Posted by Many businesses consider site search merely another task on their UX checklist. Yet in an environment of increasing acquisition difficulties and customer expectations that have gone through unprecedented shifts, E-Commerce Development Agency in UK that don’t maximize site search’s full power are missing an opportunity to engage their target customers more fully and increase customer acquisition rates.
Site search can be an indispensable business asset, capable of driving sales, conversions, and creating positive user experiences. According to the E-Commerce Development Agency in UK, its effectiveness depends on intelligently configuring it – by carefully considering your e-commerce search strategy and adhering to best practices for site search you can turn it into a competitive advantage.
Importance of Site Search Just how valuable is site search?
According to one study conducted by Screen Pages, users who enter an e-commerce website searching for something are 1.8 times more likely to convert into sales; and even after losing 21% due to poor optimization of search functions on these e-commerce websites. Even so, search users still accounted for 13.8% of their total revenues.
Additionally, site search features such as promoted banners, recommended items, filters and facets provide users with content discovery opportunities on your site they hadn’t experienced previously – creating an unforgettable customer experience and keeping customers coming back!
Effective search optimization techniques for an e-commerce website
If your site’s e-commerce search function is outdated and ineffective, you could be losing revenue and new customers. Following these best practices for site search can significantly enhance its design and improve performance.
Filter Results
Users need the option of quickly finding content or products they are searching for by narrowing search results down based on brand, color, price, size or other filters and features. Offering filters or features like brand or color filters as an efficient means for doing this is often effective.
Automatic filtering is another feature designed to speed up users’ search efforts. As they search, this capability automatically eliminates potential results based on certain cues in their query and allows for better matching of a user’s intent by breaking down and interpreting semantics instead of performing simple text matching – for instance if someone searches “red toaster”, results should match descriptions more than simply products featuring red as part of the description.
Use autocomplete
Autocomplete, also known as query suggestions, is an indispensable user interface tool. As users type a query into the box provided, a drop down list appears with predictions of more popular and/or relevant queries to select from.
Autocomplete provides a conversational search experience if it’s responsive and relevant, providing users with instant results based on what they type in. As they type a query into the search bar, autocomplete functions as a dialogue that helps determine how best to return results – it should accommodate typos or grammar errors while producing optimal results for users.
Optimize Breadcrumb Hunt
Breadcrumbs provide users with a quick way to navigate quickly to their product of interest without completely redoing their search. Creating a visual hierarchy of categories may allow users to change the granularity of their searches easily.
Install a search interface
Federated search interfaces offer visitors one of the easiest, smoothest ways to easily browse products and content across an entire site. Federated searches can be configured to gather together products, tutorials, videos, resource pages and blogs in one results page with priority given to these results based on importance or relevancy to user queries – providing customers with a great opportunity to explore your diverse offerings without needing to navigate sitemaps or subdomains for answers.
Personalize results
As Google continues to increase their level of personalization, customers become accustomed to receiving customized search results across the web. Google uses past search history and location data. While e-commerce websites can customize results based on individual customer behavior and the individual profile. This enables businesses to use customer needs and preferences for personalized and contextual results that increase conversion rates.
Dynamically modifying what customers see increases the odds that they will search and discover a range of products most pertinent to them, leading to increases in KPIs such as customer purchase frequency, average cart size, conversions and revenue.