Is Your Search Providing Site Visitors Successful Results?
It is very interesting to compare the results of site visits between visitors that search the site and those that browse the categories. We looked at 16 different WebIQ projects with over 90,000 unique visitors. In those projects, 65% of site visitors preferred navigation browsing vs. 35% that preferred searching - almost a 2 to 1 ratio. More importantly, the browsers invariably report higher visit success rates. In these projects, browsers reported a visit success rate of 56% while searchers were only 43% successful. There is good news and bad news here. The bad news is that your search function is probably causing problems for your site. The good news is that if you take some steps to improve it you can clearly differentiate yourself from your competitors.
Here’s what site visitors complain about with search:
- Too many search results - “Too many results. Not relevant for my requirements. Don’t have the time right now to sort through them all.”
- Too few search results - “When I searched I got too few results and none of the results really had the information I was looking for.”
- No search functionality or it was well hidden - “I wanted to use the search on the site but could never find it. I must have missed it somehow. Who doesn’t have search these days? When visiting sites I use search first and if unsuccessful just try to find what I am looking for on my own.”
Here is what we recommend to solve these problems:
- Too many search results - Make sure you are and’ing search terms together in the search logic rather than or’ing them together. If a visitor searches on “coffee pots” that’s what they expect to get back. They do not expect search results with different brands of coffee and a lot of flower pots. We have seen sites where a search on “coffee pots” might return 150 results; then the visitor searches on “electric coffee pots” and they now have 500 results because the engine picked up an additional 350 “electric items”.
- Too few search results - This is usually caused by either (1) improper meta tagging of products/information or (2) the search engine doesn’t do a good job of fuzzy searching - allowing for misspellings or typos.
For example, a search for “binoculers” on yahoo shopping yields the following results:
While the same search on Crutchfield.com yields:
Yahoo protects the shopper from their inability to spell the word correctly; Crutchfield does not.
- No search functionality or it was well hidden - Clearly, sites with a lot of products and/or information should provide keyword search capability. The location and esign of the search field is important. Our recommendation: locate it at the top of the page but not the very top - just below the main menus or tabs. The field itself should be white and empty and the word “Search” should clearly stand out.
Crutchfield does a good job:
While Vonage does not:
If you would like some ideas on how to measure the effectiveness of search on your site give us a call. We have customers that are measuring search and improving its effectiveness as an ongoing process.
Sharon Johnson
WebIQ Project Manager