Refinements or facets, are one of the most important ways to address the myriad ways your online visitors can search your site. They allow visitors to narrow down search results based on certain product or content characteristics, so that searches can be completed in less time.

But how do you choose which refinements to use? Do you mirror your product and catalogue structure, and run the risk of creating un-useful refinements? Or do you create refinements visitors are interested in? And in this case, which are they? By making a plan for determining which refinements to display and how to display them, you can find the happy medium – that is, the refinements that meet the needs of your customers, and that mirror your product and content choices. In this two-part series, we’ll cover best practices tips for both understanding what refinements to include, and how best to display them.

Which refinements to include?

The first step in choosing refinements is to examine the content that is indexed in your site search, and how this content is structured or broken down. For instance, your content might include product pages, blog posts, video, help-desk information, and social media content. Each type of content will have its own unique structure, which will dictate how you create refinements. For example, the structure for products could include price, category, brand, color, size, in-stock items, and so on – it all depends on your particular mix of products.

In some cases, structure can be inherited from other data. For example, products may have customer reviews, which in turn have ratings, and perhaps user-generated tags. Blogs may have structure such as author, date published, tags, and comments. These structures will provide you with a list of possible refinements to include in your site search.

Another way to uncover possible refinements is to examine popular keywords in your site search reports to see how many people are searching with refinement-related terms, like colors or gender (e.g. “men’s blue parka”). Another good source: SEO traffic reports from your analytics package, which give you an overview of what people are requesting from search engines.

Keep in mind that it’s not necessary to make every possible refinement available to your customers. Too many refinements will confuse the user, and some of the more obscure refinements will likely not get used very often. Have some conversations with your customers and ask them how they would like to be able to search and refine on your site. After these conversations, you may decide that some refinements will be displayed only after the visitor has selected another facet – for example, after people select a category, they’ll be able to select a subcategory.

In some cases, you may not have the data to provide the refinements. For example, customers of an online furniture store may want to be able to refine their search results by room. To add this facet, you need to add a “room” field to your product database. This can be an intensive process, so you should make sure such a facet adds value.

In next month’s newsletter, we’ll offer some advice on how to display refinements within site search results.

If you’re like most online businesses, by now you’ve probably taken the plunge into social media marketing. Maybe you have a company blog, or you’ve created a Facebook page and/or a Twitter feed to help build community – or perhaps you’ve created a YouTube channel for your company and product videos. But once you do all the hard work of creating this social media content, how do you attract an audience? There are many techniques to make site visitors aware of your social media initiatives. Here’s one that you may not have thought of.

Adding social media content to site search results is a great way to bring attention to your efforts in this area. Visitors who are searching for specific content on your site will see relevant social media posts within your search results, and will be encouraged to click through to your various pages – and hopefully, become fans and followers. Additionally, the added content can further help them in their purchasing decisions, and engage them with your company.

The addition of social media content provides a richer searching experience for your visitors and provides more opportunities to direct them to information to learn more about your products and services. Some of our customers have started doing this, so that when visitors enter their search terms in the search box, the search results will include links to posts on Twitter, Facebook and other sites.

Many ecommerce sites make the mistake of only providing site search for their products. We recommend that you add all of your content to site search – both content on your site (products, videos, blogs, helpdesk information, etc.) and off your site (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)

When you’re ready to add social media content to your site search, we have good advice to offer. If you’d like to find out more about social networking and site search, contact us.

Visitors to your website should always be offered easy ways to navigate your site, shortening the time it takes from the beginning of their search to their discovery of just the right product or content. A couple of years ago, we introduced Auto Complete, which makes searching faster by providing suggestions for keyword terms as visitors type. It helps site visitors formulate their queries and reduce spelling errors, speeding up the experience and adding a little serendipity.

We’ve now gone a step further with our latest search enhancement, Rich Auto Complete. The new twist is that in addition to seeing suggested keyword terms as they type, site visitors will also see product images and product descriptions connected to those keyword terms. This allows visitors to access the content they are looking for without even viewing a site search page.

You can see how this works on our customer’s site, Cruiser Customizing. If you’re on the site’s home page and you begin typing the search term “kawa,” you’ll be given several completed search terms, such as “kawasaki vulcan.” In addition, you’ll see a list of  kawasaki-related products with accompanying thumbnail images. As you continue to type your search term, the suggested products and accompanying images will change based on the characters you’ve entered:

We’re confident that Rich Auto Complete will become a popular site search feature for our customers – we’re already seeing heavy usage of it, and we think it will become standard on leading e-commerce sites. It’s clear that Rich Auto Complete, in combination with an intuitive site search, can help site visitors find what they need and complete their purchases. If you’d like to try out Rich Auto Complete to see what impact it can have on your conversions and orders, contact us.

