Every company focuses on their Google rank, but a lot overlook their internal search engine optimisation.
There are two ways to optimise your website's search. You can focus on getting particular products to the top of the listings, or you can push particular landing pages into the results. What's best for you?
Different approaches are right for different companies, but it comes down to how your website is set up. Do you have thousands of products, or just a handful? Do you understand how your customers behave? Do you have access to reporting on Site Search, and how it is used?
When you have the knowledge, you can make data driven decisions that positively impact your business. Don't work in the dark; shine a light with IXO Commerce.
At Iconography, we are constantly updating and improving our platform, IXO Commerce, and all of our features are built for both new and existing clients.
There are loads of ways to boost the performance of your Site Search; our team would love to discuss it with you.
There's a lot you can do with your Site Search; just take a look below!
What do your customers search for?
It's an important question, and the answer will really help you improve the experience on your site.
Do they search for colours or materials? Sizes? They might look for 'red shoes' or they might be be looking for a specific product. Whatever they're looking for, you need to decide what best to show your customers.
The first step in this process is to review your search logs and spot the patterns; then you can think about the next steps:
There are lots of different ways to search for the same thing. One customer might search for 'fluffy towels', while another looks for 'bath towel' and a third types out 'towels'; all three are looking for an identical product.
The problem is getting the right product to show in every search. It's hard to optimise for mutliple searches, so why not narrow the playing field.
With suggested searches, you can give clear calls to action to encourage customers in a particular direction. When they click in the search box, the suggestions fold down; one more click takes them to the results.
Not only can you push the 'correct' searches on your visitors, but you can also push particular products, categories or brands. Easy to edit and easy to manage, this is designed to be flexible for your changing needs.
Of course, just getting customers searching for the right thing might not help; if your products don't show up then you have a problem.
Like most searches, IXO Commerce's system has a complex algorithm that uses a variety of fields to generate results. From Keywords to Product Titles, we make sure that we're looking in the right places.
Still, just because we're looking doesn't mean that we'll find anything.
You need to make sure that you've gotten the right information in the right place; some are obvious, but some might take a little tweaking. You should always have a suitable product name and a brand set, but are you writing appropriate descriptions for your products? Meta Keywords can offer an additional, powerful way to link products to search terms and you should make sure to use them, too!
If you were looking for yet more incentive, a lot of this will also improve your Google rank - internal and external search engine opimisation in one go!
Once you're getting the right results, you also need to think about merchandising.
The basic idea is simple. If someone were to search for 'red shoes', products with 'red' and 'shoes' in their names will come above those with just 'red' or just 'shoes'; that is how search relevance works.
But what happens when you have 100 products which are matched equally? What if they all have 'red' and 'shoes' in the product name?
That's where you should merchandise your search.
It's easy to change the priorities; simply choose what's most important. Do you want to prioritise new products, or expensive ones? Cheaper products or most popular?
Of course, the answer will probably change a lot from week to week and month to month.
You're in sale? So prioritise the products with the biggest savings!
You've just had a load of new products? Push them to the top!
Whatever you select will have an impact on which products appear at the top of the search.
An alternative is to ignore the optimisation and just force certain results.
Rather than showing results for when a site visitor searches 'lego toys', why not redirect them to a page you've selected for that search?
With this, you can guarantee that all of the relevant products are in the same place, on an attractive page that'll hold your customer's attention.