No results page

Facebook

Twitter

Linkedin

Pinterest

Reddit

email

Print

I saw an excellent write up about winning strategies for no results pages by Greg Nudelman. Greg includes plenty of examples of what does and doesn’t work.  I recommend reading it. Here is a list of some of the things that we do around the no results page.

First of all we try to reduce the number of times that the no results page is shown through the following techniques:

• The auto complete feature helps people formulate their query as they type. The suggested phrases always have results.
• We report on the search terms that have no results. Often this is caused by your visitors using different language than you use on your site. This can be remedied by either using that language on your site or adding synonyms. It can also indicate products/information that your visitors expect you to have that you don’t carry. You can use this information to help expand your product lines – based on what your visitors are asking for. Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty talks about doing this in this interview
• Similar to the Amazon example that Greg gives, we fail over if there are no results that contain all of the words in the query – we will show results that contain some of the words, with a message describing what we are doing. Note: Not everyone reads the message so in some cases this causes confusion.
  

On the no results page we will:

• show spelling suggestions using the Did you mean language. These suggestions are drawn from the language on the site
• show popular searches – I’m a fan of this
• show popular products – this can also cause confusion – visitors may not read the message that you have no results for their search term and assume that the popular products are the search results.
• show keyword specific banners – for example if there is a search term for a product that you no longer stock then a banner may be a good way of saying “we no longer carry this product range – here are some alternatives.”

As an aside – one of Greg’s examples that highlighted the “Did you mean” functionality was a Google search for asdasdasdasdasdasddfgh. If you do that search – his page is the top result (undoubtedly this page will be in the results set shortly as well).