818 – Make your website search better: Tom talks Improving Search Part 2

Episode 818 – Improving Search Part 2
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 818 of Screw the Commute podcast. This is a second part of a two part series on improving search on both Google and on your website. Episode 817 was the first part on improving when you're searching to make yourself more efficient, and this one is on your site. Can people find the things that they want easily? Okay, we'll get to that in a minute. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com the longest running, most successful, most unique ever in the field of internet and digital marketing. Check it out at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and make sure you pick up a copy of our automation ebook. It's screwthecommute.com/automatefree.

[00:01:10] All right, let's get to it. All right. So the search on your site, it needs to to send people to what they ultimately want in a in a hurry. You don't want to make them, you know, make them sad because oh there's no search results or that wasn't what I was looking for. Yeah, of course that's going to happen. But you want to reduce that as much as possible for sure. And they're not going to type in the perfect query to match your website. Hardly ever. So that's what we're going to talk about today, how you can help them to get to what they're looking for. Then another thing you know that's in it for you, besides more sales and happy visitors, is that if you check to see and keep track of what people are searching for on your site, then you can do more of that and have more things that people are actually looking for.

[00:02:03] It matches what your visitors want. See? All right, now I got to tell you, I'm standing up to do this podcast because I can't sit down. I had a back injury and so I know I'm late on this podcast at all, but if I mess up a little bit, it's probably the drugs that put me on. Okay okay. So let's see here. So basically it's going to be a bunch of tips for you. And then where to go to look to to fix this kind of stuff if you're having problems on your site. And I got to admit I've been lax on this. I did it really heavily years ago, but I haven't filled with it much lately. So I'm going to go back and improve my search on my site too. Okay, so here's some random bunch of random tips. You'll probably want to listen to this episode again. Or, you know, check the show notes again. This is episode 818. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, 818 for this one and 817 was the one on when you're searching so you can find stuff better.

[00:03:08] Okay, so here's some random tips. Leave the search terms in the search box when somebody searches, because sometimes they come back to and they don't want to have to retype the same exact search again. You know, they just want to change a word or move it a little bit. And then if it's empty, when they go back to the search box. Now, you made a mad and they probably discussed it and then go somewhere else. Use auto suggest and recommended search terms to help people define their searches. See, because they might be thinking something is called X and you call it Y on your site, and if they type X, then they disappear because your your box comes up and says, well, not not found. So you got to help them with suggestions of what you really do have and typos. Everybody makes typos. In fact, there is going to be a crazy term. I'm going to tell you a little bit later about what you can do when things sound the same. And but they're spelled differently. So you're you need to look at the relevance and of what they're trying to find. And your search thing has to be smart enough to say, oh, that's this other thing. We'll show it to them. And then you want to have filters to, to take them exactly to where they want to go.

[00:04:29] So if they have a certain color of something that you handle well, if they put that color in the search term, you shouldn't just send them to the whole array of colors. You should send them to that exact color. And then they can see there's other colors available, but you don't want to force them to search, search, search when they told you exactly what they wanted. Now here's some tips for when they they get to the results page. And you definitely don't want no results coming up. You always want to give them something, and you can put banners and other products and show them what else you have, even if you didn't have exactly what they. Want it, that they might buy something and say, oh, I didn't know you carried that. And then they'll click on that and and you win. Another thing you can do is bold or highlight the search terms that they used on the results page, so that it takes them right to it. I know I've searched for stuff. I said, okay, my name is on this page, this 3000 5000 word article. Where is it? You know, so so you can use control F if you're smart internet searcher in your browser. But a lot of people don't know that. So bold or highlight the the things they were typing. And the results page can really mess you up if it comes up repeatedly with not found.

[00:05:49] And even if people know absolutely that you have the product on your site and your results page shows nothing, they're leaving and they're going to go find it somewhere else where they can easily find it. Okay. Another thing is sometimes your search on your website, and I'm going to talk about WordPress a little bit later. Sometimes it searches the metadata behind the scenes and doesn't search your actual content. So make sure that it's actually searching what you have named things and all that. Of course, like I said, make suggestions, come up when they're when they start to type, and you can experiment with language around the search box. And, you know, a lot of times all I see, you know, you got to hunt around for a little circle. And if you're not a savvy internet user, you don't even know that's a search box. And you don't click on it so you can put, you know, search for products here, some type of text around there. So make sure that they know, hey, this is where you can I can search. Now put your search box at the top of the page and you can test different place. You can have it more than one place, but make sure it's right at the top. That's pretty standard. Make sure it's large and distinctive so people don't have to search around for it.

[00:07:04] When you're working and preparing, you're working with your search function of your site. Don't just put the names of your products, put keywords that people would be looking for that need your products. Just like anything I've been harping on since episode one of this, I don't know, 4 or 5 years ago. Keywords are the key to everything. People still use words, so make sure that the keywords that apply to your products, besides just the name of your products, are there and are searchable. And of course, typos and misspellings. You got to be able to handle them and recognize synonyms and alternative terms. This brings up the topic of stemming. That's where the endings are removed from the beginnings of words. And here's an example. Here's four different words seducing, seduced, seduction, and seduce. The second one was seduced with an Ed. The last one would just seduce. I don't know if you're some kind of pickup artist or something. You might use those terms, but. But they all start with seduce. That's the stem of that word. Your search thing should be able to recognize that. That whatever ending they put on it, that's the word that they were looking for. So that's called stemming. Another thing that's you see a lot on some of the better sites is did you mean and then it puts a spelling correction in there and there's actually a word for this, don't write me any letters or send me nasty emails about that.

[00:08:40] It's called a homophone. Homophone. Those are words that sound the same but are spelled differently. And here's some obvious ones there, there. And they're, their and there. So if you know just because somebody makes a misspelling, you don't. They still have money to spend. So. So there's a company called Soundex that has something that will help with this. But on any of the plug ins you look for that help with search and give you advanced search features, see if that is available. Another one is I actually looked this one up for the word Stephanie. There's Steph. Steph. Stephanie. Stephanie. Stephanie. Stephanie. Stephanie and Stephanie. So? So if they're looking, maybe you got a celebrity website and you're looking for. Well, it'd be like Gwen Stefani. I'm thinking. No, but somebody named Stephanie. They wouldn't find him because of all those different words. Unless you made that happen. And guess what? When I was researching this thing, March 24th is National Stephanie Day. So there you go. If you're Stephanie, I'm sorry I missed your day, so I'll catch you next year. Anyway, improving your search is going to take care of user errors and that they don't know how to spell or or they don't know what your product exactly is called.

[00:10:16] So improve it with keywords and all that, and it'll help people find what they want fast. And it should create more sales for you and happier visitors that refer you and all that. Now, I've got a link in the show notes because most of you know I harp on the use of WordPress, the gold standard for websites. If you don't have WordPress, God help you on figuring this out. How to put a great search function on there. But the article that I'm sending you has 12 plug ins for WordPress websites that improve your your site search. I'm going to be working on this myself in the next few months to improve mine. I, like I said, I slacked off since I originally did this years ago. So anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. And this was episode. What is this again? 819 part of no, wait a minute. 818 part of the two part series on improving your search, and you should go back and listen to that first one. Let me get my numbers straight here. Again, I'm a little impaired here. 818 yeah, that's 817 is where you will be way more efficient and find what you want faster if you use the simple tips in that episode. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Go out and fix that search on your site. Catch you later.