The biggest element to success with respect to e-commerce is always having a way in which your customers can find what they wish to buy. Without a way for this to occur, your shoppers will inevitably take their business elsewhere. When a shopper can perform a quick search of your site through Google directly through your site, they are more likely to buy when they find the item in question because it was a specific request. Many people chalk up this occurrence to fate and don’t act upon fixing the problem. Fortunately, there is a way to correct this and determine what people are searching for that you currently don’t have or don’t have indexed. We’ll explain below how to do this.

The Tools

You obviously already are using Google Analytics to figure out all sorts of things about your traffic and shoppers, right? If not, shame on you! There are numerous features in Google Analytics that can prove useful, and one of them is the Site Search function. This feature on its own will provide you with plenty of information about valid search results on your site, but by default, will not show you searches that have returned no results. For this, we’ll need to create macros within the utility to get it to display this information properly. For a total walkthrough of how to do this, please visit Van Patten Media.

Why This Is Important

When users are pinging your website for products or information about products, it can be frustrating for them not to find what they need. On your end, while it may be frustrating to know that you cannot stock every possible product imaginable, it is even more frustrating to figure out that a product you do have is not showing up in search. This is more common than you would think. You could be losing considerable business and without the method used above enabled on your Analytics account, you’ll never know exactly how much business you are losing! We become so obsessed with what the default metrics tell us that we often forget about the shadow figures that aren’t clear-cut.

How to Correct These Woes

While it’s good to know which searches and products are yielding no results when users are pinging your website, it is more important to figure out how best to solve this issue. This may differ depending on the content management solution that you are using for your website. One way to solve this is to ensure that the search results in questions are becoming incorporated into the pages of each product. This will not only propagate the correlation on your website, but will help with external search results as well. Another way to further connect your website and search to its products is to make sure that you are using tags. If you do not want the tags appearing on each product page, they can be disabled, but allowing for tags to exist between like products (with the tag categories being featured somewhere on the website for easy reference) is generally a good idea.