Let them Search Or They Will Leave
2007 July 13
Site Search is the Holy Grail for Ecommerce websites. You could have great products, great pricing, but if your customers can't find what they are looking for, then it's like having a website that no one visits.
If you are using a site search that doesn't allow for fuzzy words or mispellings, then you need consider upgrading. Another wonderful feature is some of the more popular site search engines is "related words". If someone types in a word, you can redirect that word to another more relevant word. Example; the correct word is a "fishing rod" NOT "fishing pole" No products are labeled "pole" so if someone searches for "fishing pole" you can re-direct that search to "fishing rod". This is very powerful and very useful. This allows your customers to search on what THEY know and not what YOU know, making the whole shopping process smoother. Not really a site search feature, but a tip. Consider logging all the terms used in your site search. Then take a look at your top searches and utilize this information to promote those products, make sure your search engine is outputting what these people are looking for, find related words (ie pole vs rod). There are all kinds of marketing ideas that can come from looking at what your customers are looking for on your website.
Again if customers can't find products either by navigating or by searching your site, you will lose out on many sales.
If you haven't already consider evaluating your site's search features and adjust accordingly.
Expanding on the logging of keywords, it might be a good idea to track the products that are clicked on after the search. This way you can track what search term the user input in order to arrive at your product. You could then generate reports to analyze the data - at which point you could think of variants, etc. This data could not only be useful to your site, but useful to your Google base submissions.
Thoughts?