Camden Soil Mix provides products and services to customers in horticulture, agriculture, viticulture, civil works and commercial landscaping; as well as services in earth management to local councils.

Customers rely on the diverse range of sustainable, organic products on offer, and need the ability to find the right product to suit their growing or landscaping application.

Following acquisition by WSN Environmental Solutions, the business undertook a market analysis and segmentation project and, from this, developed a focused strategy to engage key categories of customers. They sought to re-design the website with these customers top of mind – so that each market segment could find what they were looking for quickly and easily.

Bienalto was engaged to devise the new site. The resulting architecture – which utilises faceted search on the WordPress platform – intuitively guides customers to the products they seek; whilst remaining supportive of WSN’s design aesthetic and sustainability focus.

Challenge

The acquisition of Camden Soil Mix by WSN in 2008 was a great incentive to update the company’s website.

We really needed to reflect our current activities – that is, producing and delivering organic materials throughout NSW – while building a site that would support our plans for diversifying the business,” said Kate Concannon, Marketing & Communications Officer, WSN.

With the new site, Camden Soil Mix sought to identify each market segment the business seeks to deal with – and group relevant products and environmental messages under each segment.

Working out how to channel customers to the right products was probably our biggest challenge. Having Bienalto clarify and convert the vision for the look, layout and functionality of the site into spot-on design and architecture was the easy part,” said Concannon.

Solution

To cater for all market segments, simple search functionality wouldn’t cut it. Bienalto sought a more intuitive, user-friendly approach – and faceted search fit the bill nicely.

Faceted search (or faceted navigation) – which allows a user to hunt for information via a number of different pathways – is popular on e-commerce sites for its ability to help users find what they want much faster.

Although Camden Soil Mix is not yet an e-commerce site, faceted search works well here too. It enables the logical grouping of products according to their ‘application’ (e.g. Civil Works, Nurseries, Orchards) and ‘type’ (e.g. Mulch, Compost).

Bienalto recommended WordPress for the site’s content management framework. Offering clients’ incredible ease of use and flexibility, WordPress is Bienalto’s platform of choice from a cost and performance perspective.

For Camden Soil Mix’s site, Bienalto started with a blank WordPress theme, designed the site to align with the client’s brand and incorporated proven WordPress plug-ins to match the client’s exact requirements.

Bienalto is one of the major WordPress developers in Australia now, and our expertise is being passed on to our clients in the development of sites such as this one,” said Hurol Inan.

“Our knowledge of WordPress, coupled with our strong background in information architecture and usability design, means that clients are getting the best of both worlds – a cost-effective build and a high-performing website.”

Results

The new site achieves the business objectives of driving brand awareness and providing segment-tailored education around products and their associated environmental benefits.

Camden Soil Mix now has an easy-to-use interface, which makes site updates and the addition of new products and services a breeze.

The Bienalto team managed to strike a balance between realising our vision and providing valuable input of their own to help shape this. They were very attentive to our objectives and put forward insightful and practical suggestions that significantly improved the end result,” said Concannon.

There’s a prevailing attitude amongst web users out there: site search doesn’t work. It’s not surprising, given the common practice of ‘let’s chuck a search engine on our site’ without planning how it should work.

If it doesn’t work, then why bother? Why should you include site search, when it requires a reasonable investment to implement and maintain?

I’ve been hearing these questions a lot recently.

Indeed, scout around the new generation of corporate sites and you’ll find that more and more of them are dropping site search. Without naming names, the recently redesigned Australian websites of a large auto manufacturer has abandoned site search (excuse the pun).

So is this the new black? Is site search dead?

The case for site search

The good news for people who are ‘searchers’ instead of ‘browsers’ is that site search is a fundamental element of some sites, and will never die. I say ‘some’ – news sites, e-commerce sites and large information portals all lend themselves to search. Their customers or users are generally specific about what they’re looking for, and site search becomes a crucial navigational tool.

These sites must invest in a proper implementation of site search – not just ‘chucking one in’. You need to think about the circumstances under which people might search on your site, and then create scenarios for different searchers. These scenarios give you your indexing rules and guide your decisions on when to emphasise certain types of content (for example, directing a user to a product page instead of an FAQ).

Then, when you’ve got your site search right, you can sit back and reap enormous benefits from the insights gained via site search analytics. You can see:

• Who’s using the site
• What people are interested in
• What language people use in searching for products and services.

These insights are gold to marketers looking to improve or enhance not only the site itself, but also how they position their products and services in the broader marketplace.

The case against site search

On the other hand, if your current site search only attracts a handful of users, or you don’t have the resources to maintain it, then perhaps your site would be better off without it. Why bother maintaining one if only a very few per cent of customers use it?

There’s also a strong case against site search for businesses that want greater control over what people see on their sites – and how they get to certain pages.

A previous client of mine, TressCox Lawyers, wanted clients to be able to see the full spectrum of what they offer, as well as the many partnerships they have. So they focused on building logical, clear navigation paths on their site so that clients could easily find their way around – whilst seeing what TressCox wanted them to see.

Interestingly, TressCox has still got a site search function on their site – but it’s buried down at the bottom of the page, to discourage people from using it.

I think the key message is that you shouldn’t do site search simply because everyone else is doing it. It’s imperative to get it right – you will cause more harm than good by having a poorly performing site search function.

Most importantly, I think the fact that people are questioning the relevance and value of site search is a healthy development. It’s a sign of maturity in the market, and can only mean good things for the quality of site search in the future.

More good reading on the topic:

• Kick butt with internal site search analytics (by Avinash Kaushik)
• Does your site search need a makeover? (by Hurol Inan)
• The benefits of site search analysis (by Hurol Inan)

What do you think? Does your business have a strong case for having a site search function? Or are you considering abandoning it? Post your comments below.

I lamented the fact that site search was a vastly neglected – yet eminently useful – tool on company websites.

So what’s changed in two years?

At Bienalto, we have witnessed a huge shift in attitude towards site search, which is great news for the user experience.

Recently, we’ve been working with a number of our clients on site search refinement (or faceted search). This helps to rectify the main problems with site search: high exit rates and low selection rates.

Check out the ‘Refine Search’ section of the Austrade site for an example of what we’ve been doing with our clients.

Further afield, Google now offers Internal Search Analysis reports. These reports tell you how many visitors use your site search tool, bounce rates, abandonment, search refinement and more. Avinash Kaushik shows you how Google’s tool works and provides useful steps to help you get more value from the tool.

Other analysts are getting on board the ‘site search analytics’ bandwagon too. Louis Rosenfeld and Richard Wiggins are writing a book, Search Analytics: Conversations with your Customers, due for publication in 2008.

Rosenfeld and Wiggins clearly ‘get it’, saying on the book’s blurb that “Search queries are gold.”

Check out Rosenfeld’s Site search analytics workshop slides if you want detailed instruction of site search analytics plus plenty of working examples.

Apart from these changes, the good news is that the methods and instruction described in Search Analytics still apply, and the benefits of using site search analytics to improve the user experience are as strong as ever.

Broader application

In addition to the goldmine offered up by analysing customer behaviour on your site’s search, you can use the data from site search to boost the performance of email marketing campaigns, too.

Regular readers will know that we have talked a lot about cross channel marketing and 360 measurement and reporting lately.

Site search analytics can become a powerful tool in the ‘integrated’ approach, allowing you to target email campaigns with content that your customers tell you they want to read about (through the search terms they use).