Part 1 of “Improving the Online Shopping Experience” focused on the upper part of the purchase funnel and on ways to get customers to your website and to find your products. Today, we move down the funnel, looking at ways to enable customers to make the decision to buy and to guide them through the check-out process.

Ways to improve the online shopping experience and to reduce the drop in the purchase funnel. Part 1 covered points 1 to 3.

Enable The Customer To Decide
Inform and reinforce the customer’s buying decisions by offering in-depth product information. The content on product pages should be relevant and should give the customer a virtual feel for the product. Ensure that your website addresses the key elements of a product page, listed below.

Product name
Product names should contain relevant keywords to help customers find and identify the right product. For a product such as a book, information about the author and edition is required.
Images
Use clear product images, with alternate views. Where appropriate, allow customers to zoom in, see different color swatches, or spin the product around with a 360° view. The product page for a book could get away with an image or two, but apparel should offer most of these options.
Video
Static images are not always sufficient to present a product. Video is a good way to showcase complex products that need detailed explanation or a “how to” demonstration.
Pricing and availability
Clearly list the price and availability. When products have variations (for example, different capacities for a hard drive, or different colors for shoes), make it easy for users to identify size and color combinations that are in stock (see the screenshot for Kohl’s below). And provide sizing charts to avoid surprises and returns later. If your business also has brick-and-mortar stores, allow users to check in-store availability online.
Description
Give customers a clear understanding of your products by providing detailed descriptions, with text and multimedia. Descriptions should be simple, clear and jargon-free. Consider tablet and mobile users by providing alternatives to Flash and Java content, and don’t require mouse hovering to access essential information.
Customer ratings and reviews
Unbiased and unedited ratings and reviews by customers will help visitors make up their minds about products that they may not be familiar with (for example, customer reviews suggesting to buy half a shoe size larger for a better fit will help others not make the same mistake). Many users look up ratings and reviews when they are in stores, not only at their desk, so make ratings and reviews easily accessible from mobile devices.
Suggestions of related products
These could be complementary products (for example, a USB power adapter when the customer is buying an iPod Touch), alternative products (different styles, models or versions) or recommendations based on other people’s purchases (“Customers who bought this also bought…”). Whatever their nature, they should be relevant and valuable to the user, not just an attempt to sell more.
Tools
Give users ways to save and share pages on the website. Businesses commonly do this through wish lists, “Email this page” features, and social sharing and bookmarking. Speaking of social, companies such as Buy.com (see screenshot below) and Wet Seal are experimenting with social shopping, allowing users to shop with their Facebook friends.
Contact information
Make it easy for customers to reach you when they need help.
“Add to cart”
Last but not least, make the call to action clear and prominent, to ensure that customers know how to check out.

The key elements of product pages on Zappos.com are highlighted.

Kohl’s offers a visual way to identify color and size combinations that are in stock.

Social shopping on Buy.com includes: (1) friends who are currently shopping together, (2) a chat window.

Reduce Shopping-Cart Abandonment
Customers abandon their shopping carts for numerous reasons, many of which can be prevented by improving the experience.

Make the shopping cart always visible and accessible, and display a summary of items in the cart, keeping check-out a click away. As basic as this sounds, some websites still don’t enable customers to get to their shopping cart without adding something else to their order.

Deal Genius offers no visible way to get to one’s shopping cart.
A persistent shopping cart is important. Users who leave the website without completing their purchase should see their items in the cart when they return. If the user is logged in, the cart should also persist across devices, allowing them to seamlessly continue shopping anywhere and anytime.
Using the customer’s address or ZIP code, show taxes, shipping options and costs, delivery estimates, and the total cost, thus avoiding last-minute “cart shock.”
Give users the ability to update their shopping cart without having to go back to the product page.
If you offer promotional discounts or coupons, give users the option to redeem them without making others feel like they are missing out on savings. Let users know how they can get these discounts (“Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get a discount on your next purchase!”).
Offer contextual support to answer questions that shoppers may have regarding when their items will arrive, your return policy, and how to contact live help through a phone number, call-back or chat. Display this information in a sidebar, on the shopping-cart page or in a small pop-up window, so that users do not lose the context of where they are.

