We present a lot of new site search tips in our Big Book of Site Search Tips 2012 Edition (BBoSST), but I wanted to stress in this blog the importance of Site Search Relevance. If your search results aren’t relevant to what your visitors are looking for, then the search tips and tricks you implement […]
We just launched our newest “Big Book of Site Search Tips” – an even bigger and better collection of tips and advice to help retailers optimize the performance of their site search and enhance their user experience. The Big Book of Site Search Tips is available for free at GetSLIeBooks. Each week for the next […]
There’s a new trend that I noticed on search results pages that appears deserving of a closer look to gauge its impact on usability and conversions. Some apparel and fashion sites show the 1st image on a search results page about twice as big as the rest of the search results. This is presumably because […]
We talk a lot in this blog about ways to get more business value from site search. Today, I’d like to talk about the importance of navigation, and more specifically the navigation pages in delivering a similar experience than the search results pages, to insure a consistent user-friendly experience, better engage visitors, and ultimately increase […]
For many shoppers, site search is no longer just a gateway to product detail pages. Search has become a place where they can take a closer look at products, read detailed descriptions, see available colors and sizes, and add items to their shopping cart. Much of this capability is due to the evolution of the […]
When you begin to design your site search experience, one of the first questions you face is how many columns of items do you want to display. More columns means more product results will be seen above the fold but fewer columns makes for larger product images and room for more product information. How do […]
In stock or not? In the old days, shoppers had to add an item to their cart to answer this question. As e-commerce technology evolved, the stock status of a product became readily available on the product detail page and in many cases even migrated up to category pages. Now, retailers are discovering ways to […]
What do you see when you look at your top search terms report? I typically see brand terms and product category terms in many of the top spots. I also see a great opportunity to create a more customized experience on the search results pages for those terms. Since these are high volume terms, the […]
Behind every great site search experience sits a rich set of information that describes every possible search result. For retailers, this product information is in the form of attribute labels or tags that have been assigned to each product. With these tags in place, search engines can more accurately match products with search keywords as […]
Now that many retailers have made video a key component in their merchandising strategy, we are seeing more studies about the impact that video is having. According to a recent study by e-commerce video provider Invodo, 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in their online purchase decisions. For some, […]