A smart way of optimizing the value you get from your search and navigation is to conduct  testing to objectively decide which design options to use. However, our customers often admit that they don’t test as much as they should because it’s difficult and time-consuming to set up and run tests, and it’s also difficult to decide what they should be testing.

In the absence of testing, many website operators will resort to industry best practices. However, these best practices don’t always make sense for your business – whether for site search or another area of online marketing, as was recently pointed out in a MarketingProfs article about breaking the rules of email marketing.

To solve this problem for our customers, we’ve introduced the Conversion Optimizer, a service for conducting testing. Essentially, we’ve taken all the hard work out of performing tests – you work with your SLI Customer Success Manager to establish the tests, and then you control and watch the tests being performed in real time, via your SLI Merchandising and Administration Console. (You can even stop the test if the results are poor.) And most important, you get results right away, and you can share them with your colleagues.

At SLI, we’re big fans of this testing. It’s the only way to truly understand how variations in your search and navigation features – such as changing the position of the site search box, using a grid view instead of a list view, or tweaking your ranking algorithm – can improve your business. However, thorough testing takes a lot of time and effort, and if it’s not done right, results can be ambiguous or misleading.

We’re making the beta version of Conversion Optimizer tool available to select customers – if you’d like to try it out, contact your Customer Success Manager. And tell us what you think of the new tool. We’d love to hear about the positive changes you’ve made to your site based on test results.

Improving the look and feel—and usability—of your site’s search feature usually requires more than one change. Many small changes and enhancements can add up to a major impact on site search, speeding up the search process for site visitors and boosting the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase or find the information they seek. Evidence shows that search has become the key method for navigating through websites, and there’s never been a better time to make small but crucial changes.

To help you in these efforts, we’ve just released a new whitepaper called the “Big Book of Site Search Tips,” available now for free download on our website. We’ve collected nearly 80 tips for making your site search more effective and easy to use. The good news is that many of the tips don’t require large changes to your site – small changes can make a big difference!

For instance, place the search box “above the fold,” high on the webpage, to make sure that site visitors don’t miss it. You can also add a search box to every page of your site, improving the chances that visitors use the search feature. Other tips advise highlighting sale or promotional items within search results, and also indicating whether products are in stock or out of stock on search results pages.

Let us know what you think of these tips, and what results you’ve achieved if you put any tips into practice. If you’d like to suggest any tips for the next edition of the “Big Book,” send them along to newsletter@sli-systems.com or post a comment on our blog, where we’ll reveal a couple of tips each week over the next few months.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

In addition, we’ve added even more features to our merchandising controls, and introduced training webinars to help educate our customers on how to leverage these tools. And at the end of 2009, we introduced Learning Search with AJAX, our AJAX-powered site search.

So what’s in store for 2010? As e-commerce and other content-rich sites continue to focus on delivering a superior visitor experience, and as many marketers incorporate social media into their marketing strategy, we believe this year’s new developments will focus on features like mobile search, video, and the addition of Twitter (and possibly Facebook) feeds in search results.

We expect to see more people using our Learning Search with AJAX, and we expect to fine-tune that product as more customers start to use it.

2010: the Year of Mobile, Video and Social

Research shows that people are spending more time using smart phones and mobile devices to surf the web – and also shop. Given that, online retailers and other informational sites will need to devote resources to not only make sure that their site design suits the mobile platform, but that their site search works for mobile browsing as well. We think this will be a key area of innovation in the coming year.

We also think video will play a greater role online – particularly for e-commerce, because conversions dramatically increase when product videos are viewed. The growing use of video means that video should also be played up more in site search – whether it’s video icons next to items in site search results, or video banners for particular keyword searches on search results pages.

Finally, with the popularity of social media to increase brand visibility and improve customer loyalty, we see companies doing more to highlight their social media efforts – particularly with corporate blogs, Twitter feeds and Facebook activities – on their corporate web sites. We’ve recommended in the past that companies incorporate social media content into site search results, and we believe we’ll see more of this in 2010. Incorporating this content in site search gives potential buyers more information with which to make educated decisions about what to purchase.

