Unleash Your Shopping Cart – Increase Conversions & Exposure!

Contributing Writer: Sabine Sharp – Glendale Designs

Every website project has some common denominators that should be considered during the design / development phase:

• The layout & design should be easy on the eyes and instill credibility
• Simple navigation that lets customers maneuver through your site with ease
• The site foundation should be constructed using best Search Engine Optimization (SEO) practice.
• Products – are presented allowing your customer to:
• View products, pricing & options (in multiple views and/or zoom if applicable)
• Read product descriptions & details.
• View customer reviews
• Add the item to the cart and check out.

If you have applied the basics above, receive traffic and are still wondering: “Why is my site not converting?”, then most likely your customers are not finding the product they are looking for fast enough.

Let’s do an exercise:

Let’s pretend you sell silk flower arrangements. Type the key phrase “silk flower arrangements” into Google, Yahoo or Bing, just like a potential site visitor would do in hopes to find your product. It is not uncommon for a customer to select one of the top sites listed such as silkflowers.net. If they end up on your home page, as in our example, they will have to figure out where to go next to locate the item they are looking for.

Here is where you may be running into a problem – you set up your site on what YOU felt was the best way to navigate and shop. But not every customer shops and thinks like you do! Or knows your product like you do. What is ONE thing every customer is conditioned to do? ….. Search! They already did it to get to your site through the search engine – they should be able to continue doing it once they get to your site!

Silkflowers is using SearchSpring, which can be used with Miva Merchant, Magento, osCommerce, Zen Cart, X-Cart, WP e-commerce, Volusion or just about every shopping cart out there and is Very Powerful!

Fast Search: What we are looking for is a “table centerpiece” which is not one of the main categories. So let’s do a “search” for it.

As you can see in the image above, all available centerpieces are presented and you can now narrow your search down via faceting (or, as I call it – you can drill down…). In our example you can select; Category, Type, Color, Height, Length, Width and Price.

Miss spelling? Not a problem – SearchSpring provides you with a “Did you mean?” suggestion.

SearchSpring’s powerful features also include: Fuzzy Search, Auto Complete, Related Searches, as well as Synonyms. Synonyms help to fill gaps between your customers search queries and the keywords associated with your products and other searchable content.

SearchSpring offers a key SEO feature, keywords that your customers are searching for! As they put it:

“SearchSpring dynamically creates a most popular searched keyword search cloud as an “up and coming” search cloud. In addition to the search clouds, our system will create an “a-z” listing of the most popular searched keywords and an XML sitemap. These links are optimized for search engine friendliness and lead to landing pages specific to the keyword.

A search cloud appears on your website, and is a large list of words. Each word is a link, and they are all different sizes. Each word is something that someone searched for when they came to your website. If a lot of people search for a certain word, then that word will appear bigger in the cloud.

One of the best benefits of a search cloud is that it gives you more internal links to the pages that are important on your site. And it uses the “right” anchor text, because it uses the anchor text that people are already searching for. This will help with search engine rankings, because it adds more links to your pages, with the correct anchor text.”

Shoppers who use your site search will make up almost 50% of your total sales. They convert 3X higher than shoppers who only browse. Please contact us so we can schedule a live demo on how you can take advantage of this unique tool. To top everything off, the friendly admin panel will allow you to acquire important information so you can continue to increase conversions and sales.