On Wed., July 28 we’re hosting a free webinar featuring Forrester Research Principal Analyst Brian Walker. The webinar, “Unlock Powerful Customer Information to Generate Higher Conversions with Site Search,” will cover a variety of topics, among them –  how site search data can reveal valuable information about customers and their research and purchasing intentions, and what you can do with this data to improve other marketing efforts and ultimately, your business. Brian is a reputable expert on e-commerce technologies and the user experience, and he has great insights to share about how retailers can make more effective use of site search to deliver the type of content and information people require to make a purchase.

In the webinar, Brian will discuss things like how you can discover from site search information whether customers are finding products in stock (or not) or if they’re looking for products not available on your site that you might want to add, and what products are trending in popularity. Site search data can also reveal long-tail keywords that are useful for SEO and paid search campaigns, and can help you determine how best to guide shoppers to items they seek through behavioral features like Related Search suggestions and Auto Complete.

The webinar will also discuss how you can incorporate site search data into other marketing activities, like personalized emails; on-site merchandising, banner advertisements and promotions; and content development, and the role site search plays on the mobile platform.

We hope to make the webinar interactive, so if you plan to attend please come prepared with questions and comments. You can sign up to attend this webinar at http://www.sli-systems.com/brian-walker-forrester-site-search-webinar.php.

This year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition was a great success – thanks to the team at Internet Retailer who worked so hard to pull off an amazing event!

Probably to nobody’s surprise, mobile commerce was a big theme this year. As our recent survey revealed, 80% of retailers haven’t yet tackled the mobile arena, but my guess is that’s going to change quickly in the months to come. Given the early results from some of our customers, it seems clear that having a mobile web site is not just about keeping up with trends, it’s good for business.

SLI had quite a presence at IRCE, with 14 members of our team on the show floor, and we also sponsored drinks on two nights (hopefully you enjoyed a cocktail or two on us). Three of our customers presented, and we saw lots of traffic to our booth. We also had a drawing for a 3-D TV and 3-D DVD Blu-ray player – the winner was Lada Heep, eChannel manager for Thomson Reuters. Congratulations, Lada!

If you were at IRCE 2010, hopefully we had a chance to connect – but if not, feel free to drop us a note if you have any questions or requests. Next stops are eTail East (Aug. 9-12, Baltimore), Search Engine Strategies San Francisco (August 16-20) and Shop.org Annual Summit (Sept. 27-29, Dallas). We hope to see you there!

Earlier this month we moved our North American headquarters into a new space in downtown San Jose. Our new location at 333 W. San Carlos Ave. is bigger, giving us plenty of room to grow. And if the past year is any indication, continued growth seems certain.  (The views aren’t too bad either.)

 As we continue to innovate new site search features and techniques and pursue new markets, demand for our solutions has grown. And so have our sales, marketing, development and customer support teams.

We’re also now fairly central to many of our customers and technology partners located around the Bay Area. Of course, we serve retailers and other Internet sites around the globe – and our UK and New Zealand offices have grown as well.

If you’re in the area, stop by and see us in our new location. And if you’re game, our team will gladly introduce you to the tempting grasshopper appetizers at the nearby Mezcal.

No matter if you’re selling products, services or information online, to be successful, site visitors must be able to quickly and easily find what they came for – or they will leave, often never to return.

Our customer Ciena, a leader in network infrastructure is a good example. The company relies on its website for lead generation, and thus offers a great deal of educational materials on its site – i.e. whitepapers, product data sheets, videos and webinars – all designed to capture the interest of potential clients.

Ciena’s previous site search solution wasn’t resulting in the leads the company needed. They didn’t have visibility into how their visitors were moving through the site after conducting a search and weren’t confident visitors were finding useful information to download. Adding to the problem was the inability for their previous site search solution to integrate with any type of web analytics solution, like Omniture. And the Ciena web marketing team had to spend a great deal of time on special coding whenever there were any changes in the product pages to make sure the site search picked them up.

Ciena turned to us.

SLI worked with Ciena to implement both our Learning Search and Site Champion solutions to improve relevance of search results, as well as create pages optimized for search engines. Our services also easy integrate with analytics platforms like Omniture (and Google Analytics) to provide greater insight into visitor’s web behavior.

Ciena immediately saw results and a marked improvement in online visitor engagement. According to data from their Omniture analytics, in the second half of 2009, 18.5 percent of online visitors who used site search went on to download one or more files, compared to just 4 percent of visitors who entered the site via the home page, and who did not use site search.

In addition, Ciena’s site search results pages have become the number one entryway to the Ciena site. The company has tied 7,000 downloads and 800 registrations directly to these pages. And those registrations go straight into their sales lead funnel. You can read more about their deployment in the recent issue of Target Marketing magazine or via the case study on our site.

On the Internet, great customer service goes a long way toward increasing sales. A useable, easily searchable site is a key component. We are hard at work with our customers daily helping them ensure their site visitors become paying customers and not their competitor’s customers. Please contacts us if you would like to find out more.

We recently conducted a survey of more than 400 e-commerce companies about their plans and activities in mobile commerce (m-commerce). The feedback was intriguing, to say the least. We found that while recent reports are pointing to significant growth in mobile subscriber numbers and an uptick in m-commerce, the majority of online retailers (80%) do not currently have a mobile commerce strategy in place. Yet, 83% of survey takers say between 1-10% of visitors come to their sites from mobile browsers and 12% cite that 11-20% get to their sites through the mobile web. As those numbers are expected to grow rapidly, we believe this represents a significant opportunity, and those of you that are preparing now for the influx of new business the mobile web represents stand to benefit.

The good news is, while many online retailers may be slow to adopt m-commerce, most recognize the opportunity and plan to address it in the near future. Fifty-six percent (56%) believe a mobile commerce strategy is very important or important to their overall business and 38% say it is important for driving sales. The majority (70%) plan to embark on an m-commerce strategy within the next two years. Only 38% believe m-commerce will be important or somewhat important to this year’s holiday campaigns, while 62% say it will not be important. It will be interesting to see the outcome this holiday season.

According to a recent post from Tim Parry of Chief Marketer, those that have yet to embark on a full-fledged m-commerce strategy may consider launching a mobile site now for research instead of focusing all of their efforts on sales. The thinking behind this is that it might help retailers determine the mobile usage patterns of their customers, so specific needs can be met as m-commerce strategies are expanded.

Other SLI m-commerce survey highlights include:

• Seventy-nine percent (79%) say site search is important to a mobile website strategy and 61% are confident site search capabilities on a mobile site will generate additional conversions.
• The top four features online retailers cite as the most important to enhancing the m-commerce experience are navigation (73%), site search (59%), product pages (54%) and product reviews (40%).
• Of companies looking to build their m-commerce sites, 31% will utilize in-house resources, 28% will outsource the work to a third party developer, 36% will use a combination of both in-house and outsourced resources and the remainder are unsure.
• Fifty-one percent (51%) of e-commerce companies do not consider the iPad to be a mobile device (they say iPad users can utilize their current website); yet 31% will direct iPad to their mobile site.
• Only 22% of e-commerce organizations have developed shopping apps for platforms including iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry, while 49% are planning on creating apps, but don’t currently have one; and 29% are not planning on creating apps at all.

Thanks to all who participated in our survey. The full results will be made available on our site in the next few weeks. It will be interesting over the coming months to see how retailers respond to the growing m-commerce demand. We are already working with a number of you on adopting a successful m-commerce strategy, and look forward to helping others increase sales through the mobile web in the near future.

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.”

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