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.