The onsite search is often overlooked in ecommerce, but effective on-site search functionality on a company’s website is an increasingly important component of a successful digital strategy. Depending on the industry and the amount of products an ecommerce store has can make a difference to how integral the onsite search is.

When shoppers search directly on retail sites they are typically closer to the purchase decision. Brand manufacturers should aim to optimize their products to rank higher in search results for the most relevant and frequently-searched keywords.

Let’s discuss why onsite search is important to merchants and how to optimise it to get the best out of it.

Why is onsite search important?

Ecommerce has fundamentally transformed the way we shop. With new technologies being continuously introduced, users get pickier on what they expect from online retailers. 8 out of 10 users leave the online store if it fails to provide its customer with convenient website navigation, relevant results, or clear product information. Most likely, they will never come back.

When implemented correctly, onsite search shortens the user journey and gets the right product in front of the user quicker. This helps push the user further down the sales funnel faster. Conversion rates of websites with search options are 1.8 times higher than those who don’t offer on-site search. According to a study, 20% of searchers refined their search and 21% left the site from search.

How do you optimize the onsite search?

Placement

This is the most important thing, which is usually neglected. The search bar should be placed at a very obvious place and that is the header of your website. It should also have plenty of white space around it. White space around the search box makes the function more obvious. Without enough white space around it the user may get confused and simply avoid using it.

To make the placement of the search box obvious use an icon, such as a magnifying glass that will encourage the user to use the search function. The width of the search box should be big enough so that when the user types in their query it’s not scrolling. An obvious way to deal with this is to create a full-width search bar or one that expands when it becomes active. 

Mobile

On mobile devices, navigation can become a troublesome UX design challenge. If you have lots of collections and lots of products, the user will likely opt to use the onsite search engine. Making the search on mobile an important part of your UX will increase the usability of the ecommerce site.

Use Intelligent Search

Using an intelligent search engine helps to provide much better results. Using a platform that processes a user’s search query with natural language will ensure that even when the query isn’t an exact match, the right product is still displayed. 

Even when there isn’t a perfect match to the product the user is looking for, if you’re using an intelligent search platform then relevant results will still show. You’ll also be able to utilise content based articles within the search.

Search Results Page

This is one of the most important aspects of creating a better user experience. Ensuring that the right products appear for the search query is obviously important, but the design of the page should also be optimised. Running regular CRO design exercises on this page will help improve your conversion rate. 

Moreover, Integrating mixed content into the search results page may also help with engagement rates. This will obviously need to be tested and measured depending on the brand and industry. Also, it’s important to optimise the “no results found” page as well. This shouldn’t just be left blank. It can be used to upsell the latest collection or direct them to articles.

Merchandising

For creating an effective merchandising the on-site search can be the best place. Merchandising options should be customized based on query and search metrics. Weighting certain products heavier than others, will move them higher up in the search results. Using a combination of adding weight to products and intelligent search will put specific products in front of the user at the right time. This makes for a better, streamlined search experience.

E-commerce search bar best practices

It is clear that site search can have a huge impact on the customer experience and the business’ bottom line. There are a number of ways to improve the UX and overall design of site search to drive more utilization and conversions: 

• Use different colors. Outline the search box with a color that contrasts the site’s standard color scheme to quickly catch the eye and differentiate it from other aspects of the page.
• Try a different font. Similar to the color contrast, a different font can be used in the search box to add additional contrast.
• Have a search icon. Use common search-related icons such as a magnifying glass to help users identify search quickly and easily. 
• Make it easy to find. By putting the search box in a prominent location high up on the page, the customer is more likely to start their journey with a search.
• Use microcopy. Default or recommended search terms can help nudge customers to try a search. Common search queries from your existing customers work well for this.
• Make search instant and automatic. Search results, filters, autocomplete, and breadcrumbs should all be automatically shown as a user type to minimize confusion and increase the likelihood of clicking a search result.

How to make your e-commerce site search effective?

1. Filter results

It is important to give users the choice to filter search results to rapidly find the content or products they need. Offering filters that narrow down results by brand, color, price, size, and more is an effective way to do this.