Office Depot’s shopping cart features: (1) a persistent shopping cart, which shows the total cost and expands on hover to show its items; (2) the estimated total; (3) options to update the cart; (4) discounts, if applicable; (5) help options.

Keep Registration Short And Optional
Make the registration process optional and short; forcing registration is one of the main reasons why users don’t complete purchases. If you still need convincing, “The $300 Million Button” should drive the point home.

When the check-out process starts, allow registered customers to log in, and provide easy ways for them to recover forgotten account information.
Allow new customers to check out without registering. At the end of the check-out process, give them the option to register and save their information for future use. By this time, they will be motivated to simply create a password in order to avoid typing all of that information the next time.

Sears has simple check-out options, allowing new users to register after checking out.
Simplify and minimize the information required during the check-out and registration processes, by logically grouping the most important information first, and putting optional information towards the end. Some retailers, like Adorama, have got their check-out process down to one page.

Streamline Check-Out
Streamline the check-out process with relevant recommendations, a progress indicator, an order summary and confirmation.

Relevant recommendations can be a valuable reminder to customers as they check out. Like product suggestions, recommendations at check-out should be relevant and useful to the customer, instead of a way to try to sell anything and everything. Buying the same noise-cancelling headphones from Buy.com and Amazon resulted in very different recommendations, as shown below.

Very different recommendations from Buy.com (above) and Amazon (below).
“Enclose” the check-out process by removing the header, navigation and footer. This will minimize distractions and guide the customer through the last few steps to complete their purchase.
Use a progress indicator to show customers where they are in the process. “Three steps completed. Just one more to go!”
Give users a choice of payment methods. If users prefer not to give their credit-card information, allow them to pay by PayPal, Google Checkout or another trusted local payment option. Make sure the third party displays the total amount to be charged before asking for any payment information.
Link to your policies in context: link to the privacy policy when asking for an email address, and a link to the security policy near the credit-card fields. This relieves users from having to hunt for these policies and also instills confidence.
When displaying the summary page of their order, allow customers to verify (and change, if necessary) the details before confirming the order. This is also a good place to restate the estimated delivery dates so that they can change the shipping method if desired.
The final call to action that directs users to complete their purchase (“Place order”) should be prominent. Don’t lose customers at this stage by presenting other options to them.

The check-out process on Adorama has been streamlined to a single page: (1) progress indicator; (2) multiple payment options; (3) contextual policies; (4) option to make changes; (5) prominent final call to action.
Once the order has been placed, display a confirmation page, with the order number, saving and printing functionality, and a summary of the customer’s next steps or options. The order confirmation page for Shutterfly, a photo publishing website, not only tells users what their next steps are, but also displays timelines for the fulfillment of their order and contextual links to the next steps.

Shutterfly’s order confirmation page informs users what to expect next, using contextual links.
If your website allows new customers to check out without registering (as suggested above), then that would be a good time to ask them whether they would like to select a password to create an account and save their information for next time. Highlight some of the benefits of creating an account, so that registering at […]

Show of hands: If you run a website, how often do you consult your own search logs? I'm not talking about search engine optimization or inbound lead generation, here. I'm referring to the data that's generated by your site's own engine.

Anyone?

Lou Rosenfeld (@louisrosenfeld), author of "Search Analytics for Your Site," believes site search deserves a place in every site owner's toolset. These engines reveal the content that's working, the queries that go unanswered, and the things audiences need most — and all that information is tucked into datasets you already own.

Rosenfeld expands on these points in the following interview. He'll also explore many of these same topics during his upcoming session at Web 2.0 Expo New York.

Is site search often overlooked by site owners?

Lou Rosenfeld: It's not necessarily overlooked by users, but definitely by site owners who assume it's a simple application that gets set up and left alone. But the search engine is only one piece of a much larger puzzle that includes the design of the search interface and the results themselves, as well as content and tagging. So search requires ongoing testing and tuning to ensure that it will actually work.


