We want to give a shout-out to our customer CenturyNovelty on picking up another Multichannel Merchant magazine award – marking its second year of winning in a row!

The MCM Awards are the top honors for B2B and B2C marketers; they recognize superior print catalogs and websites from around the globe. Gold and silver awards are given for quality in both print and Web, and the Cross Channel Award honors multichannel merchants for synergy across print and Web channels. The winners were selected from 51 print channel finalists and 21 Web channel finalists.

Some of the top brands in the country, like LL Bean (Catalog of the Year & Cross-channel Merchant of the Year), Orvis and Crutchfield were all winners. You can see the complete list here http://multichannelmerchant.com/news/ll-bean-musicians-friend-2010-mcm-awards/?cid=nl_mcm_weekly.

Congratulations to the CenturyNovelty team for their hard work and an award well-deserved!

This week we complete the series of site search tips taken from our “Big Book” free whitepaper (which you can still download at http://www.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook). As we close out the series, we focus on “Search Page Format & Lay-out” with the following tips. If you’ve tried these or any tips we’ve shared over the past several weeks, please post a comment below and let us know what improvements in your site search performance you might have seen as a result.

• Consider showing larger images when visitors mouse over a thumbnail image in the search results – This is particularly suitable for product searches. Normally on the product page there are large images that allow visitors to see the product detail closely. However, search results pages usually display smaller thumbnail images that are hard to see. By having a large image pop up when your customers mouse over the product listing, they can easily examine the detailed images for all the products shown on the results page without having to click into the product page repeatedly.

• Show search suggestions on the search results page – These are search terms that are related to the term that has been entered and can give people additional ideas for what to search for. We normally counsel our clients to show search suggestions at the top of the page and the bottom of the page, and below each search result. According to our own research, about 25% of site visitors will click on a search suggestion.

• Show video in your search results – More and more sites contain some video content. This content should easily be found in site search results and potentially played directly from the search results page. For example, onlinegolf.co.uk found that visitors who watch video are 85% more likely to buy. When they made the videos available in their site search, video viewership doubled.

• Consider using AJAX to display your search page – By using AJAX, you avoid the need to do a page refresh after each refinement, reordering, view change, next page or subsequent search. A request is sent to the server in the background, and only the data that is required is sent to the browser. This results in a faster, snappier search experience.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

If you’re involved in e-commerce, we’d like to invite you to participate in our latest survey pertaining to trends in mobile commerce. Even if you don’t have a mobile commerce site, or even plans for one, your feedback is valuable. We think the mobile platform will be a key area of focus for online retailers in the coming months – and in particular, we see mobile site search playing a crucial role. Everyone’s talking about mobile, but who’s really doing it?

We’re eager to see how many retailers have either embarked on – or plan to embark on – a mobile commerce strategy in the foreseeable future. Your information will remain confidential – and by taking the survey you’ll be entered to win a Flip video camera. To be entered in the drawing after you’ve taken the survey or to request the survey results, please email us at marketing@sli-systems.com.

The survey is about 10 questions and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. You can access it here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22ANCZJG3Q9.

Thanks for your help and participation!

Your website may have the hottest products on the market, and the most engaging content – but if the site doesn’t have “findability,” potential customers won’t even know you exist. They’ll go to Google or Bing (or other search engines) and search for products or information, and your site won’t turn up on the first page of results.

But if your findability has been fixed, your site will rank high in search, and conversion rates for visitors will improve. Today I’ll be talking more about the keys to findability at the Gilbane Content Management conference in San Francisco. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion titled “Findability – Crafting Your Site to Drive Traffic and Improve Conversions” with Sam Mefford of Avalon Consulting and Richard Zwicky of Enquisite, moderated by Hadley Reynolds of IDC.

One key to improving your site’s findability via organic and paid search is to take a close look at how your current site visitors search on the site, and the language they use. You can use their searching language to adapt your site content (such as product descriptions and keywords) to the way your customers interact. For instance, do people commonly misspell an important search term? If so, that misspelling needs to be built into your site search and your content. Do they often use a generic category term rather than the actual product name (e.g. “MP3 player” vs. “iPod”)? If yes, then you need to incorporate that generic term into your site content. Your customers’ search language can also be useful in identifying the keywords to utilize in SEO and paid search efforts.

Improving findability ties in with site visitors’ increasingly short attention spans when it comes to finding what they need. They spend their days browsing search engines and social networking sites and they have high expectations for being able to quickly track down what they need – and they’ll easily desert any site that doesn’t meet this requirement.

If you’re at the Gilbane conference today, please come check out our discussion – we’ll be speaking at 1:30pm as part of the Customers & Engagement track. And if you’re at the conference this Thursday, I’ll be speaking again as part of a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce – Raising the Bar for the User Experience.”

The race is on for websites to offer as engaging a customer experience as possible – through fast and relevant site search, multimedia content, customer reviews and other tactics designed to keep visitors on the site longer. Along with raising the bar on the customer experience comes the need to serve visitors early in the shopping process and keep their attention until they turn into serious shoppers who’ll actually buy.

