Blogging and Site Search – They Go Together Like Root Beer and Ice Cream

eTaildTail friends at SLI Systems weigh in on how Blogging and Site Search go hand-in-hand; we hope the following commentary helps grow your ecommerce business.

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Chip Arndt

SPECIAL GUEST COMMENTARY

Blogging and Site Search – They Go Together Like Root Beer and Ice Cream

By Geoff Brash, VP of Marketing at SLI Systems, specialists in Webstore Site Navigation and Search. Geoff can be reached with any questions at geoff.brash@sli-systems.com ...and let him know that eTaildTail sent you.

"Whether or not your company already has a blog, you probably know the benefits of blogging and how it will help your business.  As explained in this recent E-Commerce Guide article, a blog linked to your online storefront can help build visibility for your brand and educate customers about what you offer. 

So if you’re going to spend the time necessary to maintain a blog, then you want to do whatever you can to get your blog noticed – and bringing the blog content into the search results on your site is one way to do that.  Just like root beer and ice cream, which taste great individually – blogging and site search are each valuable tools for getting your online business and the products and services you offer more attention.  But when you put them together, even better!  You now have a much more powerful way to get your customers excited and educated about your offerings.

Now, you might be concerned that blog articles would be a distraction to your online shoppers – after all, aren’t they using your site search to find the things you’re selling, and not to catch up on your blog?

However, if you do your blog right and create informative, interesting posts that relate to your shoppers’ needs, then they should WANT to read your posts – and you should want to make the posts easy to find. Here are some approaches you can take to make blog content searchable:

• Show the blog content in a separate section of the search results – for example, on the left, or below the regular search results.  This ensures that products have prime position on the results page.
• Create refinement options so visitors can restrict the results to just blog articles, or just product listings.
• Allow product and blog content to appear based on highest click-throughs, showing the most popular (or relevant) items first – regardless of whether it’s from the blog or a product listing.  You can adjust your settings so that products generally show higher – although if you do this, I recommend allowing the blog articles to move higher if people click on them more often.
• Put a search box on your blog so that visitors can search just blog articles – and also show product listings in your blog search, perhaps along one side of the results.

If you’re not sure how to integrate blog content into your site search, you may want to ask your customers (perhaps through a blog post), try some options, and measure the impact on your conversion rate.  And of course, feel free to email me if you’d like any tips at geoff@sli-systems.com ."

- Geoff Brash