Telescope: Everything You Need to Know About Search

Welcome to this edition of Telescope on Search, our monthly newsletter devoted to search. Our goal is to offer a regular, quick-browse e-newsletter with useful information, tips, and news of the latest developments on Site Search, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, and site usability. If you have any feedback or questions please direct them to newsletter@sli-systems.com.

Feature: User Reviews Affect Buying Behavior and Lead to Improved Site Search for ECommerce

Shaun Ryan
CEO, SLI Systems

A few years ago, the first user reviews began appearing on ecommerce sites like Amazon and eBay. Since then, many online retailers have followed suit and are offering user reviews on their sites. Such peer reviews have helped consumers feel more comfortable making purchases online, have proven to increase conversion rates and can be used to enhance site search.

Why offer reviews?

An increasing number of our customers are allowing their visitors to write reviews and rate their products. Many are using our partners, PowerReviews or BaazarVoice to do this. Because the online experience still lacks the tactile aspects of the offline shopping experience, user reviews are one way that shoppers can feel more comfortable buying a product on the Web without seeing or trying it out first. In addition, by offering reviews on an ecommerce site, the prospective customer doesn't have to go elsewhere to find them.

How can reviews be used to enhance your site search?

In addition to enhancing the online buying experience, the extra information collected from user reviews and ratings can improve site search, leading to increased sales and more efficient searches. Options include:

The ratings summary (normally 1-5 stars) can be displayed in search. In particular this draws shoppers’ attention to the products with good ratings.
Refine and sort by rating, allowing shoppers to more easily find products with good ratings.
Use ratings to weight results. The idea here is to give products that have a better rating more prominence in the search. You do need to be careful with this type of approach – as just because a product has a good rating, it doesn't mean it's relevant for all keywords. But where two products have similar relevance, it makes sense to show the one with the better rating first. Our initial experiments with this have been positive.
Index additional text in reviews. The reviews add additional text to product pages. This is useful for SEO purposes but it is also potentially useful for site search. If the text in the reviews is indexed by a site search then visitors are going to be able to find results using a broader range of phrases.

How does this help you and your visitors?

User reviews empower online shoppers by allowing them to express themselves and to be influenced by third-party information that is valuable to the online buying experience. This fits nicely with SLI's Learning Search, which tracks shoppers aggregate search queries and click-thrus, and uses that data to deliver results based on popularity. If employed in combination, user reviews and site search can go a long way towards making sure consumers have the most accurate information that lets them easily search, find and buy.

If you have any comments you'd like to share, email us at newsletter@sli-systems.com or feel free to post a comment on our blog.

SLI Systems & Customers in the News

Below are links to recent news articles highlighting our Learning Search service:

Google’s “Unhealthy Dominance” Could Harm Search Market – May 1, 2007

SLI Systems joins Omniture Genesis Program

How Eretailer Tripled Conversions With Internal Search Changes – Marketing Sherpa, May 9, 2007

Improved search marries products with customers – Internet Retailer, May 9, 2007

With a new system, site search use soars at Edwin Watts Golf – Internet Retailer, May 17, 2007

Upcoming Events

SLI will be exhibiting at the following events:

Internet Retailer Conference
June 4 - 7, 2007
San Jose, CA

Shop.org Annual Summit
Sep 17 - 19, 2007
Las Vegas, NV

If you have any comments or suggestions for future issues please email us at newsletter@sli-systems.com.