Automatic filtering is another capability that can help users find what they need faster. As the user searches, it automatically removes potential results based on certain cues in the user’s query. This allows for better matching of a user’s intent by breaking down and interpreting the semantics of their queries rather than performing simple text matching. 

For instance, if a user searches for “red toaster,” the system should return results that best match the description rather than just products with the word “red” in the description.

2. Use autocomplete

Smart autocomplete is also known as query suggestions, it’s a powerful UI tool. When users type a query, a drop down of predictions of more popular and/or specific queries appear. This can have several positive effects, including:

• Less typing for the customer and less chance of them abandoning the site mid-search
• Guiding the customer to fine-tune their query, especially for longer, more precise queries or if they are experimenting with terms. This is especially important on mobile devices, as user attention spans are even shorter.
• Bringing customers to results faster, with less trial and error.

If the search engine is responsive and relevant, autocomplete can provide a “conversational” experience. As the user types a query, it’s as if they are engaging in a discussion with the search bar that helps the search engine determine how to best return results. In order to do this effectively, these predictions should be tolerant of typos and grammatical errors to ensure the best results. 

3. Optimize breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs can help users navigate to find the product they’re looking for without fully redoing their search. A visual hierarchy of categories, for instance, can allow users to adjust the granularity of their searches.  

4. Use a federated search interface

A federated search interface provides one the most intuitive and seamless ways for visitors to view products and content from all over the site. Federated searches can be configured to draw content as diverse as products, tutorials, videos, resource pages, and blogs into a single results page. That results on the page can be configured to be prioritized by importance and relevance to the user’s original query. This is a great way to enable customers to get acquainted with the diverse offerings of your site, without requiring them to dig into your sitemap or subdomains.

5. Personalize results

As Google becomes more and more personalized, customers get more accustomed to personalized search results across the web. While Google uses information like past search history and location, e-commerce sites can personalize results based on the user’s online behavior and include the user’s profile into the ranking strategy. This allows businesses to use customer needs and preferences to provide highly relevant and contextual search results. 

Dynamically influencing what the customer sees increases the probability that customers search and discover a range of products purchase that are most relevant to them.

 6. Optimize results

Ultimately, your e-commerce search platform should adjust dynamically to the needs of the business and the customers. A robust e-commerce site search platform can offer a variety of tools to drive optimizations, including:

Site Search Analytics

Every time a customer interacts with their search, they generate valuable business data for your site. Analyzing site search data helps you identify popular products, underperforming products, and gaps where users are looking for something you don’t offer. Site search data also reveals the searches that return “no results”—giving you a chance to fill this gap with relevant products and content (or direct users to related products they might like instead). 

E-commerce Merchandising Tools 

Merchandising is just as important online as it is in brick and mortar stores. By optimizing how products are displayed and recommended to customers, you can guide customers through the buyer’s journey, and optimise your online sales and/or conversion rate.

With a great site search tool, you can adjust ranking criteria for specific product areas or searches to nudge customers in the right direction. You can, for example, highlight specific brands, promote groups of items for certain queries, run marketing campaigns to promote a partnership with a supplier, optimize the results for specific queries such as popular queries, fine-tune your merchandising strategy per country, and much more. 

A/B Testing

As you refine and enhance your site search, it’s critical to measure the effects of those changes. A/B testing provides valuable insight into how search improvements actually affect customers on your site. Testing different ranking criteria or product placement ideas helps e-commerce site owners understand which searches are driving the best results, which searches are underperforming, and adjust accordingly. All of this testing should be done, and with some search as a service provider can be done, without hurting the whole website if the newest strategy ends to be less effective.

Conclusion

There are two major routes to consider while building on-site search: building the tool yourself or buying it from a third-party provider. Building your own search infrastructure eliminates the cost of buying a prepackaged solution, and you can customize your in-house tool as much as you would like. Whereas, buying a third-party search tool requires recurring subscription fees.

Spending time to nurture the onsite experience can improve your conversions by a significant amount.