Interview with Shaun Ryan – CEO of SLI Systems
Alan Stewart on Oct 26 2005 at 7:11 pm | Filed under: Podcasts
The 16th epipod of The Marketers Podcast features an interview with Shaun Ryan the CEO of SLI Systems discussing his company’s intelligent search technologies that helps you search, learn and improve. You’ll also hear Alan and Andrew driving their marketing speak… literally.
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So the sound quality is my fault, is that it? Well, I’m glad you’re responding to prompting, and it really wasn’t too bad. (There’s actually at least one podcast, Brainwagon, recorded entirely in a car, and people still listen.)
Congratulations on getting sponsors for the show and also on branching out into a second podcast. (Are you familiar with Venture Voice?) When do we get links to it in the show notes?
There are also some other internal site searches that are useful. Atomz (www.atomz.com) is a good example and have a lite version available for smaller site, which is a free service. This also gives you very good market intelligence on what is being searched for, which you can use to optimise your site.
However you should note that Atomz have recently introduced ads on this service, and although they take care not to advertise the same things, some are a little close for comfort, and as they come above the search results, this is a cause for concern. So much so that we are likely to drop this soon, even though it has been very valuable.
Since listening to this podcast I have been doing a little ’search testing’ of my own on a HiFi site I constructed for a client of mine (www.hifix.co.uk).
This site has always had a search facility, but now I can see that it is underpowered and not including all that the visitors wants.
All I did to find out this info was, on the results page I inserted an email script that captured the search term and the found count. I then started receiving emails as the searches were done. I now have over a thousand search terms and their results.
I can now see this info:
1. There is one manufacture that is searched for more than any other.
2. People can’t spell
3. A determined searcher will try all permutations of the search term.
4. My search script is inadequate*
5. There are themes of searches, possibility relating to product launch or press recommendation (need more data to verify).
*My search script is poor because it only searches the database of products, even though there are links on the site to such things as shipping costs, award winners etc, people are still using the search facility to try and find them. I can see straight away that I need to extend the search to include the text pages too.
It’s been very interesting doing this simple test and proves once again how valuable TMP is
Hey Ian,
That’s fantastic news.
I believe Shaun will be contacting you direct with some more suggestions.
Cheers,
Alan
Following up on Simon’s post – I believe Atomz show Overture results on their free service. It could mean you get ads for your competitors products showing on your own site search. This is fine if you’re not running a commercial site.
Avi Rapport has a comprehensive list of the search tools available on her site http://www.searchtools.com.
Correction: Avi’s last name is Rappoport