Why site search is so important
Site search shouldn’t just be viewed as a convenient tool for your customers to quickly find what they are looking for. Site search is also a sales tool for E-commerce websites, similar to walking into a store and asking an employee where a particular item is. The hidden benefits of site search are becoming clearer and clearer especially for those running marketing campaigns. About 87% of site searchers have been shown to fulfill marketing goals compared to the people who don’t use site search.
Site searches promote purchases
Site searchers aren’t just looking for a quick way to find information on the things they are looking for. According to the latest research, around 43% of site searchers end up buying a product from the website.
That’s because when someone uses a website’s site search, they know exactly what they want. They may have found the product on your website before or even on a competitor’s website and they are going straight to it with intent to buy. Even if they don’t buy this time, there’s every chance that they will come back and buy the product in the future. The fact is that those users who use site search will have six times more chance of buying. That’s why you need your site search to point them in the right direction every single time.
Attracting traffic isn’t enough
E-commerce companies spend thousands of dollars every month to generate traffic to their website. But spending money just bringing that traffic to your website isn’t enough. You have to do something with the traffic once it is on your website. That means providing high-quality content or products, but it also means creating a website that is easy to navigate. An effective site search tool is essential for this. Users don’t want to scroll through dozens of pages to find what they are looking for, they want to type in the product and be taken straight to it. The better your site search, the longer the traffic that you paid to generate will stay on your site. And the value of retaining traffic has proven to be massive. Increased retention in traffic has been proven to yield as much as an extra $60,000 in revenue for a large e-commerce company.
Optimize your site search for maximum effectiveness
Simply having site search isn’t enough. You need to be working hard to optimize your site search constantly so that it yields the most relevant pages possible. With this in mind, it doesn’t make sense to make your site search case sensitive or to exclude misspellings. Most users aren’t going to type in the perfect phrase every time. Your site search has to be forgiving enough to cater for misspellings while being accurate enough to discern between two products with similar names.
