Mike Moran, former IBM engineer, explains why website search is a revenue driver most companies ignore. Failed searches cost money directly through lost sales and support tickets. He walks through an ROI formula and real examples from Nationwide and Petco showing how to quantify gains and build a business case for search improvements.
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Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Tim Peter, one of the authors at Biznology. I'm the president of Tim Peter and Associates, an e-commerce and digital marketing consultancy building brands and businesses via the social, local, mobile web. My award-winning work over the last 15 years for companies like Wyndham, Charles Schwab, and others has generated billions of dollars in online revenue. And today you'll be hearing from Mike Moran, who will present Finding ROI in Your Website Search. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI focus. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. And you can try Gankalam for free today. Darris Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. ProspectDB, providing highly accurate contact information for B2B marketing campaigns. Ask us for a free 1,000-record sample. And SoloSegment, your one-stop shop for targeted B2B content marketing techniques, including website search and website personalization. As we wait for a few more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar, and we'll email you the link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event and press the Send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Mike. Now while we're waiting for the last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology monthly newsletter and daily articles are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Mike Moran is the founder of Biznology, a well-known expert in all things digital marketing, and a senior strategist at Conversión. A leading social consultancy. Mike is the co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc., now in its 3rd edition, and the sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly. Mike is a veteran of IBM, managing groups in IBM.com for 8 years and retiring from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer. So if you've ever struggled with finding ROI in your website search, this is the webinar for you. Mike, take it away.
Thanks so much, Tim. And thank you, everybody. So let's start out by asking ourselves, what is website search? So some people call it on-site search. We want to make sure we're not talking about search marketing. So we're not talking about how you get rankings in Google. What we're actually talking about is that pesky little box on your website. Often it's in the upper right-hand corner, like you see on the screenshot at the very bottom for Allstate. But You can have it at other parts of the screen as well, and it's making a big promise to your customers that says, type something in here, I'll find you something good. The dirty little secret is that website search often doesn't find them anything very good. Sometimes that website search looks like a random webpage generator in kind of your most important go-away page on your site, where anyone who reaches it decides this is the time to abandon. And so we want to talk about today is how do we change website search so that you really get a return on investment. We've done other webinars in the past that focus on the changing part. But what I've heard from many clients is that they can't even get people interested in website search. People don't think it's important. And so we want to do today is to talk about where is the return on investment for website search and what are the kinds of things you can do first To really put some numbers to the problem so that people understand what's wrong and what they can do about it. So the first thing we want to ask ourselves is, how do you get a return on your search investment? So return on investment is kind of an easy formula. It's the gain that you get from investment minus the cost divided by that same cost. Now, your cost is what you spend improving search, and your gain could come from either or a combination of 2 things. Your gain could either be increased revenue, so more of your searches are leading to sales, or it could be reducing your costs. So for example, if your searches are about customer service, you might be able to reduce the number of phone calls that you're taking because more people are finding their answer on the website. So the gain could be either of those things or a combination of both. So let's figure out what's really happening when someone searches for something. So let's look at this example from Nationwide Insurance. So what is someone looking for when they search for assigned risk? So those are the keywords they picked out. And for most of us, we, we would hope that we're not the searcher searching for assigned risk, because what that means is that your driving record has put you in a pool of people who have fairly expensive insurance because you have kind of shown that you get into a few too many accidents, or you've picked up a couple of tickets. And so what you're expecting when someone searches for assigned risk is to find some information about how Nationwide Insurance would be able to help you If that's the situation you find yourself in. What we actually find is nothing about insurance at all. We're finding the words risk, but we're not really finding the words assigned risk. And these things are about the financial risk of your investments. So what would happen in this situation? So what happens when a searcher looks for something is they either find what they're looking for, and if you hope, you hope they might actually buy something, or they don't find what they're looking for. If they don't find what they're looking for, they're definitely not going to buy. So what are the kinds of metrics we could look at that tell us that searchers didn't find what they were looking for? Well, They could get no results at all on the screen. That's not what happened in this situation. They could get no clicks. I suspect that's what would happen here. It's unlikely that the searcher who's looking for assigned risk would actually click on any of these items because they can tell just from looking at them that it's the wrong stuff. And certainly they wouldn't convert. And so one of the things that makes finding your return on investment from search a little bit harder than from some other things is that unfortunately there isn't any metric that we can calculate that says absolutely for sure the searcher found what they were looking for. But what we're showing you here is that there are several metrics that say for sure they didn't. And so those are the ones we focus on. So what we really want to do is to measure how those unsuccessful searches, those failed searches, can be reduced So it's possible the searcher is going to search again. Now if they do, then we can check to see whether that second search produced results, produced a click, produced a conversion. But if they don't search again, we still want to know that the first one did not. So the game here is that we can't count what works But we can count what doesn't work. And so by counting what doesn't work, improving our website search, and then counting how those failed searches are being reduced, what's really happening is those failed searches are turning into successful searches. And as they turn into successful searches, we will see that you are getting results. You are getting clicks, and most importantly, you are getting conversions. So it could be that you're in the situation we just saw where there's no clicks and probably no conversions, but you can also have situations where there's no results. So here's a search results screen where someone unfortunately misspelled what they were looking for, and in this situation, the, the system did not recognize that it was misspelled. And so it just said no results found. And so whether you get this screen of no results, whether you get the previous screen that had results that really weren't appropriate, you can count each of those outcomes as problems in your website search. And your job is to reduce them.
