Is your site searchable? That can be a great thing for users, SEO, and site behavior data. This is especially true for eCommerce sites, because who doesn’t love to window shop online nowadays? 🙋
But not all site search features are created equally. When you are setting up your internal site search, or requesting it from developers, you better have the best practices in mind for UX and your own analytics.
Here are five best practices to implement on your internal site search:
- Prioritize Attractiveness over Relevance: Relvancy is just one factor for a good UX in search. A balanced combination of relevance, attractiveness, and personalized attractiveness ensures that customers get what they actually want.
- Personalize Site Search Results for Individuals: This is especially true for stores. Once you have enough data about a specific user’s preferences, you can begin ranking products specifically for that user to give you the best chance of converting them.
- Effective and Transparent AI Tools: If you are using AI to manage your search capabilities, you may run into a lot of “zero results” pages. When choosing these tools, be sure they are adaptable to overlapping and synonymous terms as well as hands-on adjustments when needed.
- Enable Robust Merchant Tooling: Ever heard the term “searchandising” before? This is where your search tools can understand how to combine the most relevant results with your high-value products and offerings. This can include promoting newest arrivals or current campaign focuses.
- Improve Autocomplete: We’re saving the best for last here. Autocomplete is your biggest UX helper for search. This includes strong AI capabilities to correct misspellings, rank words by importance in a string, and preview search results when applicable.
Check out the full post by Constructor.io for more tips on search functions and boosting eCommerce.
