Feature Focus: Why Does Better Site Search Generate More Sales?

People often ask us how something as simple as site search can bring a company more sales. Think about it. When people search on a retailer's site, they're offering keywords that explicitly convey their desires. If the site search delivers results with relevant products that match those desires, then the retailer has an excellent opportunity to make a sale. On the other hand, if the site search doesn't offer the right results, people will either think the site doesn't have what they want or they'll get frustrated and leave. More importantly, the retailer may have lost an opportunity for a long-lasting relationship with this customer, all because of poor site search.

Second to relevance is the presentation of the results. The results should contain the right descriptive information that confirms to the user that the site does indeed have what they want. Images should tantalize their senses, and search terms should be highlighted. The results should also be devoid of meaningless information such as URLs, page sizes, and relevance indicators but should contain plenty of other structured information such as price and availability, and provide a clear path for the next steps - such as "add to cart" or "click here for more information." If the search results fail to satisfy the user, retailers need to provide other options for refining or reordering the search results. Additionally, related terms can be used to guide visitors to other product areas.

To request a case study describing how one SLI client achieved a tripling of conversion and a dramatic increase in the usage of their site search, click here or to read more about some of our customers' successes, visit.

Demo Tips 'n' Tricks: 10 Metrics for Ensuring Quality Site Performance

Internet Retailer magazine recently reported on 10 metrics retailers should watch to ensure quality site performance. The #1 recommendation was to study site search results, and non-results. "...retailers lose a lot of sales because consumers can't find what they want based on use of a search word not in the retailer's dictionary. One way to remedy the problem is to track searches that turn up no results, a.k.a. 0% search..." We couldn't agree more.

Excerpt from SLI Blog "Chopping the head off the tail" Shaun Ryan, CEO, SLI Systems

...We found a very simple (and in hindsight, obvious) tactic to improve the ROI of automatically generated paid search campaigns. By way of background our Ad Champion service (which is still in beta) automatically creates Google campaigns from site search activity. It's a very cool product because it creates large campaigns and allows you to take advantage of the search tail everyone is talking about. Read the full item...