Last week Liana Evans of Search Marketing Gurus blogged about a recent Bon Jovi concert she attended. She drew several parallels between her concert experience and the interactions/experiences consumers have with companies vis a vis their marketing efforts, which were well thought out and struck a similar nerve in our thinking about search. So we decided to expand upon her analogies and show how her concert experience might also help with site search planning (and no, we didn’t see the concert, but it sounds like we missed out!).

1. Make sure your messages are heard and understood – at the concert, people had a hard time hearing/understanding Chris Daughtry’s singing. Liana says that for marketing, this equates to making sure your audience is hearing your messages correctly.
– For site search, this means making sure the messages in the search results are consistent with your marketing messages, and also making sure results are relevant. It also means providing a good user interface, and bolding the keyword in the search results so people understand why the result ties back to their search term.

2. Can everyone see the show? – Liana talks about how obstructions on stage made it hard for people to see the show. She says that for marketing, this means making sure your web site and all its images are viewable in all the different browsers, etc.
– For site search, this means making sure you’re giving people the right results they came to your site to find. In other words, once again, make sure the results are relevant, and that you’re offering them the products they expect.

3. Distractions from the message – Similar to #2 above, Liana says that for marketing, you should make sure that there aren’t parts of your site that are distracting to your customers – like meaningless videos, images, etc.
– For site search, this means making sure you keep superfluous information out of the search results – for example, a once common practice was to include stars that rated the results (different from customer ratings) and file sizes, both of which just distract the customer’s attention.

4. Get the crowd involved – similar to a crowd singing along to their favorite Bon Jovi songs. Liana writes that for marketing, this means making sure you get customer feedback about how you’re doing.
– For site search, this also means getting customer feedback about how their search experience was (SLI offers a Feedback Tool (for free) that does just that). SLI’s Learning Search is another way to “get the crowd involved” – as our search tool ranks results based on what previous site visitors clicked on most. Crowd involvement is what makes our search get better and better over time.

5. Using the familiar to introduce the new – for example, singing old, familiar songs to bring out new songs. Liana says that for marketing, this means leveraging past successes when introducing new products.
– For site search, this can mean 2 different things: 1) if you want to promote new items in search results, be sure to couple them with familiar, popular items; and 2) when introducing a new feature in your search results (i.e. keyword-specific banners, or a gift finder), make sure you maintain some of the same elements that people are comfortable with and have come to expect. This is also an important point when considering measurement – if you make significant changes everywhere all at one time, it’s impossible to measure the results of any one change.

6. Change is good! – just like when Richie Sambora sang one of Bon Jovi’s popular hits, normally sung by Jon Bon Jovi himself. As Liana says, for marketing, this means trying new things even when things are working.
– The same applies to site search. An example is how one of our customers (Black Forest Décor) changed the placement and size of its search box to see if it would improve how well the search worked. The search already worked really well, but making it bigger and moving it to the center of the page made it even more effective.

7. With age comes experience – in her post, Liana compares the singing skills of veteran Jon Bon Jovi with newcomer Chris Daughtry. For marketing, she says this means relying on the wisdom of experts when trying new strategies.
– For site search, this means relying on a search engine that has gained expertise over time – e.g. Learning Search, which gets better and better the more it’s used (as described above in #4). It’s also worth working with people and companies that have been around for a long time and are experts in search (or marketing). Like the members of Bon Jovi, many of the folks at SLI today were involved with search back in the 80s – and we also had longer hair back then. 🙂

A couple of people in the SLI team spotted this thread in a web analytics forum: Question about Internal site Search. I was proud to see three different customers of ours responding (with no prompting on our end), praising our service and level of responsiveness.

We put in a lot of effort to be as responsive as we can to our customers. This gets more difficult as we get more customers. The systems we have put in place combined with the hard work of our ever growing staff have ensured that we can keep this up. Seeing feedback like this confirms to me that it is all worthwhile and I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank everyone at SLI for their wonderful work to make this happen.

I spoke to analyst Robin Bloor from Hurwitz and Associates today. Going by his blog post today – At last, a Self-Education Search, Robin agrees with the approach we take with our Learning Search. He describes a recent bad experience of searching on Newegg (which I believe is powered by Endeca) which perfectly captures the importance of having a good site search and highlights the difficulty of implementing site search well, even when you have bought expensive software.

Yesterday we announced the findings of a customer site search survey we conducted using Zoomerang. We found that more people than we realized – 73% – said they’ll leave a site in just a minute or two of not finding the product(s) they seek. 36% said that they would never return to that site and 56% said they would only come back if the site had completely unique items. 96% said that an ecommerce site’s search function is important to the online shopping experience. We knew site search was important but were still surprised at how high this number was.

The results are timely, given the holiday shopping season is already underway. In fact, more than half of those we polled said they plan to purchase MORE online this year than last year.

In the press release, we list out 5 recommendations for how retailers can make sure they’re not left out of the holiday rush online:

1. the items shoppers are looking for should show up on the first page of the site’s search results a majority of the time
2. an automated SEO solution that determines what keywords to optimize for and automatically creates the appropriate landing pages is an easy way to drive more traffic
3. “searchandising” (the combination of e-commerce search and online merchandising) gives merchants higher levels of customer satisfaction and return visits
4. an effective approach to site search can be through an affordable, hosted solution that can be deployed in a matter of days (shameless plug for SLI)
5. site search data can be used to see what visitors are looking for, the terms they’re searching with, and what they’re finding and not finding – in order to gain insight into the best ways to promote products and provide a personalized shopping experience

I’d be interested to hear what other retailers have done to improve the search experience of their customers. And if you’re ever looking to improve your search we would love to help you.

We had an interesting experience recently with one of our customers who uses IBM’s WebSphere platform (several of our customer use this). This customer found out that there was an upgrade to the WebSphere search and so they decided to replace the search that SLI was providing with the new WebSphere search.

The new search was nicely presented – with options to refine and reorder the search. However the relevance was terrible. This customer has two sites with different brands but much of the same content – they kept our search on one site. A search for ipod on the site powered by us returned ipods with some of the new Nanos and ipod Touch at the top. A search for ipod on the WebSphere powered search returned no ipods in the first three pages of results – it was all accessories – products that contained the word ipod but weren’t actually ipods. From looking at the search results you would assume they don’t carry ipods.

The customer now has us powering the search on both their sites. This serves as an important reminder that of all the features you can have in a site search, having relevant results is the most important.