I feel the SERPs move: Optimizing for site search

I’ve looked at so many search engine results pages I can tell at a glance whether a query is competitive. There are subtle signals of competitiveness that stand out like sore thumbs after you have seen them thousands of times. People know to look at the title tags and URLs, but there is something about competitive copywriting that almost ensures a snippet will be displayed. There is also something about the way a page title looks that tells you whether an experienced marketer wrote it or someone who is just desperate to get some rankings.

Looking beyond the front page of a search result also tells you something about the depth of the competition. You feel the rhythm of true search engine optimization only after you scroll through 10 pages of natural, unoptimized content that is relevant to the query. Competition occurs regardless of whether you optimize your pages or not. Competition occurs regardless of whether you build links or not.

A well-positioned Web site doesn’t need search engines. It will bring in traffic from other sources. Maybe a manufacturer brands its URL on its packaging. Maybe a popular radio or television commercial helps people remember a URL. Maybe there is a great marketing push going on through mail, email, or some other channel.

Web site promotion is not just about search engine optimization. Some companies eschew SEO altogether and rely solely on PPC advertising campaigns. Building traffic to the Web site is just the first step, though. Once you get people to your site, after you convert them, you want them to look around some more and come back often. You want them to refer people to your site.

Onsite search enhances visitor conversions and yet only 59% of ecommerce sites today implement site search. While the Aberdeen Group estimates that 98% of etailers will employ site search by the end of 2009, that’s a long way off for some companies. They are losing out on valuable trend data by not implementing some sort of site search immediately.

Combining site search functionality with content creates a resource that people use the same way they use Yahoo! or Google. Hewlett-Packard’s onsite search resolves tens of millions of queries per month. Amazon and eBay are also treated like search engines by users who frequently use them for research and informational queries (I have used both etailers ONLY for informational queries for years in addition to my consumer-generated searches).

Let’s say that large etailer sites that offer search capability are the tip of the iceberg. Every month billions of queries are performed through site search tools — these are the dark queries of hidden search, the search results pages no one optimizes for. And when I say no one, I mean no one — not even the etailers. For example, if I want to find HP laptop pricing I get anything BUT “hp laptop pricing”. I have to search through many pages, possibly dozens or hundreds of pages of results, to find a simple price chart (assuming it exists).

Amazon, eBay, Barnes and Noble, Wal-Mart, Target — I can pick on them all. Many of these large companies, like HP, have in-house SEO teams and in-house search managers. And yet they don’t optimize their own product and information pages to respond well to consumer queries. I can get better information from a third-party site that creates a pricing table for me and hits the top of the search results in a standard search engine.

So even in a world where you don’t need search engines like Yahoo! and Google — because you’re Dell, or Amazon, or HP — search is a vital marketing asset that people look to for help. Dell and HP need to show me pricing when I search their sites for pricing. It’s a simple request, but their inventories are huge and their search tools are not dealing with optimized pages. I can actually learn more about Dell’s laptop pricing from Google’s search of Dell’s site than from Dell’s own on-site search tool. But I’m an informed searcher who thinks to restrict my off-site search to the Dell site. How many people do that?

Competitiveness, like trust and relevance, begins at home. You can hone your search optimization skills by managing your own on-site search. Extend that out to a multi-site search. Learn to anticipate what people want by watching the queries run against your site. Make your content relevant to your own on-site queries so that the most relevant pages apepar first in your on-site search.

Because Xenite.Org is not a commercial site, I rely upon external search engines to provide me with tools for site search. Currently, we’re still using Google to search Xenite.Org but I have used many other search services through the years, including Yahoo!, Ask, and other less well-known search engines. On-site search is the first place you should be developing your optimization strategies. If you cannot point people toward the right content in your own site, how can you hope to help them when you’re competing with other sites?

Using site search to study how your own content fares in search results — when the only competition you have to worry about is your own content — helps you look at search results pages in a new way. You can relax and ask yourself, “Did I make this page look more relevant because of links or because of content?” You know what you do with your Web site. Your Web site is a universe where you eliminate what other people do with their sites and what other people search for. You can test your optimization against itself.

As a site search manager you control the tool that is used. You may be able to influence the ranking algorithm (or not). You may be able to restrict the content that is available (or not). You may be able to do things you cannot do with standard search. As you revise your site search implementation you strengthen your visitors’ ability to navigate through your site. You increase the value of your site’s brand because people now have a resource that acts independently of the page content.

Site search is the etailer’s faithful sidekick. If cannot brand for every product and part number, you can surely draw people in through other avenues and give them compelling access to your content once they are present. How prominent you make your site search is critical, too. Currently, Xenite’s site search is not a prominent part of our navigation system. By devaluing its importance I have been able to gauge how much people rely on the tool — that is, how much people seek the search tool even when they have to follow links to get to it.

Thousands of queries have been performed across the tool in its present form. That indicates how much people want to use search for navigation. And I can advise people on what to search for, helping them to find specific content the way I want them to find it — which ultimately helps me to shape my off-site SEO strategies. If I cannot break into one query, I can create another. As an example, prior to this blog’s creation people did not search (in any great volume) for “seo theory”. This blog now receives search referrals almost every day for “seo theory”.

Search engines are your tools, not simply because you can optimize for Google and Yahoo! but because you can use them to enhance your user experience, to improve your marketing resources, and to build brand value. SEO is not just about fixing up Web pages so they rank well in search engines. It’s also about learning how to manage search from the provider’s side so that you can help people find what they are looking for.