American marketers will invest more than $8 billion in search marketing over the next 12 months—both for paid search advertising and for search engine optimization. But most ignore what's proving to be perhaps the most critical search marketing of all: internal site search.
MarketingSherpa's E-commerce Benchmark Guide reports that visitors to your Website who use your site's search box are 270% more likely to convert into buyers or registrants than typical visitors.
At the same time, the Benchmark Guide also reports 33% of people who left your site unhappily did so because they found it "difficult to navigate" and 16% left because they hit an "error" page during their visit.
My recommendation? Before you invest in further external search marketing on sites such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search, revamp your own site's internal search functionality. After all, your traffic-driving investment is wasted if your site isn't designed to convert that traffic into buyers, registrants, or whatever else your goal is.
The great news is, this marketing investment is a proven tactic. This spring MarketingSherpa asked 1,101 real-life e-commerce marketers what was the best Website revamp they’d tested in the past 12 months. Ninety-six percent of those who had tested revamping the way their site's internal search results were displayed to visitors said the results were worth it.
Key: The same marketers said more-glamorous tests such as adding video to the site or trying multivariate testing also were very worthwhile. But upgrading internal site search held higher priority for them as a proven tactic that worked.
What should you consider revamping? Three ideas:
1) Replace error and "no results found" pages. These are dead ends. Many visitors who come across one of these pages will give up and go to another site without trying again.
This afternoon, for instance, I surfed two directly competing apparel sites for the term "lady slippers." One site showed me 13 results from the women's slipper and soft-shoe categories, including "wicked good clogs." None had the word "lady slippers" in the title, but the site's search figured out what I was looking for and tried to help me.
The search results page of the other site (remember, this was a direct competitor, with many identical items in stock) said baldly, "Your search for ‘lady slippers’ returned 0 items. Would you like to try another search?"
Guess which site got the sale?
2) Run ads on your own search results. Advertisements on external search engines can work extremely well. So why not swipe an idea from Google et al. and add your own house ads to your own site's search engine results pages? Chances are this highly qualified traffic will convert even better than any external ad click would.
Among other marketers, People's Bank has tested running text ads on its house search engine results for the past three years with outstanding success. For example, a visitor searching for home-equity loans would see an ad for the bank's loans in a yellow box at the top of the regular search results. (You can see a screenshot of how this works at http://www.marketingsherpa.com/pb/ad.html.)
3) Test results page layout. Last but not least, you should carefully consider and then test the actual layout and design of your search results page. You've probably worked very hard on making sure your home page and key products or services pages are gorgeous … but left your search results page layout up to the tech staff.
Now is the time to rethink your design. Should images be made larger? Should you change the number of results displayed automatically? Should the top options be organized by price, by date, by favoritism, by conversions? If there's a special offer—a sale, a free PDF white paper—should you add an icon to draw attention to it?
The one thing to remember throughout all of this: You have just one shot at great search results design. Almost no one will click to use advanced search functions, and the same is true of additional pages of search results. People just don't go there. Their eyes flicker over the first page, then they either thankfully click on what they were looking for or give up in disgust and often leave your site immediately.
Which do you want it to be?
Anne Holland is president of MarketingSherpa, a research firm publishing case studies and benchmark data for its 173,000 marketing and advertising executive subscribers. To download a copy of MarketingSherpa’s E-commerce Benchmark Guide 2006, go to www.sherpastore.com/e-commerce-benchmark.html?8966.
© MarketingSherpa, Inc. 2006
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