Mm-hmm.
So what you're really doing is you're taking people and kind of putting them back into play. These are people who possibly would abandon your site without buying. And instead what you're doing is you're putting them back in play as people who actually could buy. Now if you think about it, the chances that they want to buy is actually very high. Now the reason that's true is if you think about what's going on with searcher behavior, think about your own behavior when you go to a website. If you go to a site and you navigate around a little bit and you don't find what you're looking for, you might just leave the site. But if you really, really think that this is the right website to be on, you really want to buy from this site, then you're going to search. You're not going to give up so easily. And so the people searching, by and large, have a much higher chance of converting than people who don't search, because people who don't search aren't as committed to your brand. They're not as convinced that your site has the answer that they want, and so they're likely to leave quicker. So the people searching are already telling you that they're more likely to buy from you. So let's think about what those conversions are. What are the things you're trying to get them to do? Now depending on what your site is, it could be any of these things.
You—
and when— there'd be plenty more that it could be. I mean, when I was at IBM, one of the big conversions was to download a white paper. Now the reason they wanted that is because they knew that people who downloaded the white paper would call the number on the on the white paper and they would convert offline and they could count how many often that was happening. So whatever your business is, there's something you're trying to get people to do. That's what you're counting. Can people do those things? Are they doing those things after a website search? Because it's the conversions and it's the usage of the search engine that really shows you the value of search. So you want to know how many people are using search. You want to find out how many of those convert. And you want to calculate your conversion rate, and that will help you know what the revenue value is of search. You can do this using your analytics system if you've tuned it properly. Before we're done, we'll show you an easier way. So here's an example of what can go wrong. So if you go to Petco and you search for 3-story ferret cage, and they have a very cute message that says not found, which is go fetch, no matches were found for your search terms. So Here's a no-result search. And so you might say to yourself, okay, well, I guess they don't have that. Let's look for quick-release cat collar. Okay, you only have one inaccurate result. That's not really what we were, what we were thinking about, right? So what's happening here? You say, well, I guess they don't sell them. I guess they may not have that. So, but the actual truth is they do sell it, and They're called breakaway collars. So now this isn't actually a good experience. So you have somebody who's gone to Petco. They either search for something where they didn't find it at all, or they search for something where they might have used the wrong word. And it turns out in both cases they actually sell these things. They just use different words for them. And so a person who's highly motivated to buy from Petco is sent away without finding what they're looking for. So let's look at the math. This is a fairly simple spreadsheet. I would argue that any spreadsheet that you could actually put on a slide is simple. And this shows you what the math is. Now, what I'll promise you is if you email me at mike@mikemoran.com, I'll actually provide you an example of this spreadsheet that you can use for your own business. Now, what you're doing here is you're saying, What is the range, minimum to maximum, for what it is that— for the numbers that we have here? So how many people come to the site? How many times do they come each month, for example? What is the percent of visits that use search? You can just use— you can take a guess at a lot of these numbers if you don't know them. How many searches do they do per visit? What percentage of the searches fail? And usually, if you haven't done any work on your website search, it's somewhere between 50% and 70%. And so then the question is, well, how many of those could be fixed? And you could be conservative and say 20% of them could be fixed, or you could be aggressive and say, no, I think we could fix 70% of them. By the way, both numbers are right. It's just a question of how long you want to take in doing those fixes. And then what's your conversion rate? On the site as a whole. Then you do the math and you can see, hey, look, maybe this is going to be a half a million dollar a year opportunity to fix website search, or maybe it's going to be a $40 million a year opportunity. Now obviously the ranges that I put in here were guesses, so who knows whether these things were right for your site. But this is how you can start by quantifying what website search is costing you and what it would be worth for you to fix it. So let's look at an expense case. We just looked at a revenue case. So here's one where Korean Air, do they have an airline club in LAX? And the answer is no results. Now what might happen next? Well, they might call Korean Air on the phone and say, do you have an airline club here? Suppose you're looking for their frequent flyer program. You might type in frequent flyer. What do you get? Well, you don't actually get anything that tells you what Korean Air's frequent flyer program is. You might conclude they don't have one, or you might call them up to really double-check. But they actually do have a frequent flyer program. It just wasn't found in the website search. So all these things are either leading to customer dissatisfaction, which is bad enough, Or it could be it's leading to increased phone calls. So you can have a very similar type of spreadsheet that's really looking at a lot of the same things, but at the bottom it looks at how many potential phone calls can you avoid and what do those calls cost. Here are the savings that you will get from fixing your website search. So depending on what your website search is for, if it's for customer service, you're going to be saving costs like in this spreadsheet. If it's for producing higher sales, you're going to be increasing revenue as we showed in the first spreadsheet. Again, if you email me at mike@mikemoran.com, I'll happily provide you with each of these spreadsheets so that you can put numbers in for your own business. And again, you can estimate the numbers at first. Maybe you don't know the exact numbers. It's okay. You look at how big some of these numbers can be on a large website. You can more