For major sites one of the most important features is a good search facility. Customers, especially non-savvy ones, use the search feature a lot and it’s vital that it offers a good user experience.
Since a lot of users type quite strange keywords into search engines it’s not really enough to rely on simple text matching any more for a search engine, you almost need to be trying to replicate Google technology combined with your product catalogue.
One of the trends this year has been rich autocomplete which is demonstrated nicely on the Apple site. Product images are pulled in dynamically as the user types a query in the search box.
If you’re a developer then there are a lot of autocomplete scripts freely available to integrate into your site.
On this blog we improved the Wordpress search by ordering the results by relevance rather than the strange way Wordpress orders by date and adding features such as keyword highlighting and “did you mean” suggestions but it’s still miles away from where an ecommerce search engine needs to be.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that internal search results on major sites are just matched from the database by the keyword – ecommerce sites are able to utilise products such as Omniture SiteSearch which uses a rules based approach to adjust search results so that high profit products are given a boost.
Omniture SiteSearch connects site visitors with the information, products and services they seek—quickly and easily. SiteSearch enables marketers to better target search results to visitors, manage relevance and ranking and use visitor behavior to automatically boost results based on criteria such as conversion, popularity and more.
- Analytics-driven Search Results
- Create ranking rules to influence site search results
- Choose metrics from any SiteCatalyst report suite to influence search results
- Weight different metrics to influence results rankings
- Target ranking rules to different visitor segments
- Preview analytics-driven ranking results
- Compare relevancy and analytics-driven ranking scores
- Specify time periods for data aggregation of analytics metrics used to drive search ranking business rules
- Combine offline data with analytics-based metrics to influence search ranking business rules
A final important aspect is to have some kind of internal site search analytics solution to understand your customers and see what they are searching for. If a particular product is being searched for a lot then move it to your homepage or highlight it in your navigation menu.
In the good old days, people dutifully used site navigation at the left, right, or top of a website. But, two websites have fundamentally altered how we navigate the web: Amazon, because the site is so big, sells so many things, and is so complicated that many of us go directly to the site search box on arrival. And Google, which has trained us to show up, type what we want, and hit the search button.
Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box. The increased use of site search as a core navigation method makes it very important to understand the data that site search generates.
What’s your favourite internal search engine?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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Nice post, thanks for sharing the search site analytics tips.
More comments from tag44Find me on Twitter
This internal search problem has always been very frustrating to me, so I always use Google Co-op to create a site specific Google search when I know I will do extensive searching of a site. This isn’t very practical, however, to use every time I want to search through a site. I usually reserve Google Co-op to search forums. But for the day to day search one could just use the site: function on any search engine.
To search through this site for example just google:
site:http://www.blogstorm.co.uk
And to search for a certain term or phrase such as ‘banana’ just plug it in at the end, with a space of course.
site:http://www.blogstorm.co.uk banana
More comments from PersonalPPCcoachCelebros Salesperson (www.celebros.com) is a great alternative to Omniture – an affordable concept-based site search, returning accurate products to any query including:
* Simple queries: identifying the product searched for and returning results with precise refinements;
* Complex queries: understanding which family of products (category) is concerned, and displaying products that match the attributes queried (e.g. “dry-hair shampooâ€);
* Spelling mistakes: detect and understand any spelling mistake a shopper might make;
* Synonyms: the thesaurus enables us to find synonyms automatically and tailor them to merchandizing requirements;
* Missing brand or product: if the shopper queries for a missing product, instead of returning the usual “no results found†page, Celebros will offer your customer the choice of similar products;
Celebros site-search is powered by analytics and includes Navigation, Dynamic Refinements, Social Search and Merchandising. The search is powered by a modern user interface including widgets like Auto Complete, Gift/Product-Finder, Product Compare and QuickView.
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