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

If you’ve put forth the effort to have a highly intuitive, impactful site search but you’re not looking at your site search reports, you could be missing out on more opportunities to improve the customer experience. In our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” (available for free download at https://blog.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook), we discuss the ways to leverage your site search reports to improve your online marketing efforts and ensure you’re delivering the best search experience possible for your visitors.

• Regularly check the top search terms on your site – They can be good indicators of new items your clients are looking for, or product lines that are performing well. For example, SLI customer Jelly Belly used to offer only a 10-pound bulk case of its Champagne Bubbles jelly beans. Using information gleaned from site search, the company discovered that Champagne Bubbles candy was the third most-requested search. They decided to offer a one-pound container, and it’s now one of the company’s biggest sellers with wedding planners.

• Review the searches with poor or no results – A poor result is one that has a low clickthrough rate. These terms either relate to content that people are searching for that you don’t have or, more often, are examples of your visitors using different language to describe your content than you do. Both of these pieces of information are extremely valuable. If visitors are searching for content that you don’t offer, then you know that there is demand for that content and may indicate products that you should be stocking on your ecommerce site. If visitors are searching for products that you are not able to or don’t intend to carry, then you can address this by showing keyword-specific banners suggesting similar products.

  If your visitors are using a different language to describe your content or products, you can either start using this language on your site (which will help with your search engine optimization as well), or you can add synonyms to your search so your visitors will find the items they’re looking for.

• Review your site search quality metrics to ensure your site search relevancy is improving over time – A good site search solution “learns” by tracking visitors’ aggregate search queries and click-throughs to deliver results based on criteria such as popularity. This means that, over time, searchers on your site are presented with the most relevant search results and can find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily. Improved searches result in more satisfied customers and greater sales.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

If you’ve been following our series of site search tips, you know that each week we reveal a few tips from our latest “Big Book of Site Search Tips” whitepaper (available for free download at usblogsli.wpengine.com/whitepaper/bigbook) in various categories like General, Refinements, Relevance, Reporting, and others. This week we offer a couple tips below related to Merchandising, and one tip from the Search Page Format & Lay-out category. As always, if you have any tips to share or feedback on what’s worked well on your site, please post a comment on our blog – we’d love to hear from you.

• Consider overriding search results to place relevant promotional items at the top of the list – Search provides a powerful venue for showcasing products that you would like to highlight, such as sale or seasonal items. Online shoppers pay the most attention to the first several results, or those on the first page.
• Don’t present unrelated cross-sell or up-sell products at the top of the search results if they are not connected to the site visitor’s search term – Shoppers expect to see relevant results, and will distrust the value of your search function if it habitually returns search results that are promotional and irrelevant.
• Offer grid and list view options, if applicable – A grid view is typically suitable for a product search. Depending on the size of the images you can display three, four or five across the page, and as a result, you’re able to show many more products above the fold. In a list view, you can provide a more in-depth description of the product along with other information such as category, shipping, ratings, number of reviews, etc. Conduct testing on your site to determine which view generates the best return, but it’s always good to offer your visitors the option to see results in both formats. Some people simply respond better to a list format, whereas others might like to see things in a grid. Let your customers choose how they want to see the results, and you have a better likelihood of converting them.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

This week we return to the topic of site search tips, and provide a few more tips below from our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” which is available for free download at https://blog.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook. The tips below focus on Search Page Format & Layout and offer simple ways for you to structure your site search pages to generate more click-throughs, and ultimately more sales/conversions/downloads, etc. Feel free to post a comment below about your own experiences, or if you have additional tips to share.

• Incorporate images into search results – A picture is worth a thousand words. Showing images in results helps visitors find what they’re looking for faster and with fewer clicks, improving the overall site experience. Images are especially useful if your products are available in several variations, such as different colors or configurations. Images can even be helpful as a visual clue on content type, such as an article, video, PDF, etc.

• Offer as many search results above the fold as possible – Site visitors generally don’t like to scroll down to read long pages of search results. They expect to find relevant results above the fold, very high up on the page. This is another reason to make sure you only include pertinent details in the search results so you have more space for more results.

