About 10% of all searches on your site have no results. The “No results” page is an important part of your site and you can benefit from giving it some attention. Your site search logs should show you what search terms visitors use on your site, and what terms generate no (or poor) results.  If you already know the answer to this question but you haven’t yet addressed No Results pages, here are some simple ways you can deal with them and give your customers a better site experience:

• 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.

Over time companies have come to recognize that populating a web site with lots of images significantly improves the user experience. This is especially true for e-commerce sites, where people shopping online always like to see a picture of what they’re going to buy. For many sites it’s even more compelling when shoppers can view items in all the different color options available. Well, guess what? Adding the ability to refine results by color to your site search can also have a positive impact.

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.

If you’ve been putting off blogging because you’re not sure how it will help your business, it may be time to get on the blogging bandwagon. A recent article in E-Commerce Guide points out that a blog linked to your online storefront can be a great way to build visibility for your business and get customers more engaged with what you have to offer.

We agree that blogging presents a good opportunity to talk directly with your customers – and we also think that if you’re going to spend the time necessary to maintain a blog, then you should make the blog content findable on your site. Naturally, you might be concerned that blog articles would be a distraction to your online shoppers – after all, aren’t they using your site search to find the things you’re selling, and not to catch up on your blog?

However, if you do your blog right -with useful, interesting posts that relate to your shoppers’ needs and questions, then visitors would benefit from your posts – and you want to make the posts easy to find. Here are some approaches you can take to make blog content searchable:

• Show the blog content in a separate section of the search results – for example, on the left, or below the regular search results. This ensures that products have prime position on the results page.
• Create refinement options so visitors can restrict the results to just blog articles, or just products.
• Allow product and blog content to surface in your search, showing the most relevant first. Consider adjusting your ranking settings to place more weight on the products, so that products generally show higher. (If you do this, we recommend allowing the blog articles to move higher if people click on them, so that if they are the most relevant results for a particular keyword, then they will end up at the top of the search results.)
• Consider offering a search box on your blog so that visitors can search just blog articles. (In this case, the blog articles should be the most prominent, but we suggest also showing products in your blog search, perhaps along one side of the results.)

If you’re not sure how to present blog content in your site search, you may want to ask your customers (maybe through a blog post), try some options, and measure the impact on your conversion rate. Feel free to contact us if you’d like any assistance.

Also, watch our latest video for more tips on blogging and site search. And take our new LinkedIn poll, and tell us what you think about this idea.

Our primary aim is to help create a better online experience for our customers’ visitors, and help improve our clients online business, through more relevant search. As we’ve discussed in recent newsletters, there are many ways to deliver a better search experience – beyond more relevant results – by integrating additional content, such as video, into your search results. So here’s another idea: incorporate user-generated content, such as customer reviews and social tags, in your site search results and give customers an even easier way to search your site.

I’ve talked in the past about the benefits of allowing user reviews on your site – and incorporating the reviews into your site search. For instance, reviews keep customers on your site – if they can find product reviews on your own site, they won’t need to go elsewhere to get them. You can also use ratings to weight search results, giving the products with better ratings more prominence.

One of SLI’s clients - an online gift retailer, who also works with our partner PowerReviews has taken this process a step further, allowing shoppers to narrow their search results based on social tags. For instance, they can refine the search by such tags as “Best Uses” or “Kind of Buyer.” People place a lot of faith in what others say about a given product, so if you can bring these compelling testimonials into search, you stand a greater chance of convincing shoppers to make a purchase.

We’re fans of the idea of Social Navigation. What do you think? Do you offer user ratings and reviews or social tags on your site? Do you include this information in your search results? Take a minute to answer our one question LinkedIn poll.

It’s easy to test if searching by social tags will help your business, since we collect social tags via our feeds from our partners Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews. Please contact us at sales@sli-systems.com, or watch my site search video tip demonstrating the integration of site search, ratings and reviews if you’d like to learn more.