Our research also found a lack of confidence in online analytics. While nearly 95 percent of online businesses are using analytics to track conversions, measure campaign effectiveness, conduct keyword research and better understand their customers, 63 percent aren’t confident in the data.

With such uncertainty, how can you ensure your online marketing tactics are achieving your goals? Here are some suggestions to consider when assessing your technology investments.

Integrate, integrate, integrate

While not a new concept, it’s clear from our survey that most businesses still aren’t combining applications. Yet integrating technologies like site search with user reviews or online video can dramatically accelerate results vs. using these applications singularly. In today’s highly competitive sales environment, focusing on integration can drive sales and conversions, and engage your customers on a new level.

For example, integrating product videos into site search results gives your videos more chances of being seen, which further increases conversions. Additionally, the videos give visitors more information as they conduct their searches to make purchasing decisions, and provide them a more engaging, enjoyable experience on your site. One of our customers—an online golf retailer—incorporated product videos on its e-commerce site last year and saw its purchase rate increase by 85 percent. They then included the videos in site search results, and now more than half the videos watched are viewed from site search results pages.

Pay close attention to analytics

Many web site owners struggle with analytics. It can be difficult to set up and to correctly tag all your pages. The more applications you have, the more difficult this can be. For example many analytics packages (including Google Analytics) allow you to tag your site search pages and then produce reports on site search activity. If some of your applications are hosted on another domain or subdomain (for example your site search, a payment provider or your videos), then there are particular things you need to do to ensure this traffic is counted correctly.

Even when you get analytics set up properly, it can be difficult to interpret the results and turn the data into actions. It is extremely important to get this right so you know the value of the various technologies you have on your site and of your marketing efforts. The importance combined with the complexity of setting up and interpreting means there is a growing demand for analytics advice. You might consider hiring an outside expert to help or train someone on your staff to handle the process. Doing so can give you more confidence in the analytics data and in how you are spending your dollars.

Personalize messages to stimulate action

Another benefit of on-site application integration is the ability to send personalized messages to your customers that prompt them to take action—be it purchase a product or download information to further help them in their decision-making process. For example, many e-commerce companies allow shoppers to register their product and brand preferences and receive periodic promotional email messages. These companies can leverage site search data to take it one step further—e.g., they can pull site search data showing the most popular products that correlate with each recipient’s preferences and generate individually targeted e-mails that specifically promote those products. This level of customization can result in dramatically increased open rates, click-throughs and conversions.

Share the wealth (of data)

Technologies that support online marketing, like site search, email marketing and analytics, provide companies with important data that can be shared and leveraged across applications. This data can also be used to better target other activities, such as paid advertising, SEO and promotional offers. For example, when working to find the best keywords to use in advertising, paid search and SEO campaigns (and the corresponding items to promote), the information made available through your site search application—the terms customers use most when searching your site and the items they click on—can save time and provide additional, targeted keywords. Likewise, knowing which product videos generate the most click-throughs can help you improve other promotional efforts like email marketing and on-site banners.

The ongoing quest to provide the ultimate online customer experience may present some hurdles. Assessing campaign effectiveness across multiple marketing programs and on-site variations is challenging. The key is to tightly integrate your applications so they are sharing information, and deploy analytics across technologies to obtain accurate, actionable data. Doing so will help you overcome those hurdles by increasing the value of your technology investments and driving business success.

You may be working hard on your natural and paid search campaigns to draw visitors to your site. Ideally you will be directing visitors deep within your site to content that is relevant to their query term. However often they won’t land in exactly the right place or they’ll need additional information and if your site search function doesn’t perform well, they’ll waste no time in shopping elsewhere. A survey we conducted found that 73 percent of visitors will leave an ecommerce site within one to two minutes if they don’t find the products they’re looking for, 36 percent of which won’t ever bother returning to the site.

To meet consumer expectations, site search continues to evolve, and quickly. The site search of today has become so full-featured that it bears little resemblance to search solutions of just two or three years ago.  Now site search has evolved to a point where it does far more than simply generate a list of possible results for a search term. It helps website owners merchandise effectively with images and video; it is essential for SEO campaigns; and it helps improve the user experience in many ways.

All site search solutions are not alike

Effective site search has become a must-have for a successful website, along with easy navigation. However, all search functions are not built alike. Offering a mediocre site search experience—for instance, the search is slow, it returns results that are not relevant or can’t account for spelling errors—can turn off potential customers and prevent them from becoming loyal followers.

