Great search is an ongoing journey as websites, product offerings, and customer needs evolve over time. Algolia's mission is to help companies of any size create a world-class site search experience, and keep it up to the highest standards as they evolve.
This eBook is designed to give customers a checklist of practical, relatively easy ways to improve their site search. Recommendations range from core relevance and user interface design to improving search merchandising to boost conversion rates.
In the first section, you'll find our top seven recommendations to improve your site search. In section two, we offer resources for going more in-depth on each of the recommended topics.
Key search improvement strategies
- Improve data quality
- Tune your relevance
- Optimize your search UI
- Implement click analytics and A/B testing
- Merchandise your products, promote your content
- Take a mobile-first approach to search
- Personalize your search experience
1. Improve data quality
Formatting and structuring your data is the foundation of building great search relevance and UX. Audit and optimize your records to help users effectively search and discover your content.
Attributes should align with one of the four following content types:
- Attributes for searching (titles, descriptions)
- Attributes for filtering (date, category, brand, price)
- Attributes for display (UI template components: image URLs, title, description)
- Attributes for custom ranking (Conversion rates, page views, number of reviews, and average review rank are great ways for the audience to tell you what they want to see)
Data best practices
Delete any attributes with duplicate data, or attributes that don't comply with the 4 content types above. Lean records are fundamental to more performant and relevant search (in addition to faster indexing).
Check that numbers and booleans are not strings. Only true numbers and booleans should be used for sorting/custom ranking.
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 (let search analytics be your inspiration).
Convert dates into Unix timestamps. This will unlock sorting, filtering and ranking by date.
2. Tune your relevance
A great site search experience is most directly correlated with great relevance. The better you are at determining customer intent and serving them relevant results, the higher the conversion rates, the lower the bounce rates and the better customer experience will be.
Best practices for tuning relevance span several areas:
Basic tuning
Regularly review results for 1) your most popular searches 2) long-tail searches, and 3) most popular searches with no results. This way, you can produce content that your audience is telling you they want to see. All of this is especially important whenever there are bigger changes in your website content or product catalog.
Custom ranking
If you aren't using revenue-related metrics like conversion rates or profitability to adjust relevance, you are missing a big opportunity to increase the business benefits from search.
Synonyms
A critical but often missed relevance element, synonyms enable you to better determine user intent by telling your Algolia search engine which words and expressions entered by the user should be considered equal. For example, a search for “trousers” will find “pants,” and a search for “pants” will find “trousers.” Synonyms include prefix search, so if your user searches for pants, then searches for “p,” “pa,” and “pan” will start showing results for both “pants” and “trousers.”
Rules
Based on an “if this then that” logic, Rules let you make precise modifications to your search experience. Merchandising, intent detection, and context-based changes to relevance are easily made within Algolia's dashboard. With Rules, you can promote, filter, and develop thousands of strategies based on context specific to your business and market.
Consider advanced features like Personalization and Click Analytics
These are force multipliers for relevance, and we describe them in more detail below.
3. Optimize your search UI
Search is like a conversation: in the quest for content or products, consumers are essentially talking to your website and asking for help. Your User Interface (UI) is the very language in which this conversation happens, which is why it is critical to get it right. Consider the following best practices.
Provide a unified search and discovery experience
Users typically come to your site or other digital property to either:
- 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)
- 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.
You can accomplish all of the above, and more, by leveraging Algolia's InstantSearch libraries.
Display results from the first keystroke
Just like in real conversation, it is important that the end-user feels the UI react to their intent/queries. Don't wait for the 2nd or 3rd keystroke to return results! In addition, you should make sure you have properly configured your custom ranking, so that even with one character typed in the search box or bar, the most relevant and/or popular results come up.
Adapt the number of results displayed based on the screen size
On mobile, where real estate is small, it is difficult to display more than 1-2 “rich” results (with several attributes + an image). Instead, a great alternative is to show query suggestion results: complete queries of what the user might have had in mind.
On a desktop or tablet, where there is more screen space, you can display results together with filters/facets, so that users can both search and navigate.
Display and highlight searchable attributes
Let's say your customer is searching your sports store catalog and looks for shirts made with spandex. If you simply show results with workout clothes containing spandex, 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.
Use federated search
Federated search is a great way to surface all of the great content you have to a user. A user's query can reveal results from your product or content catalog, but also your documentation, blog, and website — all in one place.
