SEO can be immaculate
Search is an art form that can drive sales to your website through human interactions, not by tricking computers. In this piece, John Tomlinson, chief operating officer at Colbenson explains how to compose a search campaign that will make your customers sing.
Telephones are no longer just telephones, they’re little computers with cameras. Cameras are also computers, just ones that are dead good at turning analogue light into digital pixels.
Computers don’t just compute anymore either, they’re ways of processing digital information for whatever possible purpose … and e-commerce site search engines are not just little search boxes that trawl your product catalogue anymore, they’re part of an integrated approach to making sure your customers can actually find what they’re looking for.
The importance of the search engine to any particular site will vary depending on the nature and quantity of the content, but it’s clear than in most cases good search can drive conversion, and bad search can drive customers away.
Six tips for more effective search
Here are six ways to improve conversion through search.
1. Start with the customer
Stop thinking of search as a technical process. Search is the one part of the website which is driven by the customer; they personalise their engagement with the interface by inputting their own language and then they respond to the results.
Search is a key part of the customer experience.
How often do we click search and get thrown into what feels like a digital backwater? Different styles, poor results, sensless advertising … the search experience needs to be mapped out from beginning to end, always ensuring that the service delivered fits with the customer service ethos of the organisation.
2. Use search analytics
The starting place must customer analytics: how are your customers searching? what words are they using? what combination of terms is driving conversion, and what combination is getting them nowhere?
The traditional place to start is to look at the long tail of search terms with very low (or zero) findability. Roughly 80% of the terms will form 20% of search traffic and these will typically have low findability. In this “long tail” there are always some hidden gems, perhaps parts of the site that aren’t indexed (return policy, delivery details etc.) and spending your time here is really worthwhile.
The long tail is vital for SEO, and a rich source of data for niche marketing, but in site search we must also look at where your customers are: the head of the search graph. This is where the real action is, those 20% of terms which form about 80% of your traffic.
How many of these search terms are converting into sales? How many are converting into a connection being made between the customer and the product?
Understanding the performance of the search experience from an analytical perspective is an essential step in understanding how well your search engine is making the right connections:
• How many of your visitors use the search engine
• How many click on products (and then how many add those products to the basket, or if not, do they search again or abandon the site?)
• How many will search again having not clicked on anything? Why was it because there were zero results? Did they click Next page a hundred times?
• How many will abandon the search function, or worse how many will abandon the site altogether?
3. Join stuff up
So often a search engine will be unable to recognise terms used in its own category structure. Often the AutoComplete will have a different structure than the categories, and the Results page different again.
Category navigation is just another way to build connections between customers and data. It is like search (the category is just another tag in the database), but the terms used and the structure are established by the business and not the customer. This is fine, sometimes customers need to be guided, but it must be all joined together in a coherent way.
4. Don’t leave a dead end
The zero results page is one of the most important parts of the search experience. However well you construct your search, zero results is inevitable some of the time.
The important points are:
Make it clear what happened (“Sorry, your search didn’t return any results …”)
• Include the term that the customer typed (” … for the term “XYZ”) so that they can see if they made a simple spelling or typing error.
• Keep the search box on the page, front and centre ideally … let them see how easy it is to continue
• Include your best content anyway – show your best-selling promotions, or if the search is recognised and you have a similar product, show that! (“We don’t have any iPads, but we do have …”)
• Use spellcheck and “did you mean?” searches.
5. Use AutoComplete
AutoComplete is the most powerful tool to avoid dead ends and abandonments, and hugely effective at building connections directly between customers and data.
6. Don’t stop
By this we mean that you cannot set up search then walk away. It is dynamic because it is driven by your customers. They change all the time so your search experience must change all the time. This process, the analysis of customer behaviour then taking action to maximize the effectiveness of search, is a neverending task.
www.colbenson.com