• Show ratings and reviews in search results – Site visitors place high value on the opinions and feedback of other people who’ve shopped for similar products or services, and showing the average rating in search results helps them better determine what they want to click on. You should allow visitors to further refine or reorder their search results based on ratings. You should also show, in the search results, the number of reviews that a product has.

• Show a breadcrumb trail – A breadcrumb trail will show the search term and any refinements that have been made. It helps visitors understand where they’ve been previously on the site and how they arrived at the page they’re on. It also makes it easy for them to remove refinements and helps them go back to a broader range of results if they choose. Breadcrumbs take up very little space, and are a standard navigational element.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

This week, our tips are about using Refinements in your site search to improve your visitors’ experience and help them more quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. Refinements are especially useful if there are several pages of search results for a particular keyword, and are a good way to allow searchers to sort results by various criteria, like price range, color, brand, sale items, etc. Some standard out-of-the-box site search offerings don’t allow you to do much in the way of refinements, but we believe good refinements are an important aspect of any effective site search. Below are some tips that might be helpful – and of course, if you want more useful suggestions you can download the full “Big Book of Site Search Tips” for free from our web site.

• Show the number of results next to individual refinement options (include image from whitepaper) – In other words, where you show the available refinements, also show the number of results from the master list that fall under that refinement, so visitors have an idea of how many results are available to them. A good example is SLI customer Lighting by Gregory. They provide a good assortment of refinements, and next to each refinement is the number of items in that category, which further streamlines the search experience.
• Show color refinements as a palette (include image from whitepaper) – Colors by their very nature are visual, so rather than showing the colors in text as a refinement option, show the actual colors in a palette. This makes it easy to select multiple colors and it takes up less screen real estate.

Showing the number of results in the refinements

Color palettes in refinements

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

This week our site search tips focus on relevance. In a nutshell, if your site search results aren’t relevant – and what’s relevant will vary from person to person – your visitors may very well abandon your site. Find our full list of tips (nearly 80 in all) in our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” – which you can download here.

• Exercise caution when using global factors – such as margin, price, and best sellers – to influence result rankings — For instance, you can ‘searchandise’ results by placing sale or promotional items at the top of search results to attract attention. A robust search solution should allow you to reorder search results as needed to promote products.

• Pay attention to no result pages — Arguably it’s better to show something that might be relevant than nothing at all. One approach is to show results for some of the words being searched if there are no results for all the words entered. If you do this, you should show a message saying something like, “There were no results that contained all of your words, but here are some results that contain some of your words.” Other approaches are to show a list of the most popular search terms, or show results for similar terms (e.g. other train sets if the search term is “Thomas the Train” and you don’t sell Thomas the Train items).

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

This week we return to basics with some general tips for how to improve performance of your site search. Both of the tips below are very simple to implement and can increase usage of your site’s search box, which can result in higher conversions, click-throughs and/or content downloads – which is great for lead generation. For the complete list of tips, just click here to download our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” which offers close to 80 tips for how to improve performance of your site search to help your bottom line.

While we’re on the topic of site search tips, do you have any tips you’d like to share? If so, feel free to post them here as a comment and we’ll consider adding them to our ongoing discussion.

• If you have the text “enter search here” in the search box, use JavaScript so that the term disappears as soon as people click in the box and begin typing – Avoid forcing the site visitor to delete the text prior to typing in their own search term—sometimes people start typing before deleting the text and unconsciously enter jumbled letters, causing problems for the search results they’ll see.

• Don’t confuse visitors by having the search box placed near other boxes, such as newsletter subscribe sign-up forms — Make sure the search box is distinctive and easy to find. Given that site visitors expect to find their way to the search box—and given that they may abandon your site if they can’t find the search box—it makes sense to keep the search box prominently highlighted by itself on a webpage. For example, in the newsletter-subscribe box you may want to put the text first.last@youremail.com, which indicates that this box is expecting an email address, not a search term.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips