Some site owners prioritize great navigation to convert prospects into clients and keep them satisfied with the site’s usability. Navigation is important. However, it’s not everything. An internal search is essential. You have to modify internal searches to reflect your website’s content, business, and customers’ needs, habits, and desires. Check out the following findings:

• At least 50 percent of shoppers prefer using a business’s internal search function to find products or services that they need
• The number of orders increases as clients perform more searches
• Search functions are among the most efficient ways of converting prospects to loyal customers

With all these facts, you have to prioritize optimizing the internal search site search on your website. Like any other form of optimization, improving the performance of your search function can lead to higher conversions because prospects can find what they need easily.

Before this happens, you have to understand your prospects’ behavior. Prospects are more likely to use the internal search function because:

• They are used to searching for what they want on search engines
• They don’t want to spend a lot of time searching manually if they don’t have to

You can imagine their reaction when they find an internal site search that doesn’t work properly. Search engines like Google have spoiled most of us. They give us what we want quickly and effectively.

The fact is most internal site searches don’t operate effectively. And they end up costing the business managers a lot of money in the long run. To optimize your internal site search, you’ll have to make a few changes. Here are five great tips that will come in handy.

1. Make the optimization of your internal site search a part of your routine

After setting up the internal search engine on your website and understood the basics, you need to include a search site in your optimization routine. Investing in a website analyzer will help you figure out important metrics such as search refinements, exit rates, or zero results. These metrics will help you add more valuable information when conducting audits and generating reports.

2. Study habits of your prospects

Figuring out what your prospects are looking for is an important step. Look at your logs and use Google Analytics Site Search. Are there grammatical errors or misspellings that prevent prospects from finding and purchasing your products? Look at dictionaries developed for your industry. And fix your search engine to show relevant results based on the correct and incorrect queries. Next, create an internal search marketing strategy, and watch how your conversion rates will rise.

Look at what your prospects typed into the search engine to find your website. They’ll likely type the same terms in your internal search function. Figure out the keywords that your prospects entered and link them to corresponding products and search engines.

3. Offer help

Most prospects know how to Google. However, only a handful are familiar with the internal search on your website. Make it easier for them to use by offering radio buttons, auto-complete features, an option to narrow down results, and drop-down menus.

Showing previous results and suggestions for future searches will help in converting your prospects. Experts encourage site owners to invest in phonetic tools, spell checkers, controlled vocabularies, and natural language to prepare for any sort of thing a prospect can throw at the internal search.

4. Refine a catalog

You don’t have to add or remove anything from your stock. Instead, you should focus on extracting, normalizing, and categorizing. Look at your items and pick unique attributes. Choose standard descriptors across your products and use them to group organically. Ensure that your search handles phrases, numbers, and keywords. SEO involves much more than just single products and words.

5. Show descriptive results

How you present your results are as important as the results themselves because they determine how your visitors access them. To improve your presentation, you have to focus on:

1. Result numbers

How many results appear on a page? Limitless pages full of results tend to be a turn off to prospects. Prospects can end up looking at a list of endless results and regret using the search function. Organizing the results will help you eliminate clutter and maintain relevant results.

2. Relevancy

Do you have a ranking system that helps consumers identify the most accurate results? Do the search results include frequency and conversion rates? You should restructure your results according to customer behavior.

Do you have filters in place to help your visitors find what they want? Relevance, alphabetical position, price, and popularity are some of the sorting options that you’ll find on most websites. Look at your business and the searching habits of your customers to determine the appropriate filters. For instance, if you sell clothes, you might consider adding color, size, and price. Auto sellers can filter results by model, make, and year.

3. Visual appeal

Pure text results are not attractive and captivating. Consider making your results enticing by including product images together with descriptions. Your customers will appreciate your efforts because you’ll help them save time. They might even reward you by buying your products.

Bonus Tip: You can’t avoid “no results”

Regardless of how well you’ve optimized your search function to handle misspellings and alternate product phrases, you have to keep in mind that your prospect will see “No results” from time to time. This doesn’t mean that they won’t buy from you. Keep refining and improving your results. If they have bought your products in the past, chances are they will buy again.

Conclusion

Adding and optimizing the search function will do much more than increasing your sales. It will contribute to your SEO campaign and improve your search ranking to make it something hard to ignore. Since most business owners don’t invest a lot of time and energy in the search function, you’ll be a step ahead of them.

Article Submitted By Community Writer