Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems explains how to use site search to improve your SEO rankings and paid search campaigns.

If you’re like most digital marketers, you probably don’t realize the hidden treasure in your possession that can improve your search marketing, email marketing and other campaigns, and create a more meaningful online customer experience.  Yet the little white box on your web site – the search box – can mean so much more than simply helping people find products and information on your site.  When used appropriately, your site search solution can help deliver more targeted messages to your customers and result in an improved online experience for them (which improves the bottom line for you).

Below are 5 tips you can use to improve the effectiveness of your site search to improve your marketing efforts and deliver a better customer experience online.

1. Improve the relevance: Examine your search logs and check that you’re delivering relevant results. Start with the most popular search terms. A great way of doing this is to examine what results people are clicking on and bringing the results people click on the most to the top. Relevance is the single most important aspect of site search.
2. Connect search to customer ratings and reviews: Your online visitors love to read the opinions of others. Make it simple for site visitors to sort through these reviews based on their own likes and dislikes. Another customer of ours, an online tea retailer, has configured its site search so that shoppers can narrow the search results to see items with reviews based on similar preferences (like full-bodied teas, or ones with good aromas). The result: a refined, more relevant group of items in the search results, making it even easier for shoppers to find the right products.
3. Leverage site search data for more successful SEO and paid search campaigns: It can be a huge struggle to figure out which search terms will generate the most referrals from search engine traffic, or will create the best paid search efforts. However, there’s a gold mine of information in your site search system – including “long tail” terms that aren’t used as often but which convert much higher than more commonly used search terms. The site search terms show the language that your visitors use on your site – they’re use similar language when they’re search the whole web and you should be optimizing and buying keywords based on this Shoppers’ most commonly used keywords might be different than what you’d expect – or they might change at various times of the year without you realizing it.
4. Index all your content: Many ecommerce sites have a lot of content beyond their products, such as blogs, guides, forums and faq’s. All of this should be indexed and should be accessible through your site search.
5. Bring rich content into the search: Video is appearing on more and more company web sites.  Make it easier for shoppers to find this rich content by incorporating them in search results – for instance, create a video icon that lets searchers know that there’s a related video to view, or show the videos in a section of the search results. 

Shaun Ryan is CEO of SLI Systems, a provider of hosted search solutions that learn from the people who use them to continually improve relevance of results. Shaun can be reached at shaun.ryan@sli-systems.com or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/shaunryan.