Most companies will focus their time and money on getting more traffic on their websites through organic (SEO) and paid (CPC) efforts but very few will review and optimize what happens with Search on their own sites.
Why does Onsite Search Matter?
Just think about it and if you’re not in the mood just “google it”. Search is everything today and if you provide poor search results, your visitors will quickly leave and check Google or Amazon – they don’t have time to understand how search works on your site (if at all).
Industry reports show just how relevant an onsite search is for eCommerce.
- Site search generates on average 13.8% of your overall revenue
- Users who complete a search are 1.8x more likely to checkout
95% of clients I have ever worked with had no onsite search optimization routines and I suspect that most companies overlook or work on this randomly. This is good news because once you review the below you will gain a significant competitive advantage.
You need to understand that you know your products best and you know what your customers purchase when they think about them so you are in a great position to show very relevant search results by creating search algorithms (mini Google).
All you need to do is create a weekly recurring task where you Review your top 20-30 website search terms. Go through each search term and replicate the results pages for both desktop and mobile.
Optimizing On-site Search on Magento
First Time Search Optimization Routine
- clean up Search Terms by removing all the single-use search terms and everything that looks like spam – this will help speed up your search
- go through your attributes and ensure only relevant attributes are Searchable (product title, brand, SKU, MPN, maybe even the barcode, NOT product description or other text-heavy attributes)
- have a look at your Catalog Search Configuration settings and ensure those settings are optimized. Check Magento Docs on Catalog Search to understand what every option means.
Weekly Recurring Optimization Routine
- check your top 30 most used Search Terms and create redirects and synonyms where needed. Examples:
- a visitor is searching for a brand – redirect them to the Brand Landing Page instead of showing search results
- a visitor is searching for trousers – create a synonym to help your website understand that trousers mean pants
- Continue with this routine week after week. You will see that it’s getting easier in time as the most used search terms have already been optimized and you only need to go through new search terms in more detail.
Follow the above steps at least ONCE and check your website’s Conversion Rate. You will be convinced that this is definitely a high priority task.
Once you have mastered this we can move into more advanced On-site Search Optimization tasks like keywords/attributes weights and priorities, extensions, and 3rd party services.
Reach out to me below with a Google Sheet of your top 30 search terms and I’ll help you to get started with your, first time, on-site search optimization routine.
Read about another recurring task you can start right away that will give you a great competitive advantage and follow our step-by-step guide to Landing Page Optimization.
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