Tips for accelerating sales in your ecommerce website

The major success for any E-commerce site is how easily a customer can find the product that they are looking for.  Customers use the simple search button if they can’t easily find a product through the standard category search.  The simple search option has its own limitations and may not always come up with the results you are looking for.  In such case the advanced search option helps to accelerate the search process by searching through filters and at a deeper level. Successful searches increases the customer’s trust and also helps in increasing conversions.Almost all businesses in the world have their own website and try to optimize its profits with a wide range of marketing tools.


1. Focus on Location and the visibility of the search box 
The visibility and the position of the search box should be given importance.

2. Focus on Keywords that describe the business 
The internal site search should return results for keyword phrases that describe your business, or the keywords that you bid for.  For example, if your site ranks for “golf accessories”, the internal site search should also be able to return results for ‘golf accessories’, otherwise it creates a negative impact in the form of confusion on the customer – which further hampers the overall business reputation.  I’s also a good idea to place emphasis on the keywords that your marketing uses to describe the products you sell and that site visitors use in product reviews.

 
3. Emphasis Search by Category Refinement: 
For any magento developers ecommerce site that has thousands of products, adding a ‘Search by category’ refinement helps the customers to retrieve the data in less amount of time. This is because the search is being made only within a particular category and not on the entire product database.

4. Filter by Department, Size, Colour 
To get more effective results, you can allow the visitors to filter the result by some common criteria like age, colour, product, department and size and also on the number of products they want to view per page.

5. Handle Non-Product Searches 
The search functionality should be able to display results for non-product searches. For e.g. if somebody searches for the ‘Sitemap’, or ‘Contacts’.

6. Handle Site Map Information
Sitemaps are important for both the visitors and the search engines’ robotic visitors to understand the structure and architecture of the site.  The crawlers use it to index the pages that are buried deep inside the search engine directory.  The site search should be able to display results if somebody searches for the Sitemap.

7. Improve the Site Search with Google Analytics 
Google Analytics can be used as an effective tool for improving the internal site search. It can be used:
to track the repetitive keywords that customers are searching for and where your business is lacking.
to prioritise keywords depending on the frequency of the search terms.
to track the terms the visitors search from the “Site Search”. It also helps to identify the start pages from where they started their search, the destination pages where the visitor ended their search and also the categories they have visited.

8. Handle synonyms 
The internal site search should be designed in such a way that it can handle synonyms. For e.g. a search for “footwear”, should also be able to return results for shoes, sandals, boots and other types of footwear as well.

9. Handle miss-spelled search phrases 
Like any search engines that have the capability to return results based on  miss-spelled words, the internal site search should be able to perform the same and should be able to bring up suggestions for correct spelling. For e.g. if somebody search for “touser” instead of “trouser”, the site should be able to return results based on the correct spelling.

10. Display Relevant Results 
The search functionality should be able to return results that have relevancy with the search phrases. It’s better to display no results than displaying wrong search results for the keyed phrases. For e.g. if somebody search for “lunch box”, the search result should display results that are related to the phrase “lunch box” and not anything related to “dresses”.

11. Handle pluralisation 
The search functionality should be able to handle pluralisation and return results accordingly. For e.g. if somebody searches for “bedsheets” instead of “bedsheet” the site should be able to return the same result.

12. Provide suggestions as visitors type in 
The functionality of the internal site search can be made more effective by providing suggestions to the visitors that will appear as and when they write. This will help them to choose the right terms or right phrases further resulting a better search result.

13. Search by Product Code or ID 
The option of searching by product code or ID is another way of making the search an effective one.

14. Map the search phrases with the Product Page 
The internal site search should be designed in such a way that the keywords that visitors type in can map to the actual product page where they get the option to further filter down the search by other factors (size, price etc) and also they can directly complete the checkout process by hitting the “buy now” or “add to cart” link directly from search results.

15. Emphasis on short-tail keywords for better results 
The search criteria in the search engines and the internal site search are different. Long Tail Keywords have been the focus for organic SEO for better conversions, but to compete with oneself it’s a good idea to optimise the internal site search with the more frequently searched short-tail keywords for better results.


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