Identifying trends in language, or more specifically, identifying the words and terms people search for on the internet can be extremely helpful in discovering which words and phrases you should, or shouldn't use on your website to attract new visitors.

Lets say you were starting a business and were going to sell "widgets". You are getting ready to put together your marketing material and source vendors for product, but you aren't sure if people were interested more in "red widgets" or blue widget".

Doing a web search and simply observing the number of listings found on a search engine for either really wouldn't give you any insight into buying trends. But, if you could know which term more people search for, and whether the trend was increasing or decreasing, you would have a much better idea.

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There are just two words that sum up the internal search function of Volusion eCommerce shopping cart software -- but being a professional, I won't use those two words, and will instead just say, "not good".

When a user searches your Volusion store, the search only returns results where the search term appears in the Product Code, Product Name or if the words were (manually) entered in the Additional Product Keywords field of a product record. By default, none of the text in product descriptions, product options, category pages, help files, policy pages, the "knowledge base", (or image alt tags, meta data, etc, etc), or any other text in your store is searched.

To enable Volusion's "extensive search", (which does at least search the description fields of your product pages), you need to add the following hidden input field into your search form.

<input type="hidden" name="Extensive_Search" value="Y">

Still the result pages are poorly formatted and since there are no suggestions for mis-spelled words, semantic or contextual search functionality, and no "best match" -- this leaves the user to fumble through the results, or worse; may cause potential customers to leave your site and go to Google or another search engine to locate the product they want to buy.

You May be Losing Sales because of Volusion Search!

But, there is a solution...

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