One of the most overlooked aspects of ecommerce sites is the search experience your site visitors encounter. People have been trained to enter keywords to find anything quickly by the search engines since the late 90’s from AOL to Google. Miva Merchant’s ecommerce software includes basic search functionality so every store front can provide search to visitors. Beyond the default search there are many site search solutions from modules to hosted services that integrate nicely into a Miva Merchant store providing advanced search functionality. Some of the internal site search tools available will even help with your SEO campaign by automatically optimizing your site for customer search phrases.
SearchSpring is one of the more advanced site search solutions and powers the search on MivaCentral.com, the store for modules to Miva Merchant. If you search on MivaCentral.com you can see SearchSpring in action but you might miss exactly what the search tool does since it integrates so cleanly into the rest of the site. The first priority of your search tool should be to help prospective customers find the right product as quickly as possible. Miva Central accomplishes this via SearchSpring by offering search query auto-completion, suggesting similar searches, providing navigation to narrow search results, showing searches for keyword synonyms and creating a breadcrumb trail to track progress.
Organic search traffic to Miva Central has increased since implementing SearchSpring from the extra pages generated by SearchSpring for the search engines to index. Three features of SearchSpring really boost the SEO potential of your site by creating search friendly pages based on visitor search phrases. First you get a unique page created with the search results for all your top searches; each of these is a new page for the search engines. You also get a custom page created for each related search automatically. In addition, you get a sitemap of the top searches for the search engines to index which you can also upload via webmaster tools. Finally the reporting in SearchSpring gives you insight into how much organic traffic you are getting from the search engines and how often the search engines are indexing your site; both which are great indicators for any SEO campaign.
Improving the customer experience, especially via search, almost always increases the conversion rate for your store. Also by having additional search friendly pages you will usually increase the amount of organic traffic from search engines. Both of these combined should yield higher revenue for your ecommerce site. Most store owners are thrilled just by the increased traffic, conversion rate and sales; however more treasure exists including a failed searches report that tells you what keyword phrases customers search for and no results are returned. You can use this data to map a failed search phrase to appropriate results, get ideas for expanding your product line, redirect to a specific page or just to find out what customers are looking for but not finding so you can add to the site if appropriate.
Site search is only one part of your online store but can have drastic impacts on the customer experience and sales. Find out how easy (or hard) it is to find something on your store this holiday by asking a friend or relative to use your site for a few minutes. Ask them to search for something and watch how they interact. Just watch without talking or guiding your volunteer to see how they use your site; you may be surprised with what you observe. Take a test drive around MivaCentral.com to get some ideas on how your site search could improve. Do you see something you would improve on MivaCentral.com? If so leave a comment below.
For more information on SearchSpring or to schedule an online demonstration, visit https://www.searchspring.net or call 719-594-4595.
