Have You Mined Your Own Search Engine?
If you are in the online retail business, and have an internal search engine, have you thought about ‘mining’ your own search results keywords & phrases? Let me tell you, you can strike gold with a plethora of qualified keywords, from human results, actual visitors to your site.
A couple of weeks ago while attending SMX, I was eating breakfast before the session and struck up a conversation with a gentleman named Ed Hoffman, VP of sales at Sli-Systems. This company is incredible; basically they utilize a patented search technology that actually “learns” from past site searches to your site by tracking visitors’ search queries and click thrus, then this system compiles data that gives you relevant search results based on popularity. I was shocked! I never even thought about doing this. This is a gold mine of targeted search results, in your own back pocket!
After researching this further, I found that when people use your search engine, they expect to find what they came there to look for on the first page, or they’ll abandon the site. Sli-Systems claims their learning search technology can help keep people on your site 95% of the time by learning behaviors of search terms, then making keyword adjustments to your backend, or content management system. I believe it!
One of my clients is a large e-commerce site, and as an experiment I got the IT guy to download its search engine data…GOLD! You would not believe the words, phrases, misspellings, part numbers; you name it, I found gold, gold, gold! Do you realize how valuable this is for PPC? SEO? When I compared some of these terms with their PPC terms, there were several ‘nuggets’ I never thought of! Goodness, I feel like I won the lottery…
However, I do not have the patented Learning Search advanced search technology that SLI-Sytems has, so it may not be long until I contact ED. If I were you, I would visit their site.
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