This week our site search tips focus on relevance. In a nutshell, if your site search results aren’t relevant – and what’s relevant will vary from person to person – your visitors may very well abandon your site. Find our full list of tips (nearly 80 in all) in our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” – which you can download here.

• Exercise caution when using global factors – such as margin, price, and best sellers – to influence result rankings — For instance, you can ‘searchandise’ results by placing sale or promotional items at the top of search results to attract attention. A robust search solution should allow you to reorder search results as needed to promote products.

• Pay attention to no result pages — Arguably it’s better to show something that might be relevant than nothing at all. One approach is to show results for some of the words being searched if there are no results for all the words entered. If you do this, you should show a message saying something like, “There were no results that contained all of your words, but here are some results that contain some of your words.” Other approaches are to show a list of the most popular search terms, or show results for similar terms (e.g. other train sets if the search term is “Thomas the Train” and you don’t sell Thomas the Train items).

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

This week we return to basics with some general tips for how to improve performance of your site search. Both of the tips below are very simple to implement and can increase usage of your site’s search box, which can result in higher conversions, click-throughs and/or content downloads – which is great for lead generation. For the complete list of tips, just click here to download our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” which offers close to 80 tips for how to improve performance of your site search to help your bottom line.

While we’re on the topic of site search tips, do you have any tips you’d like to share? If so, feel free to post them here as a comment and we’ll consider adding them to our ongoing discussion.

• If you have the text “enter search here” in the search box, use JavaScript so that the term disappears as soon as people click in the box and begin typing – Avoid forcing the site visitor to delete the text prior to typing in their own search term—sometimes people start typing before deleting the text and unconsciously enter jumbled letters, causing problems for the search results they’ll see.

• Don’t confuse visitors by having the search box placed near other boxes, such as newsletter subscribe sign-up forms — Make sure the search box is distinctive and easy to find. Given that site visitors expect to find their way to the search box—and given that they may abandon your site if they can’t find the search box—it makes sense to keep the search box prominently highlighted by itself on a webpage. For example, in the newsletter-subscribe box you may want to put the text first.last@youremail.com, which indicates that this box is expecting an email address, not a search term.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

When people search your site, it’s not enough to just provide a page of results – no matter how relevant the results are (although admittedly, relevance in results does count for a lot). Customers often need added incentive to click a result and make a purchase, and merchandising your site search results pages is a great way to do just that.

Below are a few tips on “Merchandising” taken from our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” which we’ve been discussing the past few weeks. This is a very small sample from a collection of nearly 80 tips – all of which are compiled in a free, downloadable white paper. If you want to see the whole batch of tips, just click here.

And now for this week’s tips…

• Do create banners relating to specific keywords — Make it obvious to the visitor that they’ve arrived at a search results page displaying the correct product category. When customers search for a brand name or product that you may have a special sale on, you can include a keyword-driven banner at the top of the search results page to highlight that promotion. For example, someone searching for “Merrell” on a shoe retailer site might see a banner on the search results page that says “Free shipping on U.S. orders over $60.” When they click on the banner, they are taken to the site page for that offer.

• Use banners to promote free shipping, or shipping discounts — Site visitors are focused on buying once they’ve searched for a particular product. By placing shipping offers within banners on search results page, you provide an additional incentive for shoppers to complete a purchase.

• Use synonyms to offer more results — For instance, if a site visitor searches for iPods, and your site offers other MP3 players, connect these and other similar items so that they appear together in search results. This provides shoppers with more alternatives, encouraging them to browse similar products.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

Site search and site search reporting are critical parts of your online business success. If you’re not doing so already, you should review your site search reports regularly to make sure your visitors are finding what they seek – AND that you’re using the language of your customers on your site. Did you also know your site search reports offer other useful information as well? Here are a couple tips from our Big Book of Site Search Tips with valuable ways you can use your site search reports to see more ROI from your on-site search solution.

• Review site search terms for SEO and PPC campaigns – This is a great source for keyword research because it shows the language your visitors are using – and chances are, if they’re using it on your site, they’re also using it on the web.

• Review your site search quality metrics to ensure your site search relevancy is improving over time – A good site search solution “learns” by tracking visitors’ aggregate search queries and click-throughs to deliver results based on criteria such as popularity. This means that, over time, searchers on your site are presented with the most relevant search results and can find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily. Improved searches result in more satisfied customers and greater sales.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

This week we’re offering a couple tips on how to improve relevance of your site search, and also how to leverage data in your site search reports to make improvements. Our own research shows that if people can’t find what they’re looking for on your site within the first few minutes, they’re likely to leave and possibly never return. In other words, if results aren’t relevant – and relevance can alter depending on who’s doing the searching – then your site search hasn’t done its job. Reporting can help you in this area as well.

• Don’t place search results in alphabetical order – While this might offer a logical way for site visitors to scan results, alphabetical ordering usually has no relation to the relevance of the results. Sometimes it makes sense to offer this as a sort option.
• Use “landing pages” when visitors type in specific product numbers, or when there is only one result for the search term – For instance, if a customer types in an SKU or product number, they should be taken directly to the page for that product. Another example: If a customer searches for “returns” you may want to take them straight to the page that describes your returns policy. This streamlines the searching process for customers who know exactly what they are looking for.
• Review your site search quality metrics to ensure your site search relevancy is improving over time – A good site search solution “learns” by tracking visitors’ aggregate search queries and click-throughs to deliver results based on criteria such as popularity. This means that, over time, searchers on your site are presented with the most relevant search results and can find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily. Improved searches result in more satisfied customers and greater sales.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips