Search or Destroy: Is Your Site Search Turning Away Customers?

Ever heard the one about the guy who wanted a relationship but ended up destroying each opportunity before it even started?

No, I’m not referring to the latest “How to Find Your Soul Mate” self-help book or last week’s edition of your favorite daytime TV talk show. I’m talking about how online marketers lose business because their site search fails to deliver relevant results. So instead of developing long-term customer relationships, retailers end up destroying them before they even begin.

Shift your focus to relevancy…or else
If you sell goods or services online, you probably focus much of your time on Internet marketing: analyzing your keyword and e-mail campaigns, infiltrating chat rooms and community sites and blogs to spread the message and create brand recognition. That’s all well and good; you can’t drive site traffic without awareness, right?

But let’s be real. Clever creative tactics can entice people to click, but will they quickly find what they’re looking for upon arrival? Will they get relevant results on the first page? Hopefully. If not, you won’t lose only one sale; you might lose that customer or prospect forever, along with his dollars, his loyalty, and the likelihood of his urging friends to shop at your site. In short, you miss out on the customer’s lifetime value.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When customers can’t find an item, they assume you don’t stock it–when there’s a chance they simply couldn’t find it. The last thing they’re thinking about is whether the search results were relevant. Why should they, when they can simply go elsewhere in a click or two.

You, on the other hand, do have a problem. It’s time to stop measuring success by the number of unique users you get each month. Heavy traffic doesn’t necessarily correlate to heavy sales. Instead, start paying attention to conversion rates, as the ratio of visitors to buyers is the true measure of success. And one of the best ways to improve conversion rates is by providing relevant search results.

That’s right. Relevancy is just as–or maybe more–important than online marketing.

Blame it on Google
What’s the big deal about relevance? People should be happy to find the desired item on page two, even three – that is, if they climbed into a time machine and traveled back to 1995, when we were impressed to get results even remotely close to our expectations.

But along came Google. We tried it and got hooked on the relevant results. Now we’re spoiled by it. So much so that while the average person has very little patience in the real world, the average online consumer has absolutely no patience in the virtual world. And as we’ve become used to the increasingly relevant results delivered by Google, we expect every search to be equally effective.

In fact, according to a study sponsored by search engine marketing firm iProspect and conducted by Jupiter Research, most of us expect to find what we’re looking for on the first page of the search results “62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, and a full 90% of users click on a result within the first three pages of search results.”

That means that your site search functionality must be easy and intuitive, just like Google. Results have to be relevant and match what people expect to find. Users have to find the item right away. When it’s not there, they’ll just move on to another site.

Get your priorities straight
As we said earlier, managers at online retailers devote a lot of time to marketing, which in itself does not cause poor search results. What causes poor results is that marketing activities are given so much priority. The site search, then, becomes the sales stepchild: at best barely noticed, and at worst entirely ignored.

Fortunately there are user feedback tools now available that make it easy to measure and improve relevance. These tools allow you to capture all types of user feedback: what’s working, what’s not working, what could improve, and so on. In many cases, after a company deploys one of these tools, it sees a major decrease in the number of reported complaints.

Now you might be thinking that these tools are exactly like a traditional feedback form. In a way they are alike, yet at the same time they can offer so much more value. The beauty of these tools is that you can place them directly in the search area, so that when users see a problem, they can immediately tell you about it. They don’t have to go on a major expedition to find that traditional form.

Most important, some of the better tools even track this information and then deliver it to you in one report with practical recommendations. You don’t have to compile and analyze and format. That makes it easy for you to adjust search results, create more relevance, and ultimately drive more sales.

In the meantime, here are a few tips to help you improve the relevancy of your site search almost immediately:

• Create intuitive titles for the search results for your products, and increase the use of popular keywords in those titles. This improves relevancy on both your site search and other search engines.

• Index only the relevant content associated with each product. In other words, for the results pages, don’t index navigational or other content that’s not related to the product. By creating concise results, you also improve relevance.

• Pay attention to results that have low click-through rates. Make sure that the keywords in the actual product pages are included in the results page. Some products get low clicks simply because the terminology in the search results doesn’t match what users type into the search fields.

Dr. Shaun Ryan is cofounder/CEO of SLI Systems, a provider of Website search solutions.