Is site search data an untapped resource?

Lou Rosenfeld: If your site has substantial search traffic, then you already own scads of useful data that describe what your users want from your site — in their own words. Why would you not want to take advantage of this resource?

In my book, I cover different ways to improve many aspects of a site — not just search performance, but content quality, navigation, metadata, and overall performance. There's certainly enough there to keep a full-timer occupied. But if you don't have such resources in your hands, at least spend an hour per month reviewing two common reports:

Your site's most common queries — to see what's of greatest interest to your users and how those interests change over time.
Your site's most commonly failing queries — either queries that induce immediate site exits or those that retrieve zero results.

Dedicating just a little bit of time with these two simple reports will go a long way toward identifying and diagnosing problems with your site, many of which will be surprisingly simple to fix.

What are the best tools for analyzing site search data?

Lou Rosenfeld: Most common web analytics tools are lacking when it comes to helping analyze site search data. While you can get basic reports out of the big name tools, I always suggest downloading what you can into your favorite spreadsheet or database and playing with the data yourself. Your users, your site, and your organization are different than everyone else's, so you'll really want to get beyond your web analytics app's generic reports and interrogate the data as best suits your needs.

Search Analytics for Your Site — Any organization that has a searchable website is sitting on top of a valuable and under-exploited dataset: your search logs. This book shows how search data can improve your website and help you better serve your audience. See this title and others from Rosenfeld Media.

How do you act on the conclusions you reach from the data? Create more content for popular queries? Something else?

Lou Rosenfeld: Missing content is only one problem. You might find that the content actually does exist, but it's poorly structured, tagged, or titled. Or the content isn't prominent enough. Or your individual search engine results are poorly designed or unhelpfully sorted. Or that your deep contextual navigation is broken. Or that your search box isn't wide enough. These are just a few of the conclusions you might reach, but remember: analytics data can only tell you what might be wrong. You still need to use qualitative research methods to establish why.


Is there a particular site-specific search engine you recommend?

Lou Rosenfeld: Yes. The one you're using right now. Crappy search performance has less to do with your search engine selection process and more to do with not bothering to learn about users' needs and configuring your search engine accordingly. So before your CIO spends six figures on a new search engine license, at least make sure you're getting the most out of what you already have.

What's the difference between site search analytics (SSA) and search engine optimization (SEO)? Is SSA really just SEO for your own site?

Lou Rosenfeld: Pretty much. Large organizations have sites so jam-packed with content that searching them is as overwhelming as searching the web. In such environments, a decent search system is the user's only chance of finding what they're looking for. So site owners need to play God for their sites just like Larry Page and Sergey Brin have for the web — by ensuring reasonable search performance.

Does SSA reveal user intent better than other forms of analytics?

Lou Rosenfeld: I think so, as the data is far more semantically rich. While you might learn something about users' information needs by analyzing their navigational paths, you'd be guessing far less if you studied what they'd actually searched for. Again, site search data is the best example of users telling us what they want in their own words. Site search analytics is a great tool for closing this feedback loop. Without it, the dialog between our users and ourselves — via our sites — is broken.


This interview was edited and condensed.

Strata Conference New York 2011, being held Sept. 22-23, covers the latest and best tools and technologies for data science — from gathering, cleaning, analyzing, and storing data to communicating data intelligence effectively. Save 30% on registration with the code STN11RAD.

Related:

Search is the Web's fun and wicked problem
The economics of gaining attention
5 assumptions about social search
Social data is an oracle waiting for a question

Jason Taylor is the vice president of platform strategy at Usablenet. Usablenet’s platform powers the mobile sites of 20% of the Fortune 1000, including Estée Lauder, Hilton, Delta, Victoria’s Secret, FedEx, ASOS and others. Follow @Usablenet on Twitter.
Google’s Eric Schmidt recently noted that mobile search is growing much faster than desktop search. As mobile increasingly becomes a primary gateway to the Internet, it is crucial for companies to incorporate forward-thinking SEO practices into their mobile strategies to ensure their mobile sites are easily detected by search engines and found by consumers.
More than 60% of consumers search for brands from mobile devices before purchasing, and another 49% of mobile searchers made a mobile purchase in the past six months. Businesses must view mobile as a significant piece of their overall marketing campaigns that can drive substantial traffic and increase revenue.
Here are some high level SEO strategies that brands can implement into their overall mobile efforts to ensure they are getting maximum visibility.
1. Develop a Device Agnostic ApproachSearch engines incorporate various criteria in mobile browsers to determine page rank. These factors include overall site performance, usability, download speed and screen rendering. A fully optimized mobile site that extends all functionality and key content from a website will rank higher in search results than a website that has simply been reformatted for a smaller screen.
For example, simply transcoding a webpage through the use of a cookie-cutter template will strip it of key content, leading to incomplete pages and decreased overall usability. Difficult navigation and broken pages will result in a lower page rank and a negative user experience that discourages repeat visits.
The type of devices that consumers use to search the mobile web also factors into site ranking. Different mobile web browsers render pages in different ways, which is why it is essential for brands to develop a device agnostic mobile strategy that supports the wide variety of available mobile operating systems.
For example, Staples’ mobile site was developed to support all web-enabled devices. To decrease bounce rate (when a user views only one page on a site, but then leaves), brands’ mobile sites must automatically recognize the consumer’s device as it loads, and render the page accordingly to ensure a view that is best optimized for the user’s particular screen.
2. Leverage Traditional SEO Practices on a New PlatformBrands will ensure that their site stands out in a crowded market by translating traditional web SEO practices to mobile. Common SEO tactics that should be incorporated into all mobile sites include:
Appropriate Keywords in Headlines and Text: Consumers use mobile for more focused and task-oriented searches (i.e. for a specific location or product). This is different from how most people search from a desktop computer. By understanding consumer behavior, brands can anticipate queries and incorporate key search terms into page text, increasing detection from search engines.Relevant Page Titles and Accurate Page Descriptions: Page titles are one of the first factors mobile browsers use to determine where a page will show in results. Similar to traditional SEO, it is important that these titles reflect the terms that people use to search, increasing the likelihood that the site will appear relevant and receive better page rankings.Outbound Links: Despite less real estate associated with mobile screens, incorporating outbound links to relevant sources provides a more complete user experience and associates the mobile site with other trusted brands.Standard Coding: The wide variety of operating systems supported by mobile makes it extremely important for brands to follow valid HTML coding. Browsers parse through HTML code to determine search relevance. Any errors or invalid coding will result in broken pages and a lower ranking. Sites built in accordance to standards will ensure a consistent experience across all devices. 3. Incorporate Linking and Digital NewslettersMore than 20% of email marketing is read from mobile phones, which is why it is crucial for companies to test and support all incoming links from digital newsletters and other promotional materials. But how can brands make sure that their linking practices translate to mobile? In practical terms, these links provide one fully integrated experience while also allowing brands to cast a wider net by creating a connected presence across the mobile web.
Further, effective traffic driving tools such as email newsletters and social media allow consumers to share links faster than ever before. Links that are not tested or properly maintained will lead to a loss of traffic from redirects to the mobile site. Additionally, these links are important for a mobile site because they can be used by all Internet-enabled phones, including those with limited or no JavaScript support.
For example, Staples incorporates multiple links in its digital newsletters that lead consumers to different product pages or special offers on its mobile site. Consumers who click on “Hot Deals” are directed to the Staples homepage, which is different from users who click links for product promotions which lead directly to the specific product pages.
The Future of Mobile SearchThe rapid consumer adoption rate of smartphones, coupled with increasing advancements in mobile technology, means that mobile SEO is a powerful tool to move the needle on mobile traffic. Next-generation coding languages like HTML5 can be incorporated into mobile SEO practices to enhance a mobile site’s usability and performance, resulting in higher page rankings in search engines.
Advancements in location-based search results and integrated real-time social search results will further impact how consumers use mobile search and how browsers position results. In order to increase traffic to mobile pages and drive revenue, it is essential for brands to think strategically about how to leverage common mobile SEO practices in order to increase brand loyalty and maximize traffic.
Disclosure: Staples is a client of the author’s company.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Palto
More About: business, MARKETING, Mobile 2.0, mobile search, mobile seo, Search, SEO
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Last week, to make inroads against the deluge of page-scraping content farms, Google carried out some changes to the way it ranks search results.

