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Have you ever used a website’s site search feature, glanced at the results, and then concluded it wasn’t worth your time to keep searching for what you were looking for? If you think about it, you’ll understand that this has most certainly happened to you more than once. Even some of the most trusted websites present information that is completely inadequate, imprecise, or just plain wrong.
Continue reading to understand how to provide your site visitors with better results and how to enhance the number of site searches that result in purchases or leads.
Employ the Magnifying Glass Icon
On your website, a magnifying glass sign should always be shown next to the search box. We highly recommend that you incorporate this icon in your user interface since it is a frequently used depiction of search and has universal recognition among users. Not only does it save space, but it is also identified faster than words.
You may either place it on the search button or manually input it into the search form.
Size Your Search Bar Accordingly
The size of your search bar will be determined by how important it is to your website as well as how long you expect a typical inquiry to take. It is not recommended to make the input field too short, which results in just a piece of the text being seen. This results in poor usability since it is difficult for users to evaluate and change their query quickly.
A text input that is 27 characters long is a good rule of thumb since it can accept 90 percent of inquiries.
Start Utilizing Search as a Service
Many third-party companies provide search engine software as a service to help businesses run their site search engines daily. As a result, marketing teams can focus more on their campaigns while leaving the duty of managing search engines to a third party.
Include Informative Content
There are visitors to your website who are not looking to buy anything from you. A lot of them are looking for specific information about your products or services. As a result, another important way for improving your website’s search feature is to ensure that there is enough information-rich content for customers to view.
Take Care of Misspellings
You will inevitably have some typos and misspellings in your business. Take notice of why all of the main search engines contain “Did you mean?” spelling corrections. Even though spelling suggestions are incredibly significant, the bulk of website search engines do not support them. If a user continues to use an inaccurately spelled query, you must handle the issue carefully on the page that shows your search results by providing a link marked “Did you mean?”
Provide Clarity about What Users Can Search for
Include a sample search word in the field for users to write, or make it obvious whether or not users may combine several search criteria. This gives users indications about the queries that may be used. It is critical to keep the cognitive load as minimal as possible, so the placeholder text should disappear as soon as the user begins typing in the field and should only be a few words long.
Improve the Results Manually
There are a variety of commercial search engines that can be connected with your website. These search engines provide the ability to manually enhance common search terms. Regularly reviewing search logs and examining the replies that your website’s search engine offers to typical user inquiries may help you, as the owner of a website, make better use of the resources at your disposal.
If your relevance algorithm is unable to retrieve items that you previously considered to be of high relevance, you should manually highlight those items and place them at the top of the search results list for certain queries.
Simplify Your Results Page
When it comes to site search, the results page is the very last stage of the customer journey; thus, its significance in deciding whether or not a user makes a purchase cannot be understated. This implies that to boost conversions, the user experience (UX) must be greatly satisfying, with an excess of results being just as negative as an inadequate number.
When confronted with 1000 results, the majority of customers do not want to sift through all of the available options to find the best product. Customers should instead be able to order the results based on a wide range of parameters, such as price or color.
