By Warren Colbert, interactive marketing specialist at  Baynote

Editor’s note: One important, continuing trend this year has been the integration of consumer search applications that used to be “out there” on a website with a search box, but are now integrated “in here,” or inside the blog or other online publications.  EveryZing, Sphere, and Collarity come to mind, as do Lijit and Zemanta.  In this post, Baynote explains how recommendation engines, site search, and social search can all become tools for the blogger or publisher to use to improve their product.

Navigation Gaps are cash sinks
If you had a leak in your car’s oil tank, would you run out to the store and pick up some premium oil and fill it back up again immediately? No, I hope. Otherwise, you’d just have a lot of premium oil on your garage floor. This is equivalent to pouring some expensive oil on the ground. The logical solution is to get your oil tank fixed, plug all the leaks, and then put in that premium oil to keep your engine running. This sounds obvious, but website owners are doing just the opposite. They are spending lots of money on premium services and technologies to generate high quality traffic to their websites that are full of navigation gaps. This results in more users falling in these holes and going to competitors’ websites. In essence, website owners are spending money to generate users of which a certain percentage will inevitably fall into navigation gaps.

What’s a Navigation Gap?
When users land on a website they follow a navigation path to get to the content or products of their interest, either through site navigation or site search. Navigation gaps are areas where website users are not finding valuable products or content and consequently abandon the site. When users fall into these traps they typically abandon their search and bounce back to the search engine; often landing on a competitor’s site.

How do I spot these gaps?
There are a number of methods to find these gaps on your websites. Analytics tools allow you to see the bounce rates and exit rates for pages. Pages that have gaps tend to have high bounce rates and/or exit rates showing the lack of user interest. However, these are very basic and somewhat unreliable metrics since they don’t explicitly tell you the intent of users that fall into gaps. More sophisticated reporting and analytics tools can give you insight on what these users were looking for before they left, giving you better information to plug these holes.

How do I fix Navigation Gaps?
Methods to fix navigation gaps fit in two categories, manual and automatic.

Manually. Analytics and reporting tools can give website owners deep insight on where navigation gaps exist on a website. By using this data, navigation gaps can be filled through site optimization procedures such as multivariate testing, manual document pinning to search result pages, website redesign, and other manually intensive tactics.

Automatically. Website recommendations surface relevant content to website users by engaging them with the best products and content at the optimal moment. Recommendations engines use sophisticated algorithms to match websites users with the products and content they are looking for without excessive manual input. Streamlining navigation is just part of the equation, the other is fixing search. Site search engines use keyword-based algorithms to retrieve search results, which often misses the mark since different users often use different terms to refer to the same content. As mentioned above, one method for fixing this is to manually pin keywords to documents through metatagging. However, this is not a scalable or effective process.

A more scalable solution is to employ a social filter that tracks the success and failures of your users and can map intent to search results instead of just keywords. These tools are frequently referred to as social search solutions. Robust social search solutions can reorder search results based on observed user interactions with website content. This allows site search engines to adapt to changes in the relationships between keywords and urls that occur on every website.

Fix the leaks first
In the current state of the economy it is even more important to maximize the return on investment for traffic generating methods, such as SEO and SEM. By employing tactics like recommendation engines and social search solutions, website owners are guaranteed to receive higher benefits from their search marketing campaigns.