Supercharge Your Search Part 2 - Own Your Search
by Olly Burjan
Octobers's top CRO Edge-estion
In part 1 we discussed how you can easily collect customer data via your search, now it is time to own your customers' journey.
Conversion rates are proven to be over 5 times higher when visitors use search. Make sure your search bar has pride of place and is the most prominent feature of your site
Your search should be easy to use and search results should be relevant, accurate and rapid.
Getting your search to be relevant and accurate requires you to think about how you are using your attributes. Here are some key things to look at:
- Ensure that the correct attributes are set to searchable (most people have too many searchable attributes, which leads to irrelevant results).
- Ensure the search weight is set correctly on those attributes (prioritise some over others such as product name).
Attributes like product name, description, colour or SKU largely determine the relevance of your search results. For example, if you’ve prioritised “description” above “name”, the search engine will first show products with search terms in the description rather than the product name. This won’t give the user the most relevant results.
Another example that some sites fall foul of is having attributes like “weight” as searchable. If you have SKUs or product names containing numbers this will give you many irrelevant results. Here is the relevant search section of an attribute so you can make the changes needed:
In part 1 we showed you how to analyse your search data. Use this information to set up redirects for specific categories or products when searched exactly. This will help customers avoid browsing through the entire list of results. Remember to also reduce zero-result searches as we mentioned previously too.
If you want to take your search further we would advise installing a module that works for you. Modules we like are:
Their modules provides a number of great features such as autocomplete, spelling correction, synonyms and analytics.
To sum up; Magento provides useful data about how your customers are using your search (part 1) and enables you to take control of the most relevant results for your customers (part 2). Review your attribute searchable settings and search weights to make sure you are giving customers the best information. If you want to own your customers' search journey further have a look at a module as featured above. In part 3 we will discuss more visual aspects of the search.