Ecommerce Podcast Highlights Successful Online Retail Strategies

Last year, we launched the Ecommerce Podcast series, in which we interview ecommerce sales and marketing executives and talk to them about their strategies for building their online businesses. By the end of 2009, we posted 21 interviews with ecommerce experts from such companies as Internet Retailer, Title Nine, Shop.org, Century Novelty and Interflora UK. In addition, we interviewed key ecommerce industry analysts, including Susan Aldrich from Patricia Seybold Group, and Brian Walker from Forrester. Some of our more popular interviews were downloaded up to 1,500 times.

As we continue the podcast series in the coming year, we’d like to know who you’re interested in hearing from. Have a suggestion for an ecommerce business or executive you’d like us to interview? Email your suggestions to newsletter@sli-systems.com

To make things easier for your customers, we’re now recommending mouse over pop ups, which will save your shoppers time, consequently speeding up their purchase decision time. With this feature, shoppers can mouse over images in search results to see a larger version of the image and/or pertinent product details in a pop-up screen. This allows them to browse many products without having to click on each item and then backtrack to the search results again.

Our customer BedBathStore.com is using mouse over pop ups to help its customers cut time from searching. For example, if a customer searches BedBathStore.com using the keyword “pillows,” hundreds of  pillows are returned – and that’s a lot of pillows to look at. But by simply positioning the cursor over each image, shoppers can get a better look at colors and shapes close-up without having to click on each one.

If you’re going to add pop-up images to your site search, it’s important to make sure the images are positioned correctly, and don’t get cut off by the browser window. For instance, if a result appears near the bottom edge of the window, the pop-up image should appear above the search result – not below the edge of the window. This requires some careful coding, unless you’re an SLI customer, in which case you ask your personal Customer Success Manager and they’ll show you how this will look on your search and navigation pages.

Our Learning Search with AJAX doesn’t require a page refresh each time a user conducts another search query, selects a refinement, switches between grid and list views, reorders the results or clicks to the next page. In any of these instances, only the data that is needed is requested from our servers so the results can appear much faster. This gives a snappier, more engaging search experience that makes me smile every time I use it – and hopefully it will have the same impact on your customers.

We’ve put a lot of work into making sure that the search still works as your customers expect it to. You can still use the back button on the browser to go the previous page. You can copy the URL and send it to a friend, and they’ll see the same page as you do. These simple, everyday features required careful design so that the AJAX search matches users’ perceptions of how a webpage works. Our AJAX search also works with our merchandising controls, meaning that banners, landing pages, tuning rules, and so on still work as they do on normal search results pages. Our AJAX search also works if you are using SLI for some or all of your navigation pages.

We have designed the AJAX search with web search engines in mind. Although Google has announced a proposal to crawl AJAX pages, they and other major search engines currently do not crawl such pages. SLI’s AJAX search includes a non-JavaScript version of the search and navigation pages – in other words, your existing landing pages and navigation pages are still available, so the crawlers from the web search engines will be able to access these, as will any of your visitors that have JavaScript disabled.

You can see how our AJAX search works on our customer’s site, Footwear etc. Some of our beta customers have seen significant positive impact in their sales following the rollout of Learning Search with AJAX.

AJAX search is currently in Beta testing but will be available as an upgrade to existing SLI clients starting in January 2010. Contact your Customer Success Manager about creating an AJAX version of your search. If you’re not a current SLI customer, we’ll still consider building you AJAX search at no cost, which qualified customers can try out for free for a month.