Most likely, you already know that with web analytics, you can uncover valuable information about how and where your visitors use your site to purchase products or download information. Did you also know that when you integrate analytics (like Google Analytics) with site search you can gain great insights into how your visitors think, how they navigate your site, and why they buy (or don’t buy)?

In fact, analytics packages show differences in how site search and non-site search users interact with your site. Typically, site search users are more engaged with the site – they spend more time browsing, view more pages, and convert at a much higher rate.

Specifically, analytics packages track and analyze site search data to give you a better understanding of which keywords convert well, and which keywords perform poorly. For example, site visitors might spell a keyword differently (a common problem for complex product names), or simply use a search term for a product you haven’t accounted for (e.g., “iPods” instead of “MP3 players”).

If the keywords don’t match, then valid products may not appear for that search term – resulting in poor conversions and/or click-throughs. Analytics can help you detect such keyword challenges early on, and allow you to modify product descriptions and other content and ideally capture more sales or requests to download information.

Integrating analytics with site search can also tip you off to seasonal trends so you can modify product copy or even add products as visitors’ search habits change. For example, you may discover through keyword analysis that shoppers are looking for back-to-school products earlier than you anticipated, or that they’re actively searching for a product you don’t carry that you might want to stock.

Analytics can also help improve your success rate when using site search results pages for pay-per-click campaigns. You can easily use site search results pages as PPC landing pages, giving you more time to spend on developing ad copy and bidding on keywords. Analytics will identify the ad variants that perform well, so you can optimize landing pages for campaigns with the best click-throughs.

Remember, when you’re using site search pages as PPC landing pages, the traffic patterns are going to be very different from when the pages are accessed from the site search box. In order to properly evaluate the site search effectiveness, as well as the effectiveness of the landing pages, they should be tracked separately in the web analytics tools.

While there’s a wealth of data to dig into when you connect analytics to site search, it can be overwhelming to sort through all the numbers. If you’re curious (or confused) about any information that you’ve gleaned from web analytics in relation to site search, contact your SLI customer success manager, and we’ll help you interpret the data.

Given the rapid adoption of smartphones, everyone in ecommerce knows the importance of developing a mobile version of their web site. What’s perhaps even more important is creating a mobile version of your site search.

Why is mobile site search so important? It’s a vital part of the web-browsing experience when you’re on a mobile device. Limited screen real estate provides little room for navigating from page to page or product to product. With effective mobile site search, people don’t need to rely on navigation – so it’s a space-effective way of getting people to the information they want to find on your site.

When you develop mobile site search, you need to take into account the unique challenges of browsing the web via these devices. Obviously, the small screen size will constrict the search choices you can offer to mobile device users. For instance, it’s very difficult to show options for refining search results. In addition, variable download speeds will limit how long these users are willing to wait for the search results to load.

These factors make site search even more crucial to a mobile website since it’s more difficult to navigate through a website via a mobile device. Therefore, you should consider giving site search prominent placement on your mobile site. Amazon does this with its own mobile site – as you can see when you visit the site, search dominates the screen.

Relevance of search results is particularly key for mobile site search, since it’s difficult to show facets to refine results – you want to make every effort to ensure the results are relevant after typing in a keyword. Users can’t or won’t scroll through pages of results to find what they need. It’s also important to keep the site search feature light in terms of images – any pictures should be small so as not to slow down page loads. On the other hand, you may want to include easy access to product reviews – people tend to use mobile devices when they are shopping, and they may want to access reviews on the spot.

We’re happy to offer advice on the best practices for mobile site search that’s fast and effective. If you’re an existing SLI customer and would like to develop a mobile version of your site search, contact your Customer Success Manager.

If you’ve invested time and energy in an effective, relevant results-oriented site search solution, you’ve probably seen an impact on your web site – higher conversions for people who use the search box, perhaps even a larger average order size for people who search. But have you wondered if your site search is delivering all that it can to your bottom line, and if it could be further improved to generate even greater results?

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.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

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

The past year saw continuous improvement in site search, particularly in the search interface. We rolled out Auto Complete to most of our clients, and we’re offering it as a standard feature for all new clients. We’ve made significant improvements to the way people can refine searches by color We’ve seen our customers add rich content types to their sites, and we’ve expanded our site search to incorporate this content – in particular, video and blogs. We’ve seen the increased adoption of ratings and reviews by our e-commerce customers, and the integration of that information into search.

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

When your customers are browsing through dozens of search results – for instance, if they’re searching a general category instead of a specific item – the task of viewing each product can be tedious. If shoppers need to click on every result to get a better look at products and accompanying information to figure out which one to buy, it can be time-consuming and cumbersome.

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.

A recent article in Internet Retailer notes that speed sells on ecommerce sites. At the same time, consumers want more rich features that can, consequently, slow down their sites’ performance if not implemented correctly. I’m excited to introduce our new Learning Search with AJAX, which addresses both of these issues.

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.