Great website search coupled with a high quality user experience will deliver an enormously positive impact on sales and on the overall success of online initiatives. An integrated search results page provides a major marketing opportunity to promote products, highlight offers and deliver key messages.
Search is a powerful marketing tool
The latest website and search technology provides significant opportunities to make website search a powerful sales and marketing tool, delivering high quality results and targeting visitors with important marketing messages when a search query is submitted.
If the website visitor cannot quickly find the product or information they require, they will go back to Google or Bing and visit another website.
Integrated search results
An integrated search results page, makes search Usability a priority and presents high quality search results on a page that does more than simply list search results. For example, an integrated search results page can:
- Present high quality results in response to a query
- Promote products
- Deliver key marketing messages
- Highlight latest offers
- Provide latest news
- List more detailed product information
Visitor's search expectations
Visitors have strong expectations on how website search should work and on the type and quality of the results returned when a query is submitted.
As visitors become more web search savvy, they are inputting ever more complex multi word search queries in order to more quickly find the product they want or obtain the information they need.
Website search quality
Research shows that the satisfaction rating for people using external search engines to find products and information (for example, Google) was good. On the other hand, the satisfaction rating for people using website search engines was poor.
Yet the quality of search on a website should be significantly better than that experienced when using Google or Bing or Yahoo. The website content being searched is limited, there are no competitors fighting for ranking position and the website search engine can be tuned to deliver high quality results.
Unfortunately, in many cases, website search is a small box tucked away in a corner, generally ignored by visitors. When a query is typed in, it delivers poor quality results on a not very attractive results page and is often of limited value to online sales and marketing.
The sales and marketing opportunity is lost as visitors go back to Google and try a competitor's website where products and information is easier to find.
Plenty to think about. If you would like more information then click on the link to contact us
