Are your searchers getting lost?
‘I do not search. I find,’ said Pablo Picasso – but that was before the internet.
Making your website search-friendly is crucial to achieving its selling and marketing potential. But it’s a tricky thing to get right, not least because most visitors to your site are unskilled at searching effectively for what they want.
For example, most people stick to two or three keywords. If they get poor or misleading results, they are likely to get frustrated and leave the site altogether to look elsewhere.
In effect, you will be directing promising leads to your competitors’ sites.
To illustrate how basic the variations in efficiency can be, we put the search engines at five well known Australian sites to a simple test. The selected sites were DStore (www.dstore.com.au/), Dick Smith (www.dicksmith.com.au), Retravision (www.retravision.com.au), Harris Technology (www.ht.com.au) and the Trading Post (www.tradingpost.com.au). They all sell notebook computers or have advertisements for people who do.
At each site we entered two queries: ‘notebook’ and ‘note book’ (without the quotes). You might expect that the two very similar versions of what must be a common search term for these companies would return similar results in each case, but only the Dick Smith website did. See below for the variations at the other sites.
One step ahead
The solution is to stay one step ahead by analysing what your site visitors are searching for and the results. For this you need to monitor your user’s search queries with a web analytics tool such as ClickTracks or Urchin. By extracting lists of the keywords your visitors use, you can improve your results by adding more content and changing the way your search engine lists results for these queries.
Even better, Google has now made its Google Mini and Google Search Appliance available in Australia. The company’s small army of PhDs set their collective minds to finding the best alternative terms for searches in Google’s massive database, and this is the result. With prices starting at $4,700 (AUD, ex GST), it’s an attractive alternative to developing an in-house application that does a far inferior job.
If you would like a free assessment of your search engine, further information on this article or Google’s search technology, please contact us to make an appointment.
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