Turning Your Popular Internal Search Queries into Traffic Generating Machines!
Many eCommerce platforms will track popular search queries that are executed by customers once they are within your site. In a Nexternal Order Management System that data is available in the Dashboard. While this information is invaluable in helping business owners understand their customers, did you know that you can also use that information to generate more external traffic from the search engines? The beautiful thing about internal results pages is that those URLs can also be looked at as individual pages. If you have 100 product pages and 5 categories, the number of indexable pages for the search engines is not limited to 105! Here’s a step by step guide for leveraging search result pages generated by your eCommerce platform:
- First, determine the search queries that people are using once they visit your site. For customers on the Nexternal eCommerce platform, visit Dashboard/Keyword Search Analysis.
- Setup a popular searches page link to it from your site. Click here to see a simple example we setup in our fictitious golf demo at Firstfairway.com. If you’re using the Nexternal platform, this can easily be setup by creating a new article. The destination URL in the link code might look something like this:
http://store.firstfairway.com/categories.aspx?Keyword=firstfairway+merlot.
Remember that the links on your page are to search results, and not products themselves.
Make sure your anchor link text is the popular search term itself. - It is also important that your search results pages generate unique titles and meta descriptions which leverage the keyword data. This allows the search engines to look at these as unique pages. In the case of a search for “firstfairway merlot”, the title generated is, “firstfairway merlot – Available Now in the FirstFairway Online Store” and the meta description is, “FirstFairway search results for firstfairway merlot”. If you are using the Nexternal eCommerce platform, we are pleased to report that these elements are automatically generated for you, so no action is needed. If you are using a different eCommerce platform, you might suggest that they generate unique titles and meta descriptions in on their search results pages.
- Keep your popular search list updated. This is one of those projects that you should circle back to every month or two. Continuously add to and refine your popular searches based on real data.
With about 10 minutes of work, you can have several new traffic generating pages!
After receiving a degree in Industrial Engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Alex began his career as a technology consultant with Accenture. In 1999 he left Accenture and founded Nexternal – a cloud-based eCommerce Platform company. Alex is passionate about eCommerce and online marketing. He is now a Senior Vice President of HighJump, managing the Nexternal business unit.