Conversely, a robust and effective site search solution can do much more than help visitors find information—it can boost other site and business optimization efforts, including SEO and paid search.

To find the right site search solution, ask these six questions and satisfy yourself that you’re getting the answer that meets or exceeds the needs of your customers.

Are the results relevant? The single most important feature about search is that it returns relevant results that actually mirror what the site visitor seeks. This is the Google effect in action. While it may sound obvious, too many site search solutions offer results that are totally off the mark.

Consumers have very little patience for a search that doesn’t deliver relevant results. The best solutions “learn” from visitors’ site search activity by leveraging information about search queries—the keywords used and resulting items that site visitors actually click on. This greatly improves the chance that your visitors will find what they’re looking for within the first page of results, increasing the likelihood of a purchase.

Do you have the resources required to run and maintain the site search? The best site search solution in the world will fall apart if it’s not deployed and maintained correctly. Search can require significant computing and technical support resources, both to build and update the indexes, and to robustly serve the search results.

If you don’t have these resources available, you should choose a site search vendor that provides search as a hosted service (SaaS). Additionally, a hosted search provider gives you a way to get a robust site search solution up and running with little to no installation or training time, and requires no ongoing maintenance or software upgrades.

Does your site search vendor give you control? Online businesses should have the freedom to merchandise and promote products using search—for example to adjust the position of items within search results (because of a sale or other promotion), or to place promotional banners on search results pages. You must be able to use the valuable real estate on your search pages to communicate with customers and draw their attention to products or services you want to promote.

Can you repurpose data from search? Site search can do much more than help your site visitors find what they’re looking for. The data from site search can improve the customer experience in many ways. For example, you can easily create landing pages that are targeted to the query term used on a paid search ad by using your site search pages as landing pages Search data can also improve your SEO campaigns. Site search activity, such as keywords and the items clicked on, can help you determine which terms you should optimize your pages for, and what products to show visitors on corresponding landing pages.

Does your search solution constantly improve? Your search solution provider shouldn’t get too comfortable. You want a vendor that is constantly looking for ways to innovate and make their site search solution even more useful and effective for your business. In addition, you need a site search that can be customized to meet your company’s unique search requirements, including those that may come up in the future. For example we have recently seen more and more of our customers using video on their site and found is beneficial to surface any video content in site search.

Can you measure site search performance? Advanced site search solutions provide integration with various analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Omniture and Coremetrics. Within these tools, users can compare conversion rates for site search users vs. non-site search users, and can determine the average order size for each. Analytics help you understand where you need to focus your efforts to improve your site and your business.

Another way to improve site search performance is via multivariate testing, which allows you to measure the results of multiple changes to various aspects of your site search. You can track how certain changes to your site search results pages improve or weaken your conversion rate—e.g. if you change the layout of the search.

As site visitors’ expectations continue to climb, the last of your worries should be whether or not your site search can keep up with their demands for speed and relevant results. A robust site search solution should allow you flexibility and control where you want it, while letting you rest assured that your customers’ search needs are being taken care of today and in the future. In a challenging online environment, every market advantage is welcome.

Regardless of the approach, web search and site search are working with the same information. Web search is attempting to index all of the information on the web, whereas site search is indexing just the information on the site it is searching—a tiny subset of the information web search is using. Web search mainly relies on crawls, but may also be using XML sitemaps, feeds (i.e. shopping feeds) and other techniques. Site search has access to all the structured data on the site and is able to use that to create a richer search experience tailored to the site’s content.

Each type of search has a number of teams working to improve the user experience. On the web, we have major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, while on the site search front there are millions of website owners producing content and working to make it searchable on their individual sites. Some of those teams are small, while some are significant, as in the case of well-known sites such as eBay or Amazon. Innovation is taking place in both areas and each tends to influence the other.

The most common links between the two search experiences are the users and their expectations, which change as their search experiences do. The more relevant the search results they receive via web search, the more relevant they expect the site search results to be on any given site. As they become accustomed to refinements and reordering options in site search they come to expect similar features in web search.