4. Implement Click Analytics and A/B testing
Algolia analytics provide powerful insights to both understand the customer experience and needs, and the business performance of your search. Once you have these insights, we provide a host of tools for both business professionals and developers to further optimize search. This section focuses on Click Analytics and A/B testing as these provide the foundation for optimization, iteration, and testing that can deliver long-term increased revenue and customer satisfaction.
Click Analytics
This gives you visibility into click position, click-through, and conversion data. We recommend implementing this feature to first tune relevance to globally improve all of the above statistics. Once you've had good success there, you should look for keywords or groups of keywords that need more specialized logic. This is where Algolia features like Rules and the Visual Editor come in — more on merchandising and Rules in a bit.
Tagging
This feature lets you apply tags to searches so that you can isolate and optimize different categories of search. Two popular uses of tagging are to look at search results by language and device. This allows you to better understand search performance on mobile versus desktop, or how performance varies around the world.
A/B Testing
This allows you to test variations of your ranking logic and then choose the proportion of traffic that will receive the original or new ranking logic. You can then see the impact the new logic has on click ranking, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Optimize and iterate
Once all of the above is in place, the best practice is to create a full-cycle feedback loop where you optimize a host of different elements to build a great search experience. These include testing for new data cleansing strategies, ranking logic, synonyms, search-specific rules, and merchandising strategies.
5. Merchandise your products, promote your content
Each business is unique. Your online search experience should be aligned with your catalog specificity, revenue targets, promotional campaigns, and marketing strategies. Standard search configuration is not enough to meet these objectives. Developing your seasonal campaigns or tailoring your experience in search results can help unlock additional value for your platform. Use our Visual Editor to do it easily, with no coding skills required.
Seasonal campaigns
When you run a seasonal campaign and promote products or feature content on your website, make sure that related search queries have these same items promoted for a given timeframe. Simply drag and drop the items you want to show first.
Keyword optimization
The same way you optimize your category pages, you can optimize the matching keywords to ensure a consistent experience on your website or app by hiding or boosting relevant items.
User intent matching
Use the feedback your customers give you via search analytics to reduce your no-results rate. Deploy a global strategy and adapt it to your local customer base. Apply your core strategy to all your subsidiaries, and empower local managers to adjust merchandising and content promotion strategies locally to the relevant keywords.
6. Take a mobile-first approach to search
Mobile usage accounts for half of the total web traffic today: your mobile search experience should be as polished as your desktop search. Here are our top tips to address the unique set of challenges and constraints that mobile presents.
Screen real estate is scarce and precious
Make sure to carefully consider every single piece of information you want to display—only keep the most critical ones.
Reduce friction at all costs
Consider each interaction as a painstaking effort for the user. Use shortcuts and quick access to your content wherever possible: filters are your best allies.
Provide instant feedback for every single interaction
Because of the limited screen space on a mobile device, it's tempting to create a UI that doesn't show both filter options and the search results together. This leads to a poor user experience, where the user doesn't realize they have filtered out too many or all results and they keep adding more filters. Avoid this pitfall using UI tricks to show clearly to the user the effect her inputs have.
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 Wallet/Apple Pay/Google Pay rather than ask users to input a credit card number
- Use GPS to pre-fill the address
- Use biometric sensors rather than asking for a password
- Use voice, speech to text, or images for input
7. Personalize your search experience
Today, everybody agrees on the positive impact of personalization, for consumers and businesses alike. But, every business is different, and every audience has specific expectations.
Algolia Personalization enables you to combine your knowledge of your business, data we expose to you, and our algorithms to create the best personalized experience for your specific use case.
Here is how
Define your strategy
Define what attributes of your products and content pieces are the most important to personalize on: is it more important to personalize on the brand or the color, or a mix of both?
Define what user signals to take into account in your personalization strategy—is a user clicking “add-to-cart” more meaningful than a user opening a product page?
Visualize the impact of Personalization
Use our personalization simulator to visualize the effect of your personalization strategy on search results in real time. Quickly see how personalization changes search results for all your users for any query.
A/B test
Use Algolia A/B Testing to assess the impact of your personalization strategy on your search metrics with confidence.
Iterate
Whether you've added a “wishlist” functionality on your website that you want to use in your personalization, enriched your products or content with new attributes, or you just want to maximize the impact of search personalization, keep adjusting and iterating on your strategy.
Getting started resources
Improve data quality
Tune your relevance
Basic textual relevance tuning
Optimize your search UI
Implement Click analytics
Merchandise your products, promote your content
Content promotion
Merchandising strategies possible with Algolia
Visual Editor
Query suggestions:
Take a mobile-first approach to search
Personalize your search experience
See how Algolia’s AI search solutions can boost your business.
Request a demo
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