GPI 164 – Track your visitors’ attempted ‘search terms’ — if they are missing, add them!

Do you record every term that is being searched on your website? If not, why not? You would think that a company which has spent a lot of money designing a website would keep track of all of the terms that customers are entering, but they do not.

You spend lots of money, fall short and push them away for good. You spend tremendous amounts of money to have customers come to your website and hope they will search for something, then you disappoint them with “No Results”. You do not even give them some suggestions. You wonder why they quit searching, hit the ‘back’ key and exit out, never to return.

You must learn from your market. Your customers are always right because they have the money. Regardless of whether you like their words, phrases, slang or other versions of the English language currently used, it is the method your customers use to describe what they are willing to pay for, so learn all of them.

Remember these points for monitoring your search function:

Record all entries from the public: Record all visitor search entries, failed or successful. Record every term typed into your website. This is what your customers want to search. Whether it matches your perception of the market is irrelevant. You need to answer their questions, so monitor what they ask. Use the list that you accumulate every day to populate your results dictionary.
Run statistics on the results continuously: Notice ‘frequently used’ terms searched for on your website to consider using in your site’s text. For frequent terms, you may need to rewrite your text or copy on your website to include them in order to direct your customers to your specific and relevant content. Maybe your customers refer to your product or service with different words or terms? If so, find out now; you are losing sales because they do not hear the right words.
Always provide a ‘hint’ or ‘suggestion’: Your goal is to eliminate visitors’ failed searches. Your number one goal for your website search engine is to eliminate ‘no results’ or reduce the possibility for your potential customer to get nothing when he is searching. You need to populate your search engine database as much as possible in order for the customer to get a plentiful and informative list of results.
Include slang, common misspellings – think like your customer: Include misspellings to be helpful. Regardless of the way your customers misspell your terms, enter the misspelled terms in order to redirect them to the correct area of interest. Include every possibility of misspelled key words in order to give the potential customer some successful search results.
Avoid ‘No Results Found’: Remember that the worst thing your search engine can return to the customer is ‘No Results Found’. Customers either think your website is deficient, your website search engine is useless, or even worse, your company either does not sell the items he wants, your company does not have the experience he is looking for, or he finds it easier to explore another company in his Google search. You better come up with something to keep his attention or you risk pushing him to the next search result never to return.
Research frequent unknown terms: Frequent unfamiliar words entered on your search engine means you do not know your market. Every searched term that is entered into your search engine on your website is your customer talking to you. If you do not recognize the terms entered, you have problems understanding your market. You are out of touch and now should realize this may be why you are failing to reach new customers. You are either behind the market or your website is not clear in explaining what you do or what you offer to sell.
Always provide help and a reason to return to the visitor: Help customers even if you must occasionally give them away to competitors. Even if you must redirect a customer to other companies to help him out, try to give him results from his direct search efforts. He came to your website so make sure to give him a reason to return. If he gets nothing repeatedly when he uses your search engine, there is no reason for him to return to your website since it continuously disappoints him. Do not fail the visitor.