Site Search Reporting Offers a Goldmine of Data

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If you’ve put forth the effort to have a highly intuitive, impactful site search but you’re not looking at your site search reports, you could be missing out on more opportunities to improve the customer experience. In our “Big Book of Site Search Tips” (available for free download at http://blog.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook), we discuss the ways to leverage your site search reports to improve your online marketing efforts and ensure you’re delivering the best search experience possible for your visitors.

• Regularly check the top search terms on your site – They can be good indicators of new items your clients are looking for, or product lines that are performing well. For example, SLI customer Jelly Belly used to offer only a 10-pound bulk case of its Champagne Bubbles jelly beans. Using information gleaned from site search, the company discovered that Champagne Bubbles candy was the third most-requested search. They decided to offer a one-pound container, and it’s now one of the company’s biggest sellers with wedding planners.

• Review the searches with poor or no results – A poor result is one that has a low clickthrough rate. These terms either relate to content that people are searching for that you don’t have or, more often, are examples of your visitors using different language to describe your content than you do. Both of these pieces of information are extremely valuable. If visitors are searching for content that you don’t offer, then you know that there is demand for that content and may indicate products that you should be stocking on your ecommerce site. If visitors are searching for products that you are not able to or don’t intend to carry, then you can address this by showing keyword-specific banners suggesting similar products.

  If your visitors are using a different language to describe your content or products, you can either start using this language on your site (which will help with your search engine optimization as well), or you can add synonyms to your search so your visitors will find the items they’re looking for.

• Review your site search quality metrics to ensure your site search relevancy is improving over time – A good site search solution “learns” by tracking visitors’ aggregate search queries and click-throughs to deliver results based on criteria such as popularity. This means that, over time, searchers on your site are presented with the most relevant search results and can find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily. Improved searches result in more satisfied customers and greater sales.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips