When people search for your site (via the organic listings) they are very often taken to your home page and not the page that contains the items they are after.
For example I know if a customer searches for rabbit hutches for my site he or she will be sent to my homepage. Which might not be a major problem, but after analysing my stats a lot of people hit that front page then don’t go any further. One way I’ve tried to ‘encourage’ customers to browse to what they are after is to add links to popular section at the top of my categories, which has helped, but after further analysis I notice a lot of people just used the search box.

So I came up with the idea to automatically add the search term into the search box, if a customer comes from a search engine. That way they will see the keyword and just have to click ‘search’. They will then get a list of all the products they are looking for.

The pic below shows a heat map of my site BEFORE I added this little change. A heat map tells you where your customers are clicking on the site. It a good way to test layouts and new content. Crazy Egg have a free heatmap tool, although if you have a lot of hits you will have to pay. You can also use Google Analytics for this.

This album is powered by BubbleShare – Add to my blog
So as you can see their are a lot of people using the search box. Putting their keyword search term in there will not only make the site more user friendly but they will get exactly what they are looking for.

Full details on how to add this function click here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhd8sh6f_7ggkjqz
Currently the script only works for customers coming from GOOGLE, AOL, YAHOO and MSN and I’ve only tested it on Zen Cart Version 1.3.7

I’m still gathering data, but so far more people seem to be using the search feature a lot more. I’ll give you an update at the end of the month.

Give it a whirl and let me know how it works out for you.