• Position the search box “above the fold,” or high up on the webpage so that visitors don’t need to scroll down to find it -  data shows that people who search rather than browse are 2-3 times as likely to convert, so encourage them to use your site search by making it easy to spot at first glance.
• Test different positions for the search box, and identify which positions generate the most search traffic -  our customer Black Forest Décor did this, and moved its search box from the right-hand upper corner of its site – a common placement for the search box – to the center of the page. They also made other changes to the search box, such as increasing its size and using bolder colors to make it stand out. This all added up to a big jump in average revenue from site search.
• If you use text like “enter search here” in your search box, use JavaScript code so that the term disappears as soon as people click on the box or start typing within it - otherwise, search users have to take steps to delete the term, or they need to overwrite it with their search term – and this can increase the likelihood of spelling errors and poor search results. Generally speaking, you want to avoid forcing extra steps on your visitors – search should be as painless as possible.
• Consider putting the cursor focus in the search box – in other words, code the page so that the cursor is automatically in the box, and visitors can start typing their keywords immediately - our customer Surveillance Video is a good example. As you can see when you visit their site, it’s fast and easy to start a search. Just remember that if you do place the focus on search, do so only on those pages where search is the primary box. If there is another form on the box that a visitor clicks on, and the visitor starts typing into that box while the page is still loading, then the focus will switch to the search box while they’re typing – which can be confusing.
• Add auto complete, which suggests possible terms when visitors type the first few letters of a keyword – it’s especially useful for hard-to-spell searches, and saves time by requiring fewer keystrokes.

Do you have additional ideas for simple ways to make search better? If so, we’d love to hear them – just drop us a line and let us know.

The easiest way to do this is to use OpenSearch XML. This is a small piece of XML code that you publish and link to. The code tells the user’s web browser how to send queries to your site search. This process is invisible to your site visitors, but it makes it easy for them to add your site search to the list of search engines accessible from their browser. Once your site search is added, it’s easy for the user to search your site whenever they like – without having to go to your web site first.

You can see how this works on the site of our customer, altestore.com. Once you have conducted a search on their site, you have the option to add their site search to your list of search engines. In Firefox, this is done by clicking the arrow beside the browser search box, and selecting “Add AltE Store.” This is particularly useful for internal staff, or for your most loyal customers. It makes it easier for them to search your site, because once it is set up, they can search from any webpage. I personally use this for our own intranet search all the time.

If you’re an SLI customer, we’ll publish this XML code as part of our service. If you’d like to know more about this feature, please contact your Customer Success Manager.

Once you have published the OpenSearch XML, you need to let your customers know about its availability. For instance, you can create a page on your site describing how to add your site search to their browser, you can include the instructions in a newsletter, or you can add a blurb on an advanced search page. Let us know which methods you’ve tested, and what works best for your audience.

This month we get back to basics with some tips for how to make sure your site search – which is (hopefully) already delivering a good ROI for your business – perform even better.  (Not sure if your site search is delivering good ROI?  We’ll address that topic in one of our upcoming newsletters, so be on the look-out!)

• Make your search box easy to find.  This may seem like a no-brainer but it’s amazing how many sites still have the search box either too small to see or hidden away amidst content clutter.  One of our customers – Black Forest Décor – did an experiment a while back to see what would happen if they gave the search box more prominence on the page.  So they made it bigger, used bolder colors to make it pop and moved it to the center of the page.  And guess what?  Their conversions and revenue from site search went up significantly.  You can read all about it here.
• Make sure the search box isn’t confused with other boxes.  This ties into the 1^st point above – again, you want to make sure the search box stands out and is easy to find.  You may have similar looking text entry boxes on your site where people can subscribe to a newsletter or enter a company’s ticker symbol to find financial information.  To differentiate the search box you can put the words “SEARCH” in it, move it to the center of the page or use different colors than you use for other boxes on the page.  If you have a form for people to subscribe to your newsletter – put plenty of cues around it that an email address should go into that box. Read more here.
• Leave the user’s search phrase in the box after conducting the search.  This makes it easy to  for them to change the search after they’ve done it – for example they may want to add another term. 
•  Include a search box on every page.  Some sites show the search box just on the home page but nowhere else on the site.  Many people will start navigating a site before resorting to the search – if you have a search box on every page, then it will make it easier for them to find the search when the navigation doesn’t work.  Having site search as part of your site-wide navigation assures visitors will always have a way to find what they seek.

