By now, you probably know the importance of appropriate landing pages for a paid search ad. If you don’t, here it is in one word; Outrider’s motto…RELEVANCE. Searchers do not want to spend time crawling through your site to find what they’re looking for.
My real beef is with a rather large retailer who has yet to grasp the importance of search relevance within their site. I’m guessing their site creator was more interested on how it looks than on the user experience. Case in point, I was looking for a raincoat for my dog Clifford (he might be spoiled) and used the keywords ‘dog raincoat.’ They were partially correct when they gave me a result featuring a children’s raincoat with dogs on it. They completely missed the boat by not showing their dog clothing section which had coats, but not raincoats. The boat was halfway across the ocean when they showed Google paid search results at the bottom of the page showing exactly what I was looking for at the low price of $12.99. They successfully directed me to where I wanted to go, but on someone else’s site.
Relevant Internal Search Results Matter
I endured another poor user experience with another large branded site that instead of returning results based on my search, it gave me tips on how to search within their site. I already know how to search; they should be adaptive to how I find things, not the other way around. Lisa Young, GroupM’s Organic Search Manager suggests treating your in-site search engine as you would a Google or Yahoo! Search campaign. She goes on to say “You must have a well-organized site structure and pages must be tagged well for them to be a good match to the user’s search.” The point to all of this it that websites should try to create an experience similar to what users would expect to find when using an external search engine. Along with Lisa’s advice, Samantha Gonzales of Invesp Consulting, which focuses on conversion rate optimization, offers some great tips for internal search within retail sites:
- Study Habits
- Offer Help
- Refine Your Catalog
- Include More Than Just Inventory
- Show Descriptive Results
- Bank on “No Results”
If either of these sites had followed some of these “golden rules” I would have had a good user experience and my dog Clifford would be sporting a new raincoat from a big brand rather than the one my mom found at a local craft fair.
For more information about Samantha Gonzales visit the Invesp Consulting blog.
