Customizing Site Search Is Key To Keep Customers Buying
Just when you think you’ve got your whole Internet strategy worked out, along comes a new wrinkle.
About a month ago, I wrote about the issue of search engine optimization, or SEO, which is a system of tailoring your web site to come up near the top of search engine results.
It’s a pretty big industry these days, with new SEO shops popping up almost every day, offering business owners quick fixes to all their web woes.
Conversion Conundrum
But just because you hire a fancy SEO firm to program your site to Google’s specifications, you still might be missing an important piece of online commerce.
That fact was pointed out to me by Dave Jacob, who’s a managing partner at Davalen LLC, an IT consulting firm that has offices in Sudbury as well as Lynchburg, Va.
He shot me an e-mail in response to my SEO column, pointing out that once you get to the top of a Google page, the real work begins.
In his e-mail Jacob posed this question: “Once someone finds your site, where do they go, how long do they stay and how often do they buy your product or service?”
It turns out that a big obstacle for converting visitors to web sites from browsers to buyers has a lot to do with a site's internal search engine.
A point of clarification: There are two different types of search engines that matter to businesses. One category includes external search engines like Google and Yahoo that people use to navigate the web. The second category, that’s often overlooked according to Jacob, is the internal search engine on a company’s site.
For example, Jacob said his company did a study where they tested various web site search engines by typing in common misspellings or vague keywords. In other words, his team typed in “sho” instead of “shoe” into a sneaker retail web site’s search engine. And the bad news for many sites was that a slightly inexact search could produce no results or confusing results.
The Amazon Approach
If you’re looking for the model example of a great internal search engine, the gold standard has been set by Amazon.com.
“They have a very sophisticated search,” Jacob said of Amazon. “They do things like recommend things or they try and anticipate where you’re going, what you want to do and try to help you get there.”
So, how do you find out if your site’s search engine is causing your customers to pull their hair out? Well, the first thing you can do is ask your customers (or a loved one that’s willing to be a guinea pig). And then you can run tests like the ones Davalen did. Of course, it’s always good to get an outsider to help you with these tests. When you are inside an industry, you often forget that the people who don’t live, breathe and eat your product might not know exact part numbers or industry jargon.
The key to converting visitors on your site to purchasers rather than perusers is really fine tuning your site’s search engine, Jacob said. He often sees businesses install a new search engine on their site thinking that one piece of software will solve all their online problems.
But oftentimes nothing gets better. And that’s because “you forgot to tune it,” Jacob said.
The problem, of course, is nothing in this world is free. And tuning your site’s search engine to your specifications can up the cost of installation three-fold.
Jacob recommends carefully studying your site’s analytics in order to rationalize the cost. If you can clearly see customers fleeing your site at the search result stage, you can surmise there’s a problem and estimate the money you could bring in if those transactions were closed. Armed with some good data, you may be able to spend some money and actually make some money in return. Which is a pretty good deal in this economy.
Got news for our Digital Diva column? E-mail Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
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