The web site owner has more intimate access to meta data associated with each page on their site than a web search engine does. For example, on an ecommerce product page, they know the images associated with each product, the available colors, the category, the price, the availability, average ratings, whether or not it is available with free shipping and the sales history. For an article, they know the author(s), the date it was published, the category, the number of comments, the number of times it has been viewed, any images that are included in the article, etc. All of this information can be used to create a much richer site search experience than a web search engine is able to do when it is simply crawling pages, such as offering refinements by price, category, color or manufacturer. Users can sort by price, publish date or ratings. Site owners can ensure that out of stock items aren’t shown in the search—or are shown below those that are in stock.

One area where site search has influenced web search is ratings. Ratings and reviews were pioneered by Amazon and are now a standard feature available on most ecommerce sites. We saw this trend taking place in 2007 and began integrating ratings and reviews into site search for our customers. Most ecommerce sites do this now. Currently, we are seeing web search engines offer the same rating functionality. Bing, for example will show ratings in their shopping search, while Yahoo has its SearchMonkey that will show restaurant and other ratings.

An example of where web search has influenced site search is search term completion tools. This is the functionality available on all the major web search engines now that shows users suggested search terms as they are typing. We began offering this to our clients in July 2008 and it is now a very common feature on site search, particularly for ecommerce sites.

A new area of web search and site search convergence is around searching different types of content—e.g. product information, articles, blogs, forums, information pages, store locators, videos, etc. Web search engines take an approach like Google’s universal search, where they will mix different types of results into the main search results and provide tabs or other links that allow users to see only certain information—for example just video results. Website search owners are grappling with various interfaces to ensure all of the content on their sites can be found through their site search and presented on the web in a way that is consistent with the expectation of their users.

So what does the continued union between site search and web search mean for you? As a website owner you must ensure the experience your visitors have when using your site search, at the very least meets their expectations. Talk to your visitors to find out what they want and watch what they search for. Take the time to consider what you think would be the ultimate site search experience for your visitors, given what you know about your business and the content on your site. You may just come up with something innovative that will contribute to the ongoing search revolution.

Compiling a list of keywords to use in SEO traditionally entails discovering the terms people are searching for on search engines, how often, and which other sites appear for those terms. The keywords you uncover must make the most sense for your business, since you are relying on them to improve your natural search rankings and deliver targeted traffic to your site. However, determining the best mix of terms isn’t easy. Search terms used are as varied as the people typing them in. In fact, Google estimates that up to 20 to 25% of the queries its sees are unique. And volume can be a barrier; the sheer numbers of unique search terms many sites attract make it difficult to monitor and analyze trends in the terms customers use.

You may be using any of a number of tools available to help with keyword development, such as Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker, to name a few. But, remember, the keywords they help you generate are still just educated guesses about the ways prospective customers might come to your site, and aren’t guaranteed to increase traffic. You can significantly strengthen your keyword lists with terms you’re customers are actually using.

Of course it is important to assess the search terms that led people to your site, and where that traffic came from. In conjunction with this, you should determine the search terms your customers are using once they are on your site. This can help you take important steps to ensuring you are not only creating the most focused keyword lists, but are also optimizing your web pages for the language of your customers. These terms don’t emerge from a weekly marketing brainstorm, but rather are the real words your customers are using on your site today. For example, someone may have come to your site through a Google search for the term “clown costume.” But, using the search box on your site, they typed in “Bozo.”

Use the search box. Any good site search platform will provide you with a list of the top phrases customers are using when searching your site. You will likely uncover customer search terms that are unexpected. Considering these terms in your keyword discovery process and making adjustments to your SEO or PPC campaigns by including these terms can significantly increase your conversions. Many of our customers have used this technique in their search marketing campaigns with significant results.

Mine analytics reports. All of the top analytics tools provide options to explore the ways customers are searching for information on your site. Google Analytics and Coremetrics, for example provide reports that outline customer search terms on a site. With this information, you can define keyword lists using terms that your customers think of before you do. These terms can be help you optimize your site and drive greater traffic, and are great terms to include in paid search campaigns.

Automate the process. Tools are available that automate the process of generating keyword lists based on the terms people use most often while searching a site, and the items they click on. These tools are also able to create product landing pages, based on customer search activity, that are search-engine-optimized. This process usually proves too costly and time-intensive for most companies to replicate manually, particularly if they are optimizing a site based on hundreds or thousands of site search terms.

Conducting research to determine the most relevant keywords to use in SEO isn’t something new, but there are new ways to take advantage of all the information at hand to streamline and improve the process. Remember to analyze the search activity going on inside your site, and incorporate that information into your search marketing efforts. The keywords discovered can help to significantly improve your results.