9 Ways to Drive More Visitors to Search — and Convert — During the Holidays

Successful online retailers know that site search is a critical conversion-generating e-commerce feature. In many cases, site search users, while accounting for roughly one-third of all site visitors, generate more than half the revenues. If your site isn't seeing this kind of return from your site search, it might be time to make some improvements. After all, the holidays are just around the corner and this year promises to see even more spending online than in years past.

To ensure that you get a healthy share of those holiday sales, you need to enhance the search experience on your site to deliver relevant results in a way that engages your visitors. But to get there you need more people using your search box. Since site search users are more likely to convert, make enhancements to this feature now so you have time to perform some testing beforehand. You want the site search box to be delivering optimal results. Here are some tips to try, taken from our "Big Book of Site Search Tips:

1. Make your search box big and easy to spot. While most online retailers put the search box in the upper right-hand corner of the page (which is where visitors typically go to find it), if it doesn't stand out many visitors may just bypass it. Getting more people to use search can help your bottom line. Research shows people who use site search convert two times to three times more often. Some marketers have conducted A/B tests and found that a bigger, bolder box is generally used more by visitors, and some have even taken the extra step to put "Search Here" or similar text — again, in bold typeface — to encourage more search users. If you want more people searching your site, start by highlighting the search box.

2. Make your search box float. Another way to drive more search usage is to ensure your search box is always visible by making it "float," so even as visitors scroll down a page the search box appears at the top of the page. Tests have shown that revenue per visit for search users can go up quite dramatically when the search box is always visible in this way.

3. Place the cursor in the search box. By having the cursor automatically placed in the search box when someone comes to your site makes them more likely to start a search. If you make this change, be sure to include special coding to allow keyboard shortcuts (e.g., using the arrow keys to scroll up and down a page) to work as expected.

4. Add refinements to highlight offers and promotions. Budget-conscious online shoppers are just like people who are drawn in by the sight of "sale" signs in shop windows, so give them the e-commerce equivalent by allowing them to confine their searches to your sale items. In addition to an "On Sale" refinement, enable shoppers to sort results by what's on sale or create a separate tab showing only items on sale. Here you can see how online retailer Motorcycle Superstore has created a separate tab for sale products:

5. Use floating refinements. Keep refinements in front of shoppers’ frame of vision by "floating" the refinement list as visitors scroll down a page. Doing so means they'll no longer need to go back to the top of the page to retool their search, leading to increased use of refinements and more searches — and ultimately more purchases. Keep in mind this tactic only makes sense if the list of refinements is relatively short.

6. Personalize with search history. By storing visitors’ recent searches and presenting them when they return to your site, you improve your site's search usability. This is a good way to personalize the visitor's experience and will help them find previously viewed items. If you offer this feature, add simple controls so visitors can delete recent searches if they wish.

7. Promote shipping deals in banners. Holiday shoppers are on high alert about shipping costs, and they're aware that many online retailers offer shipping deals during the season. If you're one of them, use banners to highlight these deals on search results pages. Once shoppers have searched for a particular product, they're in the mind-set to make a buying decision. By including shipping offers with search results, you provide an additional incentive for them to buy that item.

8. Slim down content for mobile and tablet screens. Mobile screens don't have the space for long product descriptions or the extra site navigation links found on usual search results pages. Tablets have a bit more room for product descriptions, but the space is still scarce. For mobile shoppers, reduce content to the bare minimum — e.g., product name, price and variations such as color, in a one-column display. Take a look at how apparel retailer Gotapparel does it:

9. Highlight the first search result. A recent trend in displaying search results is to make the first image in a search result list twice as large as the other results. If your site search is optimized to ensure relevant results, the first image should be of greatest interest to searchers. This format seems to work best in a grid view rather than a list view, and is popular with fashion and apparel sites.

If you're successful in driving more visitors to use your search box this holiday season — and give them a powerful search experience — you're likely to see sales and revenue increases that will continue even after the holidays have passed.

Terry Costa is the vice president of marketing at SLI Systems.