There are two main types of ecommerce shoppers—browsers and searchers. Browsers may not have any specific product in mind. Searchers know what they want and usually have less shopping time to spare.
Ecommerce site search helps reduce friction and help them find their desired products in the quickest way possible. When implemented well, it can boost conversions and AOV.
This article will guide you through best practices to optimize your ecommerce site's search capabilities, complete with real-world examples from successful online retailers.
What is Ecommerce Site Search and How Does It Work?
Ecommerce site search is a functionality that allows shoppers to search for specific products on an online store by entering keywords or phrases into a search bar. This feature helps customers quickly find what they're looking for, rather than having to browse through numerous categories and filters.
When a shopper enters a search query, the site search engine scans the product database, including titles, descriptions, categories, tags, and other metadata, to find relevant matches. The search results are then displayed, typically ranked by relevance based on factors like keyword match, popularity, and ratings.
Why Site Search Matters for Ecommerce
Site search matters for ecommerce because it directly impacts the user experience and conversion rates. A well-implemented site search allows customers to quickly find what they're looking for, reducing friction and frustration. This can lead to higher engagement, increased sales, and improved customer satisfaction.
Effective site search enhances the discoverability of products, especially for long-tail or niche items that may be harder to find through traditional navigation. By surfacing relevant results, ecommerce site search can help expose customers to a wider range of products, potentially increasing cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
The benefits of using site search in your online store
Improved customer experience and sales
Effective ecommerce site search makes the customer experience so much better. It allows shoppers to quickly find what they need, and helps them discover the best-fit product.
It can even introduce complementary products that'd genuinely enhance user experience, while increasing basket size for the ecommerce brand. This vastly improves conversions and sales, especially for businesses with extensive product catalogs.
Valuable insights into customer behavior
Your ecommerce search algorithm provides a wealth of data about customer behavior and preferences.
By analyzing site search data, you can understand what customers are searching for, what terms they're using, and which products or categories are in demand. It can give you insights like what colors your customers love or which material they typically go for.
This helps inform your product selection, the words you use in your product descriptions, and the types of marketing campaigns to run.
Personalization
Ecommerce site search data can be leveraged to personalize the shopping experience for each customer.
Besides tailoring product recommendations and campaigns, ecommerce websites can also personalize site search results to show products based on the customer's search history and preferences.
This can also surface products that may have been overlooked otherwise, exposing customers to a broader range of offerings and potentially increasing cross-selling opportunities for the ecommerce business.
13 Ecommerce Search Engine Best Practices (with Examples)
1. Ensure products are accurately named and tagged
For ecommerce site search to work effectively, your product names and descriptions have to be accurate, consistent, and include relevant keywords. This ensures that when customers search for specific terms, the most relevant products are surfaced.
For example, if you sell t-shirts, you might have a product named "Women's Cotton Crew Neck T-Shirt" with tags like "women's clothing", "tee", "short sleeves", and "cotton". This way, customers searching for any of those terms will find this product.
Make sure to use descriptive ecommerce product tags that cover various attributes like color, size, material, and style. This helps customers narrow down their search and find exactly what they're looking for. For instance, a tag like "red" or "plus size" can be incredibly helpful for shoppers with specific preferences.
Leverage Hypotenuse AI's automated product tagging tool to assign labels on your products. This helps minimize manual human errors and ensures consistency throughout. It also saves a ton of time.
2. Make your site search bar highly visible
The site search bar should be prominently displayed on all pages of your online store. This makes it easily accessible for customers to search for products at any point during their shopping journey.
Place the search bar in a highly visible location like the top navigation bar or header area. Make sure it stands out with clear labeling like "Search products" and an intuitive search icon.
On mobile devices, consider having the search bar permanently visible without requiring additional taps or clicks. This improves the user experience and facilitates easy product discovery on smaller screens.
3. Allow autocomplete and error correction
Autocomplete and autocorrect features can greatly enhance the ecommerce site search experience. As customers start typing in the search bar, provide relevant suggestions to help them quickly find what they're looking for.
