Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [176]
Do the results provide too much information?
Do the results provide too little information?
Are the results ordered in a logical manner?
Once you see the results of a search and see what your visitors see, then you may start to understand the problems that your users have when searching on your website.
If you have an ecommerce website, then this is something that you can’t afford to get wrong. Searchers using your internal site search will expect to see products, and if the results are completely irrelevant or presented in a clumsy format, chances are they won’t go further into your website.
Time to Hire a Specialist?
Site search can be a traffic killer. If it isn’t executed well, you will lose sales. Low-quality information and information display will not be accepted by your visitors. Just as they expect relevant results from a search engine, they will also expect relevant results from your site search. If it is developed well and provides searchers with tools they need to make decisions, then it can be one of the most profitable areas of your website.
I do not recommend that site search capability be done by an internal group, a development company, or anyone else who doesn’t specialize in developing ordered, usable, and salable search results. I have found that the companies that specialize in site search technology are the ones that do it well and constantly refine their algorithms and displays based on customer feedback. It may cost more, but isn’t the point of using a specialist to get the knowledge and benefit of their experience?
Some companies choose to use the Google internal site search for their websites, but others do not like offering searchers the ability to search the Web from their websites. Third-party leaders in site-search technology are SLI Systems, PicoSearch, and Search Spring. There are also many open source scripts and plug-ins for those who are technically savvy and want to manage it completely on their own.
The worst thing that your site search can show is no results for a search. This tells the visitor that there is nothing on the site that matches their search, nor, it seems, is there anything that is close, because most times, there are not even any suggestions to provide a pathway to the products (see Figure 15-15). A good site search provides results based on the search keywords, suggested words, corrections for misspellings, or related products. A bad site search shows no results, because visitors will leave if you do not have what they want.
Figure 15-15: The last thing your visitor needs or wants to see when using your site search: no results
The second worst thing that you can show the visitor is too much information with no organization or context (see Figure 15-16).
Figure 15-16: Cell-Phones1.com shows too many results in an illogical format that will overwhelm the visitor.
On the positive side, well-formed results from a site search can keep visitors engaged, because they see the content they need, presented in a logical format. For both information sites and ecommerce sites, incorporating graphics into the results can be a very appealing to your visitors. In addition, the presentation of information needs to be in logical format:
Concise title, which serves as the link to the page
One- or two-sentence description of the content (or product)
Date and author (if a content site)
The product price and purchase link (if an ecommerce site)
Great examples of internal site search can be seen at the ecommerce site Stupid.com and at the content site Smithsonian.com, as shown in Figure 15-17.
a
b
Figure 15-17: Two great examples of internal site search results that present an orderly, logical and attractive results page
A clear interface relies on consistency. This is where consistent product image sizes can assist or detract from your search results. Inconsistent product images, because of size, background color, and style, produce a cluttered view of the products. In many cases, different product image sizes will also skew the rows and