Are there other simple steps you’ve taken to improve your site search that have had a positive impact?  If so, we’d love to hear about them.

And if you haven’t done so already, be sure to join our new LinkedIn group – Site Search + the User Experience –  where you can share tips like these, ask questions and participate in discussions about making the most of site search and your customers’ experience online.  You can find the group here and then just click to join.

• Use the Language of Your Customers.  Often No Results pages are caused by your visitors using different language than you use on your site.  A simple remedy is to incorporate those terms on your site or add synonyms via your site search.
• Expand your Product Lines.  Sometimes No Results pages come up simply because you don’t carry the item(s) your visitors seek.  So you can use this data to help determine what products to add to your offerings, which can only help you increase sales.  Ian MacDonald from SLI customer Century Novelty talks about doing this in this EcommercePodcast interview.
• Incorporate an Auto Complete Feature.  Similar to Google’s Auto Suggest, which helps people formulate their query as they type, an Auto Complete feature on your site search will make searching your site easier.  And the suggested phrases should always have results – so this helps improve your customers’ experience.



• Show Results with Some of the Words.  As explained in his recent blog post “Winning Strategies for No Search Results Pages,” Greg Nedelman suggests that rather than state that no results contain all of the words in the user’s query, show results that contain some of the words.  In this example from Smith & Hawken’s site, you can see how we handle this for a search on “sofa bed” (which would normally produce no results).



• Show Spelling Suggestions.  Using the Did you mean? To offer spelling corrections for unknown phrases. Spelling suggestions should be drawn from the words on your site so that corrections can be made to site specific  search terms including brand names.
• Show Popular Searches.  I’m a fan of this because it can help your customers search by knowing what others are searching for when they get no results.



• Show Popular Products.  Doing this may cause some confusion, as 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.  But, if presented well it can be better than showing no products for the query.



• Show Keyword-specific Banners.  If there’s 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.”

Do you have other suggestions for handling No Results pages?  Or, do you have an anecdote to share about how addressing No Results pages helped you business?  If so, we’d love to hear about them.

Let’s look at our customer Jelly Belly. If you search their site for a particular flavor or mix of flavors of jelly beans, you will see an option to refine by one or more colors – so you see only results in the particular color(s) you like (as shown below).

Jason Marrone, ecommerce marketing manager for Jelly Belly, mentioned in the recent Ecommerce Podcast interview that they have many visitors who are choosing candy to match a color theme for functions like bridal or baby showers, and graduation, birthday and other types of parties. As such, they appreciate being able to refine the results by particular colors – such as seeing jelly beans in the school colors of the recent high school graduate.

Google recently added a color refinement option to its image search, allowing you to search for particular images (e.g. “rose bush”) in a particular color, like pink. (When Google adds a new feature, it’s generally a good idea others can borrow – although you should still test and measure with your visitors to make sure.)

Refining search results by color can get a little tricky if you have products that come in several colors – especially if you don’t have a photo for every color of every product. Of course one solution is to take an image of every product in every color available and show the appropriate product when a color refinement is applied. This can be very expensive, time consuming and often just not practical. A common solution is to take one photo of each product and show swatches of the color or material that the product can come in.

As you can see in the example below, Dover Saddlery, another SLI customer, approaches this in a useful way, by showing available colors for each item below each site search result. When you mouse over a color a larger image of the color pops up along with its name. If you click on the result, you’re then able to see the item in the different colors available.

We’re starting to do more work with customers in this area and would be happy to give you some guidance on how best to incorporate color refinements into your site search. It could be another way to increase conversions and improve the user experience on your site. If you would like more information, feel free to contact us, or take a look at our new video with some quick tips on adding color refinements to site search.