4 Advanced Tactics to Improve Your Site Search

A great digital experience is most directly correlated with high search relevance. Whether you are offering products, news, courses, or recipes, the better you are at determining your customers' intent and serving them relevant results, the higher the conversion rates, the lower the bounce rates, and the better customer experience will be.

Here are four best practices for tuning relevance.

Best practice #1: Textual relevance

The name of a product, its brand, keywords in the description — what we call attributes — constitute textual relevance.

Here are three important ways to provide more relevant results to your users:

1. Typo tolerance: reading correctly into the user's intent even if they misspelled a word or used a stop word (the, and, at, with…)

2. Synonyms: offering users a synonym result (e.g., a parka when they typed in "jacket"). This includes prefix search (if your user searches for pants, then searches for "p", "pa", "pan" should show results for both "pants" and "trousers").

3. Making sure that plurals are accounted for: searching for "feet warmers" should display foot warmers, for example.

Best practice #2: Business relevance

Use your business metrics like click-through rates, conversion rates, and popularity to tune relevance, ensuring that the user sees content or products they are most likely to act on.

For example, track conversion rates on your products, and display first the results with the highest conversion rate.

You should use business relevance to promote and filter items, and develop strategies to amplify business benefits based on context specific to your business and market.

Best practice #3: Regular tuning and optimizing

You should regularly assess where you have opportunities to tune relevance.

Turn to search analytics to review results for:

• Your most popular searches

• Searches with high click positions (e.g., where the most popular item is in position 6 instead of 1)

• Most popular searches with no results

This way, you can identify searches that are not performing the way they should and then adjust your relevance. It's even more important to be doing this type of tuning regularly, because your customers' needs and search patterns will change over time.

It's also important when there are bigger changes in your website content or product catalog.

Warning: in some tools, fixing relevance for one search term can hurt relevance for other search terms.

Best practice #4: Data quality

Simply put, your search is only as good as your data (or your metadata). Your search data attributes should align with one of the 4 following content types:

1. Attributes for searching (name, title, description, brand, color, size, list of actors in a film)

2. Attributes for filtering (date, category, brand, price)

3. Attributes for display (price, brand logo, SKU, image URL)

4. Attributes for business metrics (conversion rates, page views, most viewed, highest rated)

Here are some data best practices:

• Regularly audit and optimize your records to help users effectively search and discover your content.

• Delete any attributes with duplicate data, or attributes that don't comply with the four content types above. Lean records are fundamental to more performant and relevant search.

• Extract important keywords from long textual attributes. Lengthy descriptions introduce noise to search and can lead to confusing results. Create a keywords attribute that aligns with the vocabulary your users are searching with.

2. Perfect your UX/UI

In an ideal world, the majority of your customers will find what they want on their first search attempt, and it will be in one of the first 3 search results. However, when customers are forced to hunt further to find what they are looking for, dissatisfaction issues can arise — and with those issues, increased bounce and site abandonment rates. Giving your users the ability to find what they are looking for — and refine it in an intuitive manner — is key to getting the most out of your search.

Consider the following four best practices.

Best practice #1: Provide a unified search and discovery experience

Search, in an effort to find exactly what they are looking for (e.g., a pair of jeans in a certain brand, color and size), or browse, with a potential intent to get something, yet not exactly sure what (e.g., a business casual outfit that may include a pair of jeans).

You should allow users to start by either searching or navigating, then further refine their results by leveraging the other strategy in addition, for example offering facets after the user performs a search, or making facets searchable.

Best practice #2: Display results from the first keystroke

Just like in a real conversation, it is important that the end-user feels the UI react to their intent and queries. Don't wait for the second or third keystroke to return results. Search-as-you-type experiences encourage users to type twice as many search terms, which can lead to more relevant search results and increased conversion rates. In addition, you should make sure you have properly configured your textual and business relevance, so that even with one character typed in the search box or bar, the most relevant and/or popular results come up.

Best practice #3: Display and highlight searchable attributes

Let's say your customer is searching your catalog for comfortable loungewear, and looks for items made with spandex. If you simply show results with clothes containing lyocell, but the user doesn't understand why those results showed up, they may think they encountered a search error and abandon your site in disappointment. This is why it's always best practice to display and highlight searchable attributes — in this case, highlighting "spandex" in results.

Best practice #4: Use federated search

Federated search lets you surface all of the great content you have. A user's query can reveal results from any product or content catalog on your digital property.

