E-business Coach Commerce

Site search narrows choices when presenting matching products

"Choice" as a concept is appealing. Too many choices can be overwhelming. In the context of an e-commerce shopping experience, particularly when searching a site's catalog by keyword, just a few choices can be enough. A new update to the site search feature of Total Blue System continues the trend started in August to deliver more targeted search results:

What's new today is that results will get more targeted than before. This comes about because your site's product detail page, where the bulk of product information and the "add to cart" button lives, will now exclude certain information from being indexed by the site search spider. (We've explained elsewhere that the site search is powered by Google's search appliance device, so it's very similar to how a normal search engine approaches the indexing process.)

Specifically, there's a new exclusion of related products listed on product detail pages (identified by the heading "You might also like" or "May we suggest") from your site search index. Once again we have taken steps to reduce the number of low value hits returned by a search, providing fewer, better, targeted results for your shopper.

Note that this change, like any change that affects how your site is indexed, will go into effect over time as your product detail pages are re-indexed by the search device.

Site search improved: more targeted results, fresher index

Total Blue System uses a dedicated search "appliance" to provide site search services to shoppers at your e-commerce site. Now we've upgraded this device, part of our pre-Christmas preparations. Here's the first installment of what's new and improved:

• The indexing of your site's pages now excludes non-relevant page content. Specifically, we now exclude the page's header and footer information from the index. This commonly means navigation menus present on every page. As pages are re-indexed, common information on all the pages will no longer be included in the search index for your site and so will not match search queries containing these terms. For example, if you have a widgets category, a customer search for a widget will no longer return all pages that have the widgets category in the side bar. The only pages that will be returned are those that include widget in the content that is unique to the page. This is important to REDUCE the number of search results, delivering a more relevant, targeted set of choices to the shopper.
  

• Your web catalog, extending to every single page on your website, is now being spidered in what's called default continuous indexing mode. With the previous device, indexing was a scheduled event a couple times per week that had to be timed to ensure no negative performance impact on sites. The new device indexes continuously, at a conservative rate, providing always up-to-date indexes while imposing no perceptible performance penalty on your site. Just remember, if you've added a new product to your catalog today, it might not be visible in the search index until tomorrow.
  
• We have taken the opportunity of rewriting the search functionality in Ruby on Rails, providing all the usual attendant benefits: faster performance, greater stability, improved security and easier future enhancement. It's the last benefit to that list that may most interest our clients: future enhancement. A follow-up post in the coming week will describe what's next.
  

As background, this appliance is a server sold and supported by Google and incorporates much of the same search technology used on Google.com for web search. We've integrated the appliance tightly with Total Blue System so it appears seamless to your shoppers: they never know the difference. Aside from Google's acclaimed relevance and accuracy, we like the fact that what makes for a highly visible page on google.com will be similar in its results on your own site's search. So if you're wondering why you're seeing a certain search result for a keyword on your own site, the reason is going to be very similar to why you'd see it ranking highly on google.com.

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META descriptions now visible in your own site's search results

The META description tags for your website catalog just got more important. We've long encouraged e-commerce merchants to take care in crafting compelling META tags, as they are prominently displayed under the link to your site whenever you appear on search engine results pages (SERP's) on Google and other search engines. Now those same compelling descriptions (under 155 characters) can appear on your own site's keyword search results page.

When a shopper searches by keyword on your site using Total Blue System's built-in search function, a page snippet is included in the search results for each match. By default this snippet is the first couple of lines of text from the body of the page. However, for many pages this text does not provide the shopper with the best possible sense of what information he or she can expect to find upon clicking through to that page. It'd be better if that snippet was made up of the META description tag.

Now it is. Recently we updated Total Blue System's site search to return snippets containing the page description found in the meta description tag, if present, on a page. This tag appears in the head section of the page html and takes the form

<meta name="description" content="page description here" />

For many pages on your Total Blue-powered ecommerce site, the page description that appears in this tag can be specified in your site's web-based Admin Area. For example, when editing products within the Catalog module's Admin Area, you specify this text in the "HTML Meta Description" text area on the "Search Friendly" tab on the product edit page.

So now you've got one more reason to make time for writing great META description tags.

Narrow search results by category, emphasize products

What does a shopper see when she searches your site by keyword? Products are what you want to emphasize, of course. But narrowing the search by product category can be even more useful to your shopper. A category page can be the best way to direct your shopper along her path to purchase.

Now the search results page template places the top 10 product category matches (out of the top 100 results) into the topmost area of the page, under the heading: "Narrow your search for "[keywords]" by browsing categories that match:

Products displaying photo, name, and price follow beneath the category section of the page. In the prior version of this template, the results displayed on any given page were limited to 15, and then later to 25. Now there's up to 100 search results on the page, with potentially all 100 being products -- depending on the keyword search of course.

We've recently updated our thinking about the desirability of scrolling, and how to balance between scrolling down the page, and clicking through to a next or previous page. Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com has persuaded us that shoppers can more easily isolate the one product they are seeking when viewing many products on a page, and scrolling up and down. Compare this with clicking through to 3, 4, or 5 pages of search results, where there may be one or two products on each page that catches the shoppers eye. When more products are all on the same page, the shopper can perform a quicker visual scan, and either enter a new keyword to start a better search, or open product links in new tabs within the browser.

Here's an example of a search that shows the newly updated sections of the search results template:  categories, products, site search (articles, FAQ's, misc pages), and a new 'still looking?' section.

Thanks to Tim and the feedback of our clients on this topic. We'll be monitoring the "sales index" of this new page template within Google Analytics to check actual performance...