Qweery's look at the world of search

If you run a webshop your goal is to sell a much of your products as possible. So you create a great looking website, add your products and focus on getting found in Google (and/or use adwords) to get visitors. You have optimised your website so conversion is high: your products are easy to find, well documented and visible (images/video) and your checkout process is easy. So where is your datafeed? What? Yes, your datafeed…..PUBLISH YOUR FEED!

What is a datafeed?
A datafeed, also known as product feed, is a file containing all information of all the products you sell. The format of this file is often XML and can look something like this:

The feed should contain as much information as possible related to the products you sell. It can be something like a RSS feed but be aware that the productfeed I am talking about MUST contain all productdata for all products you have. If the file becomes too big, split it into several files (make a sensable split by producttype or something).

Why publish your datafeed?
Well…to sell more! How? There are a lot of websites out there, who are willing to add your productfeed to publish on their own website…for free! True, a lot of websites only accept affiliate productfeeds to earn some money with a datafeed, but to complete the offering on a vertical (websites where all sites for one subject are indexed) your datafeed will be pickedup.
And if you are thinking about using affiliate someday, your feed is ready. By letting others use your content, you will sell more…and that is the goal.

How to publish your datafeed?
Just put it on your website. Add it to the menu or the links at the bottom of your pages. Just make sure it can be found easily…some nice bonus: search engines will pick it up as well.
Most webshop software can create your datafeed automatically from the database it holds. Just make sure the feed is complete, correct and up to date and you are good to go….and sell more!

Just try a search in Google for something on a search engine (perhaps with the addition of optimising) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all you get as results…it is very hard to find anything about optimising your own search engine although it is one of the most important function of a website….on article I like was (in dutch):
http://www.webanalisten.nl/analyse/bezoekers/investeren-in-zoeken-zinvol.html.

My guess is that SEO mainly only focus on getting higher ranking in Google and do this by optimising the content of the website, the link structure and most important: incoming links (this is not a SEO article so I’ll leave other more detailled options).

But what happens when you got that visitor, that lead from Google? Well…just picture what you do yourself. You judge the page you see and match it on the keywords you used in Google. If that is ok, you probably didn’t reach the exact page you are looking for (you don’t even know the site and have no idea wether this site contains the page/product you are looking for)….so what do you do? Two options: scan the naviation of hit the search function.
The search function is used the most (studies mention 50%+ )…mainly because the navigation just need to use the same words/terms you expect and almost never do.

So we’ve reached the internal search engine. In most cases a fulltext search function on the underlying database. Is this sufficient? For a very small website: yes….small meaning <50 pages in total. Is the site any bigger..no way. What about the ’special’ search options in webshops? Well, in most cases you get a category filter and that’s it. Still, search for any term and you’ll get hundreds of results….want to browse through all of them? Don’t think so and you’re off to another website.

What is the webshop manager to do? Well, check what you have looked for, check what result you saw and manage the results. Add synonyms, alter search terms for terms the shop uses, ignore some terms…is that enough? Uhm….nope. What about what other visitors did? Look at the big picture….Amazon was one of the first to use statistical information and showed visitors what other bought. You can use these ideas in search as well. Look for a search engine which helps you with this.

So, some pointers:
1) check what searches your visitors do (not in Google, but in you own engine) and make sure the content matches this
2) manage the keywords your visitors use and alter the query if needed
3) split product content with text pages in search with a searchfilter of in your resultset
4) make sure your best converting products top your resultsets
5) let important pages/products rank higher
6) show high marging or interesting promotions at the top of the results (not all, but keyword based).

Good luck…need any help. Let me know and I’ll have look if you want.