Creating a gift finder on your home page – or on site search results pages – is fairly easy to do, as long as you know what refinement options you want to offer. Contact us if you need any guidance with this.
• Be sure to include pricing and inventory levels in site search results (along with “add to cart”, video icons, reviews, etc.) – when people find an item they want to buy, it can be frustrating to put it in their shopping cart only to find out later in the purchasing process that the item is not available. Likewise, including the price in the site search results saves shoppers an extra click if the cost is not in their range. Offer as much detail in the site search results as possible – like an “add to cart” button (which can save shoppers an extra click), as well as icons to show the availability of a product video, and customer ratings and reviews. You can also offer ratings as a search results refinement option if people only want to see items with four stars or more, for example.
• Make sure you don’t return “no results” pages – even if there are zero results for a particular term, showing “no results” can frustrate customers. Instead, offer alternate search terms, popular sellers or items that you’re promoting. They may not find exactly what they’re looking for but they may just find something else they’re equally interested in.
• Show information about purchasing a gift card online in the search results – many retailers overlook this option but it’s a great way to give visitors another way to purchase from your site if they don’t see exactly what they seek. People don’t always think of purchasing a gift card online – and gift cards can actually be preferable to potentially duplicate gifts, items in the wrong size or gifts the recipient simply doesn’t want. Showing gift cards as an option in the site search results makes it really easy for people to make a purchase.
• Got products that won’t ship/arrive to the recipient by Dec. 25? Be sure to make that clear in search results - Again, provide as much detail in search results as possible, without requiring customers to click through to the product page. Most likely if it’s not going to arrive by Dec. 25 they won’t be interested, so save them a step and let them know that important detail right away. Chances are they’ll appreciate the information and make a repeat visit to your site.

These are just a few fairly easy steps you can take to provide a better experience for your customers on your web site. If you have any questions about these or other recommendations, please email us at info@sli-systems.com.