Increase Sales Conversions with Your Website Search

A Website Search tool is one of the key factors on how an e-commerce website performs. If your customer can browse through your website with ease finding the required products quicker – the benefits can be immense to the overall website performance.

The first 7 seconds of the user experience is most critical in retaining a customer. First impressions of a website. Is it visually appealing? How easy is the website is to use? Are the products what the customer is looking for? Does the website have authority? Four factors that determine if the user will stay or bounce.

In this article we want to focus on how easy is the website is to use and highlighting how important the website search is in determining ease of use. The customer must be able to navigate through the website. The navigation bar always visible with easy access. A consistent theme in website design since the very beginning. With the advent of smart phones internet browsing is more wide spread on phone devices with smaller screens. Therefore, the navigation bar becomes too big and is confined to a small icon and much less prominent on the screen. If the user does click on the search bar icon with so many categories and sub categories in modern e-commerce website it is impossible to view all the options on mobile screen.

Displaying the Search bar in the website header as the main search tool can be a much better alternative. Obviously, it requires less width on the mobile screen and the customer can quickly search their keyword in seconds rather than clicking through navigation menus searching for the relevant product. So, in theory the Search bar tool can address longstanding issues in the user experience.

However certain parameters in the Search will be critical for the full functionality to be achieved otherwise the longstanding navigation issues will still exist. Can the Search results deliver the products the customer is searching for? Customer keyword search can be interpreted with many contextual meanings. The customer thinking differently to the Search. The Search criteria developed by Magento and indeed the other major software systems tend to focus on the keywords and not the context. Probably because it is merely impossible to incorporate all the keyword contexts and combinations that exist except of course for companies like Google with endless budgets to complete the research and development. The Search bar cannot solely depend on the search algorithm integrated by Magento or indeed Shopify developers. The Search must be customised for the website's audience. Finely tuned to specific keyword search navigating the user to the precise product page instead of multiple pages of endless irrelevant products.

How can we achieve a precise, specific, pinpoint accurate search directing the customer to the correct location even though the searched keyword can be vague and unclear. Search Terms and Synonyms in Magento 2 can accomplish this in e-commerce. Recording every Customer Search on the website the data is available to analyse the exact keyword phrase, the most and least popular phrases and the context that exist. The customer may use keywords to search that are not in the product title or description and so the search will fail.

On analysis of this information the Search Terms and Synonyms tool enables the Search to be directed to a specific page. If the keyword contains a product title or model the customer can be directed to the exact page achieving super quick navigation times with no browsing required. This is a major plus because finding products through search results can be very time consuming and a high percentage of customers will move on the next website on google.

Searches containing product category names can be directed to category product list pages and the same with brand keywords going to brand pages. Phrase abbreviations will most definitely cause problems for the search as product descriptions will rarely include abbreviations. Contextual meaning similarly will be missed as the search criteria will not have the ability to identify when a customer is searching in a particular context.

The only obstacle in Search Terms and Synonyms tool is the time and resources required to incorporate this strategy. The data keywords must be analysed and each keyword phrase must be matched with the specific url address. Take 1 month's data and there are a lot of keywords. Take 1, 2 or even 5 years data and there will be thousands or even a million keywords. Fine tuning these keywords will be time consuming and the Synonyms feature can make this a quicker process. However, customer knowledge is vital and this information is gold dust if implemented the correct way.

On a recent project PrinterInkCartridges.ie redeveloped their website Search implementing the Terms and Synonyms functionality on 75% of the keyword's phrases gathered over a 5 year period. 70,000 different keyword phrases existed and over half of these phrases had multiple searches. Some had over 1000 on the same search phrase. Certainly, a largescale task to format all these keyword phrases but the benefits were massive for the website conversions and how Google ranked of the site. The bounce rate reduced dramatically simply because the customer was finding the product quickly. Generating more leads as customer were able to get product information in seconds. Its only naturally that the sales are going to increase and within 6 months the website generated 80% higher monthly revenues.

Working in the Printing industry since 2009 responsible for website development and web usability at Printerinkcartridges.ie. An expert in Printing Technologies, Web Usability, SEO and E-commerce.