3. Take a mobile-first approach to search

Mobile usage accounts for half of the total web traffic today, and the competition for consumers' attention is fierce. Users are on the go, more time-constrained, and easily distracted by notifications, so their experience on your app must be as polished and frictionless as possible. Here are our top three best practices.

Best practice #1: Make your search bar prominent and well-placed

Here are three great options to make the search bar more visible to your mobile users.

• Dedicated tab

• Full length

• Simple icon

Best practice #2: Adapt the way you display results to the screen size

On mobile, where real estate is small, it is difficult to display more than 1-2 "rich" results (with several attributes and an image). Instead, a great alternative is to show query suggestion results: complete queries of what the user might have had in mind.

Best practice #3: Make the most of the device capabilities

The mobile environment can be difficult: connectivity challenges, small screen, distractions… but, on the bright side, devices are loaded with useful tools and functionality that you should be using when possible.

• Use the Wallet/Apple Pay/Google Pay rather than ask users to input a credit card number

• Use the GPS to pre-fill the address

• Use biometric sensors rather than asking for a password

• Use voice, speech to text, and images for input

All of this reduces friction and provides a better user experience.

4. Increase conversions

Modern search is a critical part of your digital experience, and it should be measured and used as a key lever for growing your business. Defining search KPIs is a critical first step towards getting value out of your search experience. Here are three practices to boost those KPIs.

Best practice #1: Personalize the search experience

Today, everybody agrees on the positive impact of personalization, for consumers and businesses alike. But, personalization can take many different forms depending on your website and customer needs.

Here are best recommendations for success with personalization:

• Define your strategy

• A/B test

• Iterate

Define your strategy

Sometimes what matters is your customers' previous purchasing history, sometimes it's brand affinity.

• What attributes of your products and pieces are the most important to personalize on: e.g., is it more important to personalize on the brand or the color, or a mix of both?

• Or, is what users have just done on your site much more important?

• Is a user clicking on "add-to-cart" more meaningful than a user opening a product page?

Before setting out on a personalization path, it is critical that you understand your users, their needs and signals.

A/B test

Use A/B testing to assess the impact of your personalization strategy on your search metrics. Let's say that you'd like to personalize search results based on both views (e.g., if a user has seen a product page, or a landing page), and clicks (what a user has clicked on). A/B test this strategy to see if it positively impacts your search metric. Then, as the next test, you might test personalizing results based on conversion data, like when a user adds an item to cart or makes a purchase, watches a video or reads an article, etc.

A/B testing allows continuous, iterative optimization, criterion by criterion, and adds confidence to the decision making process.

Iterate

No matter what strategies you implement to improve user experiences, be sure to plan on testing, adjusting, and iteration. It's almost impossible to get everything right the first time, so iteration is essential to getting actual business results from your search.

Best practice #2: Implement search analytics

From a practical standpoint, search analytics should enable you to follow your users' every search: results they get, no results, "empty" results, etc. It should help you model your users' behavior by breaking down their searches into metrics like popular searches, click position, number of "no results," and filter usage.

Search analytics will get you thinking more objectively about how to structure your product data, and how to configure your ranking and relevance. You will see whether your products are properly described or represented, whether the correct products show up in your search results, and whether, based on the searches, you have too much of one product and not enough of another.

The overall goal of search analytics is to help you make data-driven decisions when building and improving your search experience. If you can't measure conversion rates and click data from search, you will never know how much potential you have to benefit from your search, or how much impact your improvements have really had.

Best practice #3: Merchandise your products, promote your content

When it comes to getting the most out of your search tool, it is your best bet to empower your business teams — digital strategists, product managers, merchandisers, marketers and content editors — to manage and optimize your search.

For one thing, they are the ones defining growth strategies for your products or content. Secondly, they are most directly responsible for ROI and improving business results. Last but not the least, this will free up precious IT/developer team time that can go towards improving user experiences.

Your business teams can align your search strategy with your catalog, revenue targets, promotional campaigns, and marketing strategies.

Seasonal campaigns

When you run a seasonal campaign to promote products or feature content on your website, make sure that related search queries have these same items promoted for the same time period.

Keyword optimization

The same way you optimize your category pages, you can optimize matching keywords to ensure a consistent experience on your website or app by hiding or boosting relevant items.

Deploy a global strategy and adapt it to your local customer base

Use the feedback your customers give Apply your core strategy to all your subsidiaries, and empower local managers to adjust merchandising and content promotion strategies locally to the relevant keywords.

 

See how Algolia's AI search solutions can boost your business.

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