The usability of your site is very important for conversion, and website internal search is a key factor you need to focus on. Internal searches have to reflect your website’s content and the needs, habits, and habits of your customers.
According to Forrester’s research, around 43% of users go directly to the search box after entering the website. Moreover, onsite searchers are more likely to convert than the regular users who browse the website.
Reasons why you should improve your website’s internal search
- Better user experience – improving and refining the onsite search UX, you lower the bounce rate.
- Improves customer support and retention – providing relevant results to your shoppers will indirectly improve customer retention.
- Provides analytics to improve your content strategy – the statistics help you identify the most popular search terms, customer behavior, keywords and much more.
- Encourages social sharing – improved onsite search means usable and shareable content, which is a big plus for Google.
- Increases SEO.
Shoppers are impatient and they don’t want to spend a lot of time finding what they need. Most of the time, internal website searches are not optimized and their performance is fairly poor, resulting in a financial loss for business owners.
To avoid that, let’s discuss the changes you can make to improve your website’s internal search!
Consult Google Analytics for statistics
Find out what keywords visitors use to get to your website, chances are they will be looking for the same thing in your internal search. Also, use the Site Search log information to fix your search engine to provide relevant results based on visitor’s queries.
Give it around 2 weeks to collect enough data before you start optimizing your site search.
Here is a tutorial on how you can configure the onsite search in Google Analytics.
Create a user-friendly search section on your website
Put more emphasis on your search bar to make it easy for visitors to look for what they need. Improving the design of the search section increases the chances of conversion.
Design tips for onsite search box:
⦿ Make the search box easily identifiable
⦿ Include text inside the box, such as “Search for products”
⦿ Add auto-suggest options and integrate autocomplete
⦿ Allow “enter” on the keyboard to start the search
⦿ Adjust the size of the search box to fit long product names (at least 70 characters)
⦿ Make the search box available on every page
⦿ Highlight the search box with colors and design elements
⦿ Add call-to-action button, like “Find”
⦿ Increase the pixel and font size
Improve search results
If you’re looking to provide more specific results for your shoppers, consider using third-party software. This will deliver a better shopping experience and the product results your customers expect.
For instance, you can use SearchSpring to create a unique product search, long-tail search, search with special characters, typo corrections in the search, customizable no results page, product suggestions, predictive visual autocomplete, search preview, suggestions, synonyms, mobile-friendly search, and definable searchable fields.
Algolia is another tool you can use to improve site search. It offers analytics, autocomplete, typo tolerance, filters, query suggestions, synonyms management, and personalization.
The Algolia dashboard allows fine-tuning of the product ranking and creating search merchandising rules. It comes with search insights that help you better understand your customers and improve your product catalog and SEO strategy.
InstantSearch+ is a powerful solution for your Magento, Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce website. It provides highly relevant search results, it’s fast and self-learning. Amongst its features we can name AI-powered search, merchandising, navigation, personalization, recommendations, smart navigation, user-generated SEO, autocomplete, synonym management, and robust analytics.
Create dedicated landing pages
After analyzing your visitors’ data and results, you might want to promote certain products to bring more exposure to them. A dedicated landing page for certain types of items helps shoppers find out more about products, their usage and additional information, such as extra features, recommendations, product details, compatibility with other products and so on.
Conclusion
Onsite search is not something you want to overlook. Instead, it’s a valuable aspect you should invest in to get more sales and revenue. Shoppers are expecting fast and relevant results on your website, and you can improve conversions by taking a few simple steps, in an easy and affordable manner.
Website internal search is a hidden gem that’s not valued enough in eCommerce. The whole point of search optimization is to get more sales, to reduce friction for high-value users who know exactly what they are looking for and to capitalize on your efforts.
Not sure what to do next to improve your website’s internal search? Talk to our experts today!