than easily pay for anybody to start working on this, even if you don't know what the exact number is. So why do you need a good website search? Well, it's these 2 reasons: if they can't find it, they can't buy it, which means you're losing revenue. Or if they can't find it, they're calling you, which means that you are— your costs are going higher. So how do you improve things? Well, there's 2 approaches. One is you look at the most popular which I'm old, so I call that the top 40 approach. The other is to actually make improvements that cut across your entire site, which is the long tail approach. So if you work the most popular keywords first, here's an example from when I worked at IBM. But the top 1,000 most popular keywords were only 27% of the searches. Now it's still the easiest improvement you can get to just go in and one by one say what are we getting for the most important keyword? What are we getting for the second most popular? What are we getting for the third? Can we go in and make fixes to try and improve each one? You can still improve 27% of the searches. Now, the easiest way to do that is for these popular ones is to actually handcraft the results. They might call them best bets. They might call them suggested matches. Most search engines have a way of improving these things. And what you do is you stick them at the top of the screen and you make sure that they are the exact answer that you want to give. And by doing that, you can maintain these results over time, and at least you know that the most popular results are getting a good answer, even if you still haven't figured out how to fix your search engine. But the most of what you're going to do is affecting the other 73% of searches that are in those long tail category. So one of the things you might want to do is to make the search box more prominent. Put it— make sure it's on every page. Make sure it's a box. The style recently is to only have a little magnifying glass, which makes it harder for people to find. Upper right-hand corner is usually the right place for it. And if you make the box large enough that people enter a longer string, that can really make a difference in terms of how well your search engine can work. Now, you might say, hey, our search engine stinks, so we're going to replace it. You can do that. Just know that that's often not the only thing that's wrong. Often your content is wrong. Often there are other problems that you have too. But you might really have a bad search engine. You might say, well, we can't afford to replace the search engine. Well, there are 2 very popular open source search engines that are free. So you would need to have an IT team do this, and they need to support it. But you wouldn't be paying a company any licensing fees. The other thing you can do is you can use something called faceted or multifaceted search. Sometimes it's called faceted browse. And the way that works, you can see on the left here, is that you can have a set of categories that people can drill down on. You've probably seen these kinds of things in shopping search engines where you're searching for a digital camera, and on the left you can say, I want to make sure that it's more than 16 megapixels. And so, or I want to make sure that it's under $200. And you can click on those things and that will filter your search results. You can do the same thing on your own website. This can be especially helpful for things that are hard to search for. In this case, this is a technical support situation where you want to know not just what their problem is that they typed the keywords in, but you want to know exactly which version of the system they're using because you might have different answers for different versions. Another big thing you can do is tune your search engine. Most of the time what we find is people install their search engine, but they never actually tune it to make sure it's working. So we don't know whether the right thing for your searchers is to look for both of the words that they type in together, or to look for them separately. Many, many big sites, when people search, they're searching the entire website instead of only searching the language or the country of the page that the person's on. Most companies haven't done anything to tune their ranking algorithms. So they haven't changed any of the default factors. They haven't weighted them differently. And if you use multifaceted search, have you tested the facet names? Have you looked to make sure that people actually understand what these things are and they know what they're going to get when they click? So some of this might sound hard. And when I said, hey, go look at your web analytics and you'll find the answer. Well, the truth is it's actually fairly difficult to find the answer. In your web analytics system. So one thing you can do is you can use a keyword scorecard, and what it will do is it will put all the information in one place. It can actually tell you whether the results you're getting are good, bad, or indifferent. It can tell you what your most popular keywords are. It can tell you which ones are the ones that are getting good results, which ones are getting the right click-through rate, whether people are bouncing back to the search results page after they click on it. All these things are indications that the search is failing. And so what you want to do is you want to focus on reducing those failed searches as much as possible. This is how you keep score. So there's a lot of things required to improve website search. It's not just technology. It might seem easy to rip out the search engine, but the truth is that it's marketing. It's customer service. It's whatever your search engine is supposed to be doing. You need to have people who understand exactly what it is that the purpose of the search engine is so that they're the ones working on it, not just your IT team. Often when I say to people, why is your website search so bad? They say, well, it's run by the IT team. And I say, well, how come? Why— what other page on your site is run by the IT team? And usually the answer is none of them. And so if you're trying to sell products, you need to make sure that the team that's in charge of marketing is the one in charge of all the marketing messages that come out of website search. So there's a whole slew of things that we have on this chart that tell you all the different things that you can work on to improve website search. But the most important thing is to start with understanding what it's costing you, understanding what the return on investment is that you are losing, and to be able to set up the analytics the way we showed so that you can see what's wrong and you can, in a very straightforward way, start to fix it and start to see that scorecard improve. Tim, that's all I got. Back to you.