Autocomplete predicts and displays the most likely search queries or product names based on the characters entered so far. This saves time and prevents customers from having to type out the entire query.
Error correction is another helpful feature that accounts for common misspellings or typos in search queries. If a customer accidentally types "shurt" instead of "shirt", the search results should still surface relevant products by automatically correcting the mistake.
This reduces friction and frustration, ensuring customers don't miss out on desired products due to simple typing errors. Implement robust algorithms to detect and correct misspelled words based on common patterns and learned data.
4. Use natural language processing
Natural language processing (NLP) can significantly improve ecommerce site search by understanding the intent behind customers' queries. Rather than just matching keywords, NLP algorithms can interpret the meaning and context of search terms.
This way, even if a user can't accurately describe what they're looking for, they can still land on the right product.
For instance, if a customer searches for "summer dresses", NLP can recognize that they're looking for lightweight, warm-weather apparel rather than just products with those exact words in the title or description. It can then surface relevant results like sundresses, maxi dresses, and other summer-appropriate styles.
5. Allow for misspellings and synonyms
In addition to error correction for misspelled words, your ecommerce site search should also account for synonyms and alternative phrasings. Customers may use different terms to describe the same product, so your search functionality needs to recognize those variations.
For example, a user searching for "couch" should also see results for "sofa", "loveseat", and "sectional". Someone looking for "running shoes" may alternatively search for "sneakers", "trainers", or "athletic shoes". By mapping these synonyms and related terms to the appropriate products, you can improve the relevance and comprehensiveness of your search results.
Consider implementing a robust synonym library that covers common variations in product naming conventions and consumer language. This can be built through data analysis of popular search queries and customer feedback.
6. Use faceted search
Faceted search, also known as faceted navigation, allows customers to narrow down results by filtering across various product attributes like category, price range, size, color, brand, and more.
Implement faceted search filters on the left or top of your search results page so users can easily layer on criteria like "Shoes" > "Women's" > "Running" > "$50 to $100" to get to the perfect pair of shoes. The more granular filtering options you provide, the better you can guide customers to their desired product.
Faceted search is especially crucial for ecommerce sites with extensive catalogs spanning diverse product types, categories, and variants. It prevents overwhelming customers with too many irrelevant results.
7. Add rich merchandising capabilities
Rich merchandising capabilities allow you to strategically promote and surface the most relevant products based on search queries, user behavior, inventory levels, and other business rules—not just the search query itself.
Some key merchandising tactics to incorporate into your ecommerce search include:
- Boosting popular or high-margin products to the top of results
- Highlighting sales, promotions, or new arrivals
- Dynamically adjusting results ordering based on real-time inventory data
- Bundling related products like accessories to increase average order value
- Personalizing results based on user preferences and past purchases
8. Gain insights into user behavior and search trends
Leverage analytics to gain insights into how customers are using your site search and which queries are driving the most traffic and conversions. This data can inform ongoing optimizations to improve relevance and findability.
Some key user behavior and search trends to analyze include:
- Popular search queries and click-through rates
- Zero-result searches and refinements
- Exit rates from search results pages
- Conversion rates from different search entry points
- Engagement metrics like time on page, pagination, etc.
Use these insights to identify areas for improvement, like expanding your synonym library, optimizing product metadata, or tweaking relevancy algorithms. You can also leverage search trends to inform ecommerce merchandising strategies, content creation, and inventory planning.
Make search data and insights accessible to relevant teams like marketing, merchandising, and product. Establish a regular cadence for reviewing key metrics and prioritizing enhancements based on user behavior and business impact.
9. Optimize search results for mobile devices
Mobile devices now account for over 75% of all ecommerce traffic and a growing share of purchases. As a result, optimizing your site search experience for mobile is critical. Here are some tips:
- Design a mobile-friendly search interface with an easily accessible search bar and clear input fields. Minimize extra taps and scrolling.
- Leverage voice search capabilities for hands-free queries on mobile devices.
- Optimize load times and site performance for slower mobile connections.
- Simplify search filters and facets for smaller mobile screens.
- Use responsive design to ensure search results pages render properly on all devices.
