If you own an eCommerce website the you will know how important the search function that your website provides is to convert customers including casual visitors to confirmed buyers. According to reliable statistics, users who use the on-site search function convert at a much faster rate
Experience has shown that users who utilize the online search convert at a much faster rate than users who do no use it. Experts refer to the conversion process as exponential conversion. Hence the ROI on such sites, where the search function is strategically implemented, is incredibly high. The way forward is to do a bit of work in the set up and configuration of your eCommerce website, and provide a decent search experience for your audience, so that they can find out what they are looking for.
When it comes to Magento, there are a variety of tools that are available onboard, so that you can accomplish this task. The Enterprise Edition especially, includes a range of features that help you increase your visits and consequently, sales. Some of the tips that help you make the most out of search are mentioned below:
For obvious search terms, you might want to create a redirect that takes your customer directly to the page that displays the product he/she is looking for. Thus, you will be guiding users to a category page that will give them a much richer experience. These pages have the ability to display banners, full-faceted sub-category as well as reductive attribute navigation.
You will know that SOLR presents itself as a very powerful tool in Magento with a standard install as well as configuration. However, you need to make sure that all the attributes need to be indexed as well as included in the search results. Hence, these attributes need to be defined in the first place. For example, color product or brand could be some items that they will be searching for.
Yet another way forward is to assign weights to attributes that are searched by SOLR. This will make sure that low-level terms are not being given the same priority as well as higher-value terms. Thee advantage of using SOLR over the built-in Magento search function is that you can assign weighting to each specific attribute that is a part of the product catalog. This step allows users to see improved relevance in the results. Thus, users will be able to find the products that the are looking for with related ease when they use the SOLR search functionality over the built in Magento search function.
Search filtering enables further result reduction. Hence, if your site has quite a large catalog, it is more than likely that your visitors will be presented with a large and expansive list of potential search results. Search filtering will be able to optimize this issue with the help of correct attribute weighting. However, it is now more common to include reductive navigation options. Hence, ensure that reductive navigation is working properly, which is an absolute key to providing a great search experience to users, as this enables users to refine results even further to find exactly what they are looking for. Here, you should be careful that attributes in Magento have a separate configuration option to appear in the category versus search engine listing pages. Hence, as the site owner, or the developer, you need to ensure that these are selected for inclusion in category navigation and are the same that are displayed in the search results, so that users experience consistent search experience.
Additionally to creating redirects for common search terms, it is a good idea to add synonyms for search queries. This will present users with the terms that are more commonly used across your catalog. For example, using ‘rose’ as a synonym for ‘flowers’ will make your search more powerful. You can further exploit this situation by including a redirect to the appropriate link that your customers want to go.
You Magento eCommerce site is not something that you can set up and forget about it while awaiting sales to happen. You need to revisit it now and then to examine that the configuration of your store is in place and is still relevant to the current market. Hence, focusing on issues such as search can greatly influence customer behavior for your profits as well the ultimate benefit of your website.
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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