The slow-but-sure subsuming of search results by content farms begun last year, but only really came to a head in January with a post by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. An outcry from the community followed, and culminated in a post by Matt Cutts on the Official Google Blog.

Google still seems to be downplaying the problem, saying that most Search users simply weren't affected by the content farms. Cutts says that the recent changes will only alter "less than half a percent of search results."

The net result, though, is that you should find the original source of content when searching Google -- and judging by our own traffic graphs here at Download Squad (there are a lot of content farms that replicate our posts), it does seem to have made a difference.Google attacks content farms by altering search algorithm, early results are promising originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 31 Jan 2011 06:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A client recently asked me to help come up with a list of "world-class" implementations of site search. "World-class" is always a red flag term for me, because it's a crutch term that suggests that there isn't a clear idea of what constitutes actual quality. (Ergo, it should be banned, like "redesign" and "building community".)

So, being the annoying consultant that I am, I gently scolded them, saying that there wasn't one ideal or even optimal local search implementation. But there were some principles worth considering. Here's my first stab; given that these took only a few minutes, I'll likely add more:

Keep the initial query entry UI simple
Make sure it's persistent in location on pages, and that it's on all pages
Support query refinement (and avoid "advanced search" UIs)
Repeat a query back in the refinement UI and display # of search results
Provide refinement options that fit the need (e.g., don't provide options that narrow result sets when 0 results have been retrieved)
Show just enough information—and the right information—per search result to enable users to get the information they need (either on the results page or by clicking through to a result page)
If you're searching multiple content areas, see if it pays to expose these differentiations; if so, what order should results be presented in? (federated search)
Support result sorting (e.g., chronological)—if it helps
Teach your search engine to recognize regularly occurring queries for specific types of information (e.g., names of people, products, unique IDs) and configure search results accordingly
Ask for feedback on search results pages—both quantitative and qualitative (e.g., "rate you satisfaction with what you found; if not satisfied, what would you have liked to find?")
Learn what your most frequent queries are; then test their performance regularly
Learn what queries fail most frequently, and fix them
Manually create recommended search results for the most common queries



Does this list stick against your wall? Anything obvious that I'm missing? If I can, I'll assemble good examples of each (and feel free to suggest some yourself).

The real estate bubble popped. Will the link bubble be next?

The real estate bubble was the product of greed, low interest rates, loose lending policies and derivatives. Nearly anyone could get a house and people bought into the idea that real estate would always be a good investment. The result of this irrational exuberance? Homes were valued far more then they were worth.

The Link Bubble

Are links that different than real estate?

Links have traditionally been a reliable sign of trust and authority because they were given out judiciously, a lot like mortgages. For a long time link policies were tight. You needed references and documentation before you earned that link.

In addition, links weren’t looked upon as an investment tool. The concept that links influenced SEO hadn’t taken hold. The motivation behind links was relatively pure and that meant Google and others could rely on them as an accurate signal of quality.

Links or Content?

Many have recently bemoaned the death of hand crafted content and the rise of content farms as a threat to search quality. But is content really the problem?

Content has little innate value from a search perspective. Yes, search engines glean the content topic based on the text. It’s like knowing the street address of a house. You know where it is and, probably, a bit about the neighborhood. But it doesn’t tell you about the size, style or quality of the home.

Long tail searches are akin to searching for a house by street address. So, content without links may sometimes produce results. But the vast majority of searches will require more information. That’s where links come in.

McDonald’s Content

Lets switch analogies for a moment. Some have called Demand Media the McDonald’s of content. There’s a bit of brilliance in that comparison, but not in the way most think.