Today, I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce” with Paul Sondregger of Endeca at the Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco (Hadley Reynolds of IDC will be moderating). We’ll be discussing, among other things, how to engage buyers who have different intentions in terms of making a purchase on your site, depending on where they are in the buying cycle. For instance, someone who’s merely trying to gather information – if they’re shopping for an expensive product and need to know more before they commit to the purchase – needs to be impressed by the quality of information, and great customer service. This will encourage them to return when they’re ready to buy.

On the other hand, if visitors are ready to buy today, they’re much more likely to use site search, which means your site search feature needs to be fast and relevant if you want to convert that customer. And since we know that people convert at a higher rate when they use site search, it’s especially important that your site is designed in such a way that site search is rich and engaging and readily accessible.

If you’re attending the Gilbane conference, please stop by our session and discover more about what it takes to turn browsers into buyers. The session, “Smarter e-Commerce,” takes place at 3:30pm today as part of the Customers & Engagement track.

This week’s site search tips re-visit the topic of refinements. Refinements are an important aspect of site search because they make it significantly easier for visitors to sort through results to find what they’re looking for. We have many more tips on refinements (and other topics) in our free “Big Book of Site Search Tips” that can help you improve performance of your site search and deliver a better customer experience.

Next week will be our final post on the site search tips topic, so please be sure to download our free “Big Book” if you haven’t already!

• Consider storing some facet choices for users so they don’t have to make them each time – For example, on a shoe website, if someone selects women’s shoes and size 5, this information could be stored in a cookie and automatically selected next time they do a search. This is implicitly remembering their preferences; you could also let them explicitly state these preferences. If you’re not sure, try asking your customers.

• Consider having an advanced search page that allows the visitor to enter a keyword and preselect refinement options before they see results – Optionally, this can be configured as a gift finder. Consider configuring search so a visitor can only select combinations that actually return results. For example, you offer the option to refine products by color and by category. You offer a red iPod but no red TVs. So if visitors select the TV category, then the ability to restrict the search to red products should no longer be available.

• Offer the ability to refine by price for a product search – Price is an important part of a buying decision. Normally price refinements are shown as a list of ranges. One nice option to consider is a price slider, which allows you to set a bottom price and a top price easily. This is a nice presentation option because it takes less screen real estate than a list of price ranges and it offers more flexibility than fixed price ranges. It does, however, require more clicks.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

We’re nearing the end of our weekly Site Search Tips series, with just two more weeks to go. However, you can always download our free Big Book of Site Search Tips to see all 80 suggestions for how to get the most out of your site search, for a bigger impact on your bottom line.

Now, for this week’s tips – which address a few simple steps you can take to improve your visitors’ experience on your site and also get their feedback on the search. Not only can these actions give your customers a better, more engaging interaction on your site but they can also help your site stand out from your competitors, so your visitors will be more inclined to be repeat customers. If you have any questions about how best to implement these ideas, or feedback about your own experiences, please let us know by posting a comment below. Thanks for reading!

• Allow people to search by hitting the “Enter” key so you don’t force visitors to click the “Search” button – When people are typing in the search box, their hands are on the keyboard. It’s faster for them to simply hit the “Enter” key, rather than moving their hand to the mouse and clicking the search button.

• Ask your visitors for their input and feedback – Your visitors sometimes have ideas about how you can make it easier for them to find what they’re looking for. Conduct user testing by watching people use your site search and other areas of your site, or survey them using tools such as SLI’s free feedback tool.

• Consider storing recent searches and presenting these to visitors – Being able to easily redo a recent search can help people that are returning to your site. Recent searches can be stored in a cookie and displayed anywhere on your site. It’s a simple way of providing personalization. If you do offer this feature, add simple controls so the visitor can delete the recent searches.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

If you’ve put forth the effort to have a highly intuitive, impactful site search but you’re not looking at your site search reports, you could be missing out on more opportunities to improve the customer experience. In our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” (available for free download at http://www.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook), we discuss the ways to leverage your site search reports to improve your online marketing efforts and ensure you’re delivering the best search experience possible for your visitors.

• Regularly check the top search terms on your site – They can be good indicators of new items your clients are looking for, or product lines that are performing well. For example, SLI customer Jelly Belly used to offer only a 10-pound bulk case of its Champagne Bubbles jelly beans. Using information gleaned from site search, the company discovered that Champagne Bubbles candy was the third most-requested search. They decided to offer a one-pound container, and it’s now one of the company’s biggest sellers with wedding planners.

• Review the searches with poor or no results – A poor result is one that has a low clickthrough rate. These terms either relate to content that people are searching for that you don’t have or, more often, are examples of your visitors using different language to describe your content than you do. Both of these pieces of information are extremely valuable. If visitors are searching for content that you don’t offer, then you know that there is demand for that content and may indicate products that you should be stocking on your ecommerce site. If visitors are searching for products that you are not able to or don’t intend to carry, then you can address this by showing keyword-specific banners suggesting similar products.

  If your visitors are using a different language to describe your content or products, you can either start using this language on your site (which will help with your search engine optimization as well), or you can add synonyms to your search so your visitors will find the items they’re 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