If you’ve been following our series of site search tips, you know that each week we reveal a few tips from our latest “Big Book of Site Search Tips” whitepaper (available for free download at www.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook) in various categories like General, Refinements, Relevance, Reporting, and others. This week we offer a couple tips below related to Merchandising, and one tip from the Search Page Format & Lay-out category. As always, if you have any tips to share or feedback on what’s worked well on your site, please post a comment on our blog – we’d love to hear from you.

• Consider overriding search results to place relevant promotional items at the top of the list – Search provides a powerful venue for showcasing products that you would like to highlight, such as sale or seasonal items. Online shoppers pay the most attention to the first several results, or those on the first page.
• Don’t present unrelated cross-sell or up-sell products at the top of the search results if they are not connected to the site visitor’s search term – Shoppers expect to see relevant results, and will distrust the value of your search function if it habitually returns search results that are promotional and irrelevant.
• Offer grid and list view options, if applicable – A grid view is typically suitable for a product search. Depending on the size of the images you can display three, four or five across the page, and as a result, you’re able to show many more products above the fold. In a list view, you can provide a more in-depth description of the product along with other information such as category, shipping, ratings, number of reviews, etc. Conduct testing on your site to determine which view generates the best return, but it’s always good to offer your visitors the option to see results in both formats. Some people simply respond better to a list format, whereas others might like to see things in a grid. Let your customers choose how they want to see the results, and you have a better likelihood of converting them.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

Fast on the heels of our “Big Book of Site Search Tips,” we’ve published another whitepaper about e-commerce site search and how companies can leverage it to improve the way people buy online.

This newest paper discusses how site search should act on an e-commerce site much in the same way store clerks guide customers to products in brick and mortar stores. In other words, if a customer walks in the door – or visits your site – and you don’t carry the shoes she wants in her size, or you don’t have the particular color pants he’s looking for, would you simply let them walk out the door without offering other alternatives, or at least offering to order the particular item for them? Probably not – and your site search shouldn’t either.

Likewise, if a customer finds an item in your offline store that they wish to purchase, wouldn’t you take that opportunity to suggest other items they might also be interested in – or point out items on sale? Your site search should do this too. It’s called ‘searchandising’ and it’s a way to guide customers to other products that might be of interest when they’re searching your site.

Research shows that people who use the search box on an online retail site convert at three times the rate of those who don’t, so search is obviously an important function that deserves great attention. But don’t just think of your site search as a search box and results, and nothing more. You can actually leverage visitors’ search activities to promote products through additional search suggestions and banner ads on results pages, as well as through SEO and paid search placements. Additionally, you want to make sure results are relevant and contain the right information that will help your customers more easily make a purchase – like price, availability, images and video (if available), and user ratings/reviews (if available).

Download our free white paper here and learn how your site search can be improved so that more people make purchases on your site. Simple enhancements can result in big conversion increases when implemented properly.

This week we return to the topic of site search tips, and provide a few more tips below from our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” which is available for free download at http://www.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook. The tips below focus on Search Page Format & Layout and offer simple ways for you to structure your site search pages to generate more click-throughs, and ultimately more sales/conversions/downloads, etc. Feel free to post a comment below about your own experiences, or if you have additional tips to share.

• Incorporate images into search results – A picture is worth a thousand words. Showing images in results helps visitors find what they’re looking for faster and with fewer clicks, improving the overall site experience. Images are especially useful if your products are available in several variations, such as different colors or configurations. Images can even be helpful as a visual clue on content type, such as an article, video, PDF, etc.

• Offer as many search results above the fold as possible – Site visitors generally don’t like to scroll down to read long pages of search results. They expect to find relevant results above the fold, very high up on the page. This is another reason to make sure you only include pertinent details in the search results so you have more space for more results.

• Show ratings and reviews in search results – Site visitors place high value on the opinions and feedback of other people who’ve shopped for similar products or services, and showing the average rating in search results helps them better determine what they want to click on. You should allow visitors to further refine or reorder their search results based on ratings. You should also show, in the search results, the number of reviews that a product has.

• Show a breadcrumb trail – A breadcrumb trail will show the search term and any refinements that have been made. It helps visitors understand where they’ve been previously on the site and how they arrived at the page they’re on. It also makes it easy for them to remove refinements and helps them go back to a broader range of results if they choose. Breadcrumbs take up very little space, and are a standard navigational element.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

This week, our tips are about using Refinements in your site search to improve your visitors’ experience and help them more quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. Refinements are especially useful if there are several pages of search results for a particular keyword, and are a good way to allow searchers to sort results by various criteria, like price range, color, brand, sale items, etc. Some standard out-of-the-box site search offerings don’t allow you to do much in the way of refinements, but we believe good refinements are an important aspect of any effective site search. Below are some tips that might be helpful – and of course, if you want more useful suggestions you can download the full “Big Book of Site Search Tips” for free from our web site.

• Show the number of results next to individual refinement options (include image from whitepaper) – In other words, where you show the available refinements, also show the number of results from the master list that fall under that refinement, so visitors have an idea of how many results are available to them. A good example is SLI customer Lighting by Gregory. They provide a good assortment of refinements, and next to each refinement is the number of items in that category, which further streamlines the search experience.
• Show color refinements as a palette (include image from whitepaper) – Colors by their very nature are visual, so rather than showing the colors in text as a refinement option, show the actual colors in a palette. This makes it easy to select multiple colors and it takes up less screen real estate.

Showing the number of results in the refinements

Color palettes in refinements

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

SLI has started out the year with exhibiting at two great conferences – Internet Retailer Web Design and eTail. We had a wonderful time and hope all of you who attended have gained valuable knowledge from the speakers and networking with your peers.

At both conferences we had some great prizes we were giving away. We wanted to take a moment to say congratulations to John Du Cane from Dragon Door Publications who won a iPod Nano, John Parrish from Kellyco who won a Flip camera, Christopher Lailey from CanadaFlowers.ca who won a Zune HD, Rob Williams from Printglobe who won a PSP, Debbie Truitt from Professional Supplement Center who won a iPhone and Jeff Stone from Bikesomewhere.com who won a Netbook. We hope you all are enjoying your prizes.

We’d love to see you at future events. Keep your eye on our events page to see where we will be exhibiting next and make sure you stop by and visit our team at the SLI booth.