“Your search returns no results” and an empty page are not proven techniques to keep your customers engaged. You can easily add a static block or widget to the search results page.
The code in my demo site was contained in: app/design/frontend/base/default/template/catalogsearch/result.phtml. If you are running a custom theme (likely), change the /base/default in the path to your theme location. If it didn’t exist obviously we would copy …track/phtml to our theme to maintain the upgrade path.
The first improvement is to change the standard Magento “no results” message to a custom one:
<?php echo ($this->getNoResultText()) ? $this->getNoResultText() : $this->__(‘Your search returns no results.’) ?>
becomes
<?php echo ($this->getNoResultText()) ? $this->getNoResultText() : $this->__(‘Your search returned no results. Please try another search or browse our Newest Products below.’) ?>
Then create a static block in your Magento admin that contains some content to engage the customer when no search results are returned. Insert the line below before the final endif in result.phtml, updating your-new-static-block with the static block id you created.
<?php echo $this->getLayout()->createBlock(‘cms/block’)->setBlockId(‘your-new-static-block‘)->toHtml() ?>
For my example, my static block contains the native Catalog New Products List. Upload the results.phtml changes clear your cache, and regression test. All set.
You can test the search results difference on my Magento HLSM demo site.