A new application developed by CableOrganizer.com is harnessing what the site knows of visitors’ web search behavior – specifically, what keyword a visitor typed into a web search to pull up the CableOrganizer.com listing that delivered the visitor to the site – to tap into its site search function and get visitors to the right landing page, chief operating officer Paul Holstein tells Internet Retailer.
“We are personalizing the landing page even off organic search, using site search, and we are able to present results that are more likely to meet your needs,” he says.
While about 70% of CableOrganizer.com’s customers arrive at the site via web search, mostly from Google, natural search doesn’t always send web searchers to exactly the place on the site that has what they’re looking for, Holstein explains.
For example, consumers who did a web search on “label printer” and clicked on CableOrganizer.com's listing in the results would be delivered to the site’s home page, which doesn’t feature that product. “So people were bouncing out,” Holstein says. “For some reason, my home page had higher rankings for “label printer” than the correct landing page did. But I can’t control Google’s organic search – it’s going to send people wherever it’s going to send them. “
While web search didn’t always work as Holstein wanted it to, CableOrganizer.com’s Learning Search site search function from SLI Systems Inc. was effective at getting visitors who used the search box to the right products on the site once they arrived.
Why couldn’t web search's power to expose the site to a huge online audience be combined with SLI’s ability to get searchers to exactly the right spot on it? In July, after six months of development, CableOrganizer.com was ready to test an answer to that question. It wrote a Javascript that immediately captures the web searcher's referring domain along with the keyword the web searcher typed to pull up CableOrganizer.com's listing. That Javascript then calls on the site’s search function, and runs the information through it.
The result is that the site search function intervenes to send the searcher to what it, rather than the web search engine’s algorithm, deems the most relevant landing page on the site. The data transfer that makes it all happen occurs instantly, in the second between when a web searcher clicks on the CableOrganizer.com listing in web search results and when he’s delivered to the site.
CableOrganizer.com has patented its innovation and intends to make it available for sale in the future. In the meantime, on its own site, the feature has tripled traffic. Dan Shields, e-commerce initiatives manager, says traffic has risen in part as a function of indexing: SLI indexes the content on Cableorganizer.com by increments as searches on the site accumulate: more searches equal more indexing.
Because the SLI function is running more searches on the site, as each click from a web search now counts toward reaching those incremental totals that trigger indexing -- along with regular searches on the site that don’t originate as a web search -- SLI is indexing content on CableOrganzier.com more frequently. Search engine spiders read the frequent indexing as fresh content, a factor that pushes CableOrganizer.com’s listings higher up in natural search. That, in turn, leads more web searchers to see and click on those listings.
“We are performing three times as many SLI searches, which means three times as many indexes per cycle, so we are bringing our traffic up and in the process bringing in more visitors, who are converting at a higher rate,” Shields says.
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