Thanks, Mike. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to make their website search more profitable. But you didn't answer every question. I've got several good questions from our audience teed up for you. And I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it in the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. If Mike has convinced you That your website search can improve your ROI, but you don't know where to start, SoloSegment has a special offer just for listeners to this webinar. The first 3 listeners to contact info@solosegment.com will receive 50% off the Keyword Scorecard for their website for 6 months. You can immediately start tracking all of the metrics Mike showed you in the webinar. Plus, you can give your team access to a knowledge base that tells them exactly what to do to improve those metrics. Again, email info@solo-segment.com and tell them you were at Mike's webinar to get your half-priced discount while it lasts. If you're too late to be one of the top 3, you can still get 20% off by mentioning Mike's webinar. We're about to start firing questions at Mike, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. BarnRaisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp empowers companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. And you can try GaggleAmp for free today. Garrus Digital, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency ProspectDB, providing highly accurate contact information for B2B marketing campaigns. Ask us for a free 1,000-record sample. Nsolo Segment, your one-stop shop for targeted B2B content marketing techniques, including website search and website personalization. And now on to your questions. Our first question for Mike. Can you talk about how to get more funding for website search? What are some keys to convincing your boss or CFO to offer increased funding?
Frequently what we've done for our clients is just using that spreadsheet that I showed you. So if somebody really thinks, hey, there's no way we can even get anybody interested in this, email me, mike@mikemoran.com. I'll be happy to send you that spreadsheet if you want. If you need help, you know, I'll be happy to even get on the phone with you for a few minutes and help help you fill out the spreadsheet, and that will show what the opportunity is that's being lost. Usually that's enough to at least get them to say, well, let's take a look at this. I have several clients where the cost of doing— of hiring a consultant to come in and start working on website search is one that they can prove if all they did was fix the 2 or 3 most popular searches and did nothing else, they would more than pay for the consultant every month. And so this is something that I find that it has been woefully underinvested in. Most companies, their website search is terrible. And what they need to do is they need to really think carefully about what that's costing them to drive away the customers who are most likely to buy from them.
That's great, Mike, and that's a terrific offer. So people can email you at mike@mikemoran.com to receive that spreadsheet and get some assistance there in driving ROI and getting more funding. That's great. Another question we got is, how would you prioritize website search versus, say, SEO?
I think that they are just 2 different animals. Happily, a lot of the things that you do to improve SEO also improve website search and vice versa. So doing things like updating the content on the page so that it includes the keywords, you know, there's a lot of technical things you can do to be able to make sure that your pages are being crawled properly. Doing that, there is no choice between search marketing and website search. Doing those things helps both. So in some happy situations, it's the same thing. But what I would argue is that most companies have spent an awful lot of time trying to fix their SEO, and they're probably at the point where spending just a little of that money on fixing website search would bring much more benefits than continuing to pound away at SEO that probably at this point is, is fairly good. It may not be perfect. They might still have lots more that they'd hope for, but the truth is that if you've been working on SEO for a few years, it's probably in a lot better shape than the website search that you haven't worked on at all. And so to me, you will figure out what the right amount is to spend on both once you are looking at the metrics. I mean, you already have an idea of what to spend on SEO because you see what spending it actually returns for you. If you're not spending any money on website search, which is what most companies do unfortunately, you have no idea how much you should be spending on it. So I would say spend a little bit on it. You'll probably see some very immediate results. And when you do, over time you'll figure out how to apportion the spending between both.
That's really good stuff, Mike. And that is all the time we have for today. I want to say thanks to Mike for these great ideas. And thanks especially to our audience for your participation. Thank you all for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to answer, you can email them to eileen@mikemoran.com. That's eileen@mikemoran.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Mike for the answer. Later this week, we'll send you all a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We'll also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Writing for Social Media with Paul Gillen scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on January 12th. We hope to see everybody back here then. And until then, bye everybody.
