Assume you’re searching for new clip in shoes for your road bike, but you’re not sure exactly what you want. You go to your favorite bicycle or sports outfitter’s website and search ‘bike shoes’. But instead of turning up only the shoes specific to bicycling, it also shows you a variety of other shoes for hiking, running and water sports. Now you’re required to sort through a group of products to find exactly what you need.
For an ecommerce site, this process of wading through pages of products can quickly erode customers’ perception of your business. Whether your customers want a specific car part, a chiffon summer dress or clip in bike shoes, they want to find it quickly. In fact, according to usability experts such a Jakob Nielsen , if users do not find what they are looking for on your site, they will often assume the site does not have the product and will leave, rather than reformulating their search query.
Relevancy is, hands down, the most important feature of site search that drives transactions. When your site search returns results that your customers are looking for, they can quickly find and purchase the product. Luckily, there are easy ways to improve the chances your customers will find exactly what they’re looking for with the right technology, and a few easy-to-implement steps. SLI’s learning platform was designed to determine relevancy based on site search activity – it organizes which products are most clicked based on keywords entered into the search box. SLI improves search relevancy by not only displaying the most suitable products, it also continues to learn so that over time, the best results will be featured first.
In our new Big Book of Site Search Tips, we highlight a few tips you can use to further improve relevancy. Below are a few examples.
First, don’t alphabetize your listings (unless it really makes sense.) Alphabetizing may make sense on paper, but in action it can push the most relevant and popular products to the end of the page, or worse, to the next page. Keep your top-selling products where customers will quickly find them.
Second, use customer queries to understand their behavior better. Behavior never lies, and neither do customer queries. By observing what your customers are looking for, you can provide them what they need, and anticipate what new trends are on the horizon.
Additionally, you can lead customers directly to meaningful pages that you know they are looking for. This is especially helpful for searches for items that are all the same brand or type, or if they are searching for a service that has one specific landing page.
And beware searches that yield pages with no results. In ecommerce searches, it’s better to take your customer to a page that has other recommended or similar products, or to suggest other search query wordings that might help customers find what they are looking for. This reduces the number of clicks to get to a certain page and improves your site’s user experience.
Overall, it’s important to keep in mind that your customers are sophisticated searchers. Because they have used other effective search engines around the web, they’ll visit your website expecting a similar experience. By ensuring that search relevance on your site is just as good, you’ll meet, if not exceed their expectations for an easy shopping experience.
These are just a few of the many ways you can improve the relevance of your site; you’ll find even more ideas in our SLI Big Book of Site Search Tips 2012 Edition. You can also learn more about improving your site search through our video tips at http://blog.sli-systems.com/resources/video-tips.