- Make product images, descriptions, and key details easy to scan on mobile.
- Implement click-to-call or location-based search features for local businesses.
By optimizing search for mobile, you'll provide a seamless omnichannel experience and remove friction from the mobile shopping journey.
10. Conduct A/B tests
A/B testing helps you experiment with variations of your search functionality to see which one yields better usage and conversions.
You can run tests on elements like the placement and design of your search bar, displaying rich media like images and videos in search results or introducing copy to guide searchers.
Make sure to establish a testing roadmap and prioritize high-impact experiments. Set up tracking to measure the impact on core KPIs like click-through rates and conversion rates. This systematic testing approach helps you plan ahead and increases your chances of achieving impactful optimizations.
One note—be mindful of limiting the tests to one variable each so you can clearly tell which change impacted the results.
11. Offer support for non-product searches
Users don't just search for products. Many times, they're looking for information like return policies, shipping information or even product care guides.
Ensure your search function accounts for these informational queries in addition to product searches.
That includes creating a dedicated knowledge base, FAQ pages or blog articles to address popular queries.
The search bar should also be able to handle synonyms and leverage NLP to map queries to the right content.
12. Avoid zero search results
There're likely 2 scenarios here. First, users who enter keywords that simply don't match any of the products or pages you have. The second is when searchers don't actually know what they're looking for and are just browsing.
In both or any situations, the search bar shouldn't yield no results as that can turn potential buyers away.
You can start by reviewing your zero search queries and prioritize those by search volume. Use autocorrect and synonym matching or create related content to address the queries.
Your search function should also offer search suggestions or prompts to rephrase the query in a way that's more likely to return relevant results.
13. Showcase trending queries
Prominently displaying trending searches on your site can help shoppers discover popular products or content they may have missed. Trending queries provide social proof and reveal what's currently resonating with your audience.
There are few ways to do this, like adding a "trending now" section on your high-traffic pages or including these trending queries in the search bar as searchers type.
When displaying trending searches, be sure to link them to the corresponding search results or content pages. You can also use visual cues like numbers, upward arrows, or fire icons to signify popularity and pique curiosity.
Leveraging trending data helps inspire product discovery, reduces zero results, and gives shoppers insight into what others are viewing or buying on your site.
Reporting on your ecommerce site search
Your ecommerce search functionality is a valuable tool that drives conversions and gives you actionable insights on customer behavior.
The user is already on your ecommerce site. Even if they don't buy, we should still try to make the most of their visits.
To succeed, it's important to continuously test and analyze. Review things like:
- What's the percentage of users leveraging the search bar?
- What's your conversion rate from search to clicks to purchase?
- What are the search terms visitors use to describe your products?
- What are your most popular products or categories?
This data can help you identify potential gaps in your product offerings or content. It can help you give your products more effective names. It can even boost your visibility on external search engines since users would use the same terms wherever they search.
Ecommerce Site Search FAQs
How important is search in ecommerce?
Search functionality is crucial for ecommerce website search. It directly impacts user experience and conversions. An effective search feature helps customers find products quickly, increasing the likelihood of purchases. Visitors who use site search are 2–3x more likely to convert, as they often have higher purchase intent.
How does ecommerce search work?
Ecommerce search engines typically use algorithms to match user queries with relevant product information. These algorithms consider factors like product titles, descriptions, categories, and tags. Advanced ecommerce search algorithm features may include natural language processing, machine learning, and personalization to improve results.
What are the different types of search in ecommerce?
There are several types of ecommerce site search functionalities:
- Exact search: where the product name is spelled and named exactly right
- Product type search: where a user searches for a general product or category
- Problem-based search: where a user searches for a solution to their pain point
- Non-product search: where the user searches for information like return policies or delivery fees
Conclusion
As you implement these ecommerce search engine best practices, remember that the ultimate goal is to create a seamless, intuitive experience for your customers.
By prioritizing relevance, speed, and user-friendly design, you'll guide shoppers effortlessly to the products they desire.
This will not only boost conversions but also enhance overall customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
