Navigation and search in e-commerce have always been important. But today more than ever. This is due to the explosive trend of “mobile first”, a reality when it comes to online browsing and shopping, as well as due to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has led brands and businesses to focus on improve the user experience in their online stores with the aim of increasing your conversion and loyalty rates.
One of the key elements to achieve these goals is to have a robust, fast, easy and personalized navigation and search.
For many online sellers the search bar it is simply a basic tool that fulfills the sole function of delivering results to product searches as queried by the visitor.
But what happens when this visitor makes the wrong type or does not write the word exactly as we have put it in the catalog? Or worse yet: What if you write a product or brand that we do not sell? Well, chances are you will miss out on the sale and end up buying from another online store.
What is an advanced search bar for?
With an advanced or intelligent search, we can transform all these situations into sales opportunities. We could compare a smart search bar with a personalized sales advisor for visitors who, in addition, informs you of the trends and performance of your products according to their demand.
It is important to note that an advanced search bar not only brings an advantage to the end user of the store, but also serves as a way to collect data. The success of large companies such as Amazon, Mercado Libre and even Netflix is due to the fact that they collect the largest amount of data from their customers regarding their searches, preferences and navigation on the platforms. This data is essential to constantly optimize their platforms and feed their algorithms with artificial intelligence to create personalized browsing experiences for each customer profile.
In summary, with an advanced search bar you will obtain key information for and best of all, it will help you to increase your sales offering products to your visitors based on their tastes and behavior within your e-commerce.
According to studies by , a user who does a specific search has twice the chance to convert vs. one who just browses the store. In addition, users who perform at least one search in e-commerce represent 30% of the revenue total (income) of a store.
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Reasons to optimize the search bar in your e-commerce
Here are seven reasons why you should enhance the search bar in your e-commerce:
1. Know what your customers and visitors are looking for
The benefit of being able to consult all the searches made by your visitors are multiple. On the one hand, you can measure which product, brand, color or model are the most valued by your customers.
In addition, you can also consult all the searches that do not return a result in your catalog, the “ZERO HITS”. These are useful to the trader as he can find key searches related to products or variants of something that in your catalog you do not have in your inventory or you do not have it indicated.
2. Increase the conversion of your visits
There are products or clothing that are said in several different ways, such as “jacket” and “jacket”. These two words mean the same thing, but if it is not present in your catalog, your visitors will never find what they are looking for. There are also times that products or brands are commonly written with typos or misspellings. This browsing behavior is very common, especially on mobile devices due to compressed keyboards. Both cases result in lost sales, not finding what they were looking for.
By having an advanced search bar you can configure synonyms, to solve this behavior. (ex: “Fornite” is set to synonyms such as:”fornight” “4nite” “forknine” fournine” etc.)
3. Improve the experience and usability of your online store
It is recommended that the search bar be always in sight and at the user’s hand, make it fast and effective. Predictive search is paramount as it saves customers time and effort.
Nowadays search bars come with visual search technologies, which allows the user to have greater freedom and precision with what they are looking for. Also thanks to innovative searches, such as “” of , which have the search by sketch (sketch) allow to increase the engagement of your visitors and provide them with a dazzling experience that makes them come back to your e-commerce and that they even share this type of experience.
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4. A useful tool to make digital marketing strategies
The data generated by the search bars is very useful when doing keyword campaigns (keywords) paid, such as GoogleAds, since we can relate the most frequent searches of e-commerce related to categories, collections or products and use them as keywords for your Google ads or YouTube campaigns.
5. Increase your SEO based on searches
Having an advanced search bar will force you to be working on your catalog to optimize your visitors’ searchesfor which this directly affects the SEO positioning of your product sheets and your categories.
6. Power promising products by leveraging them from the most used keywords
Consult the data generated by the intelligent search engine and look at the products that have a very high CTR (Click Through Rate, that is, the number of clicks obtained with respect to the number of impressions) and a low impression rate. These are very attractive products for your visitors but that almost never appear in the search results.
You can make these types of products more visible by placing them at the top of the results page for the most popular keywords, or configure them as featured products in your searches. This works as a direct (cross-sell) from the search instance.
7. Redirect traffic from search to a page
Create banners associated with specific searches that are carried out in your search engine. This is very useful for reinforce marketing campaigns that have specific landing pages. For example, if we have an active Christmas campaign with an associated landing page (page), we could configure it as follows:
Every time someone searches for the following words: Santa, Rodolfo, Christmas tree, Christmas decoration, etc… a Christmas banner appears with a link to the corresponding landing page of the campaign, complementing the search result.
Conclusion
Not having an automated search bar in your , translates into a loss of sales and not being able to access a source of valuable data where you can draw conclusions on improvements to your site, from a deep knowledge of the profile of your visitors and customers, as well as extract organic search keywords for future marketing campaigns and develop new business strategies.
We invite you to and switch from a basic search to an advanced search with artificial intelligence that will allow your customers to search with a photo or even a drawing. Don’t miss the opportunity to meet the insights of your customers and your business.
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