Manor Quarry Blog

Internal Site Search

After optimising your site for the search engines, and increasing its rankings, there should be an increase in traffic to your site. The next stage to look at is how to keep visitors on your site for longer, and how to optimise it internally.

The aim of internal site optimisation is to make your web site as friendly a place as possible, from easy and clear navigation, to ensuring customers find the products they are searching for. By improving the visitors’ experience on your site, you will have more chance of keeping them browsing longer and therefore making a purchase.

Think of it logically. When someone visits your site they are a perspective buyer. If it is hard to navigate around your site and find what they are looking for, or the search produces limited results, then this customer will not hesitate in leaving your site and head to a competitors to try and find what they are after. You have missed an opportunity. Do not let this happen by correctly optimising your site internally by providing the customer with what they want.

Understanding your customers is an important part of internet trading. Analyse the searches people are doing on your web site. This allows you to track what visitors are looking for but more importantly shows you if your website is delivering.

This information is invaluable for marketers when making decisions about keyword changes, creating promotions and amending the inventory that will ultimately help improve the customer’s shopping experience.

Analysis of sales statistics show that more sales are generated from customers who use the site search facility than those who don’t. Therefore, a critical element of a site’s success is how the search process is managed.

See how your visitors search your site, what they look for, and where they end up. Track top search terms used and top search terms yielding no results.

Having knowledge of search volumes will give you a sense of what is being searched for and what keywords you may want to focus on. Once knowing which words and terms are most searched, use this to your advantage. This is what people are on your site for, so in the cases where these keywords don’t match any products, either start selling the product or add these additional keywords to current product descriptions to include them in search results going forward, therefore eliminating “No Search Results Found” on the results page, making product searches more effective and helping customers to find what they want.

By analysing and comparing which products are more popular or prominent on your site also helps in the search process. Order results by popularity to show customers what is being purchased more often as this will give them confidence in the product. Also look at the slower selling products and try and work out why they are not so successful. It could be down to a number of factors including: wrong keywords being tagged to the product; poor product description; lack of images; or placed in the wrong category. If a product is struggling, try promoting it to get it in the eye line of perspective buyers.

Once you know what people are searching for, what they are finding and what they can’t find, you should be able to act accordingly and make any necessary changes.

This entry was posted on July 2, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Web Site Optimisation. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

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