Nowadays, your potential customers want a site that is more than just pleasing to the eye. They want their experience to be frictionless. In other words, your website needs to be easy to use and your products need to be easily found. And your site search solution should be able to do just that.
Search Solution Tips for Your Ecommerce Site
Site search is just like Google, but instead of searching throughout the internet, it searches your website. A good example is Amazon’s search bar. But unfortunately, most businesses just install their search solution and never go out of their way to optimize it for their customers. And that’s a big mistake.
Econsultancy found out that websites with site search had nearly twice as big of a conversion rate. That’s a lot of lost orders. For that reason, we compiled 10 tricks on how to improve your site search. Here’s what you need to know:
1. Make Your Search Bar Visible
When you’re designing your website, you want to make sure that your search bar is easy to find. Here are some ways to do it:
- Add it to your header. Other websites like Amazon and eBay do this. So instead of confusing them, you should put it in a place where it’s familiar to them.
- Give it some space. There’s no reason to hide it. So make sure it has its own space and can be easily found.
- Add a magnifying-glass icon. A lot of people associate this icon with search.
2. Give Filtering Options To Your Search
Another simple way to make on site search solutions more effective is to have some filtering options. A good way to start is by adding the ability to search for different product types. But it shouldn’t end there. You should also give them other options like:
- Color
- Size
- Material
- Price Range
- And much more.
The more detailed you make it, the quicker your potential customer finds the right product. And the easier it is to find the product, the easier it is to buy.
3. Add a Prompt to Search – site search Best Practices
While it might be a small detail, it’s still something to pay attention to. As you know from copywriting, people like to be told what to do. So adding a call to action like “search here” is an easy way to help your shoppers find the product they need.
Read more: Alternative to Google Image Search Engine
4. Have a Search Box Everywhere
Have you seen that wherever you are on Amazon, there will always be a search box on the header? That’s there because it’s convenient for the customers to start a new search. This way they won’t have to go back a couple of pages to start searching again. The only place that shouldn’t have a search bar is the checkout page so as to prevent the customer from changing their mind and continuing searching.
5. Add Descriptive Keywords to Your Product Page
Your customers probably don’t know the exact name of your products. So a smart thing to do is to put some keywords that describe the product. So instead of them not getting results when typing: “brown leather jacket” they’ll get exactly what they were searching for. You can put those keywords everywhere like description, title, tags, etc.
6. Add a Mobile-friendly Search Box
It’s no surprise more people are buying on mobile. That’s why it’s more crucial than ever to mobile-optimize your search box. There are a couple of ways to do it:
- Big buttons. The first thing you should do is make the search buttons bigger. That way your clients can hit the search button easily rather than accidentally pressing the delete button.
- Product Suggestions while searching. Another way to make it easier for the mobile user to find your products is for the search bar to make product suggestions while typing. This is both quick and convenient.
7. Never Have Any Dead Ends
Another thing to keep in mind is to never have any dead ends after searching. Even though you might not offer the exact product, you should still show some relevant products to them.
8. Offer Suggestions – Best tips for Search Solution Tips
To make your client experience even easier, why not give them suggestions while searching for a product? This way they get to their desired product faster and easier.
9. Make Sure Your Site Search Handles Long Tail Semantic Searches
The longer the search, the more likely it is that the person is going to buy a product. So make sure that your site understands what product to show when they write: “White-striped T-shirt Size M.”
10. Add Other Types of Keywords
And lastly, you could add other types of keywords. These keywords would include:
- Easily misspelt words. Sometimes the customer might misspell some of the words. For example, they might search for “Costum” instead of “Custom”. So add those misspelled words as tags so the site search could find them.
- Another thing to write down is synonyms. For example, when you own a watch store, you might also want to add “clock” or “timepiece” to your product tags.
- US/UK English Words. You probably know that UK English and US English have different words for the same thing. So don’t ignore them. Add “rubbish bin” to your tags if you’re selling trash cans.