Both McDonald’s and Demand Media crank out product that many would argue is mediocre. Offline, McDonald’s buys the best real estate and uses low prices, brand equity and marketing to ensure diners select them over competitors.

Online, Google holds the prime real estate. But that real estate can’t be outright purchased. And in the absence of price, we’re left with brand equity and marketing. Online, brand equity translates into trust and authority. And links are the marketing that help build and maintain that brand equity.

Demand Media has brands (their words) that give it automatic trust and authority. Publish something on eHow and it automatically inherits the domain’s trust and authority, built on over 11 million backlinks.

Writers for Demand Media are provided revenue share opportunities on their articles. Here’s one of the tips they give to writers to boost traffic to their articles.

2) Link to your article from other websites.

Link from your own website or blog, from a message board or forum, from your social networking profile on MySpace or Facebook and more. The more high quality links to your article there are on the web, the more highly a search engine will rank it.

Demand Media combines the installed brand equity of multiple sites (which happen to be cross-linked) with an incentive to contributors to generate additional links. The content doesn’t have to be great when links secure premium online real estate.

There might be something better down the road, but McDonald’s is always right there at the corner.

Link Inflation

The last few years have produced major changes surrounding links. Linkbuilding is now a common term and strategy. A number of notable SEO firms tout links as the way to achieve success.

Linkbuilding firms sprung up. Linkbulding software of various shades of gray were launched. Paid links of various flavors flourished. Social bookmarking and networking accelerated link inflation. And new business models like Demand Media sprung up to take advantage of the link economy, creating a collection of sites and implementing incentives that result in something that resembles derivatives.

Link policies went from tight to loose and people got greedy. Anyone can get links these days. So what’s the natural result of this link activity?

Link Recession

The value of links is inflated and at some point the system will correct. The algorithm will change to address the abuse of links. Unlike The Federal Reserve, Google probably isn’t looking for a soft landing, nor are they going to extend a bailout.

Some links will continue to matter. Links that are in the right neighborhood. The ones with tree lined streets, good schools and low crime. But will links from cookie cutter planned communities still be valuable? Strong links will mean more because they’ll hold their value, while many more links will be neutralized.

I’m no Nouriel Roubini, but I do believe that a major link correction is coming in 2010. Google must address the link bubble to make search results better.

Share and Tell:

Some websites have a hierarchical navigation path; for instance, the eBay URL collectibles.shop.ebay.com/Comics-/63/i.html?_pcats=1 is put in Home > Buy > Collectibles > Comics > Search results. Now, Google sometimes helps searchers by displaying such navigation hierarchy info in the green place that used to carry the page URL. The site’s domain is still shown, so above eBay example turns into the following Google line:
collectibles.shop.ebay.com > Buy > Collectibles

...and you can also click on the parts like “Collectibles” to be taken straight to that section.*

Note this doesn’t work for any URL or site. Also, sometimes intermediate hierarchical positions will be collapsed using a “...” to save space.

*If you can’t see these “breadcrumbs” yet, this may still be rolled out for you.

[Thanks Hebbet via the Google blog, and Jim!]
[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google Results Show a Page's Place Within the ... | Comments]
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Filed under: Google, Search, Web
Google sure seems hung up on the speed of the web these days, and I have to say, I like it. After announcing the SPDY protocol they're working on to speed up page loading time, it has come out that Google is seriously considering using page loading time as a factor when returning search results. This isn't some unsubstantiated rumor, either; it comes from none other than Matt Cutts, the high-profile Google employee who works on Google's web spam team.

Cutts said that the directive to speed up searching comes right from the top, Google's co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to Search Engine Land he said they want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.

At first blush it seems counter to Google's accuracy goals to favor fast pages over slow pages when a slow page might be more relevant to a user's search, but I know that I have often not even bothered letting a slow page finish loading when I was busy searching for something specific. If Google can shield me from the slow sites, it will help me find what I'm looking for more quickly.

Of course, now I have to do something about the slowness of my personal blog. But I probably should have long ago.

[Photo by chrisscott]
Google will factor page load speed into search result rankings originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google - Matt Cutts - Larry Page - Web search engine - Search