Once a visitor searches out your website, how will they find what they're looking for among the pages of information you're offering?  With all of the attention SEO and SEM receive, it's sometimes easy to forget that customers often need a way to search within your website.

Although a little dated, the message presented by Kevin Newcomb's "Study:  Drugstore.com Offers Best Site Search" is more relevant today than ever.

Customers expect to be able to search your site.  This is especially true if you're offering multiple products and/or services.  It does no good to drive traffic to your site if your merchandise is unusable once you're found.  If you don't have an internal, site-specific search function, you're behind.

If you've added search to your site, have you tested it?  How well does it work?  Do you offer any of the enhancements Newcomb's study mentions?  Are customers more likely to buy from you if they can search out your products?  More often than not, the answer is yes!

The benefit Newcomb's study omits is the carry-over effect of thinking about site search.  When you start tweaking and enhancing the pages on your site to become more easily searchable by your internal search engine, the additions almost always carry over to the big search engines.

Don't miss out on sales opportunities by having hard-to-find products.  Getting people to your site is only half the battle.