For eCommerce sites, there is nothing more terrifying than discovering your products are buried six feet under. Ineffective site search can bury relevant results to the point where your customers won’t find what they’re seeking. If your customers are looking for black hooded cloaks or wooden brooms, they may not even find them when they search using those specific keywords. Site search relevance can mean the difference between the life or death of your eCommerce website.
“The standard site search we were using was a horror movie of ‘Paranormal Activity’ proportions!” said Mark McTamany from Cell Bikes. “Unlike SLI’s relevant, targeted, and always-learning visitor-based results, our ‘built-in’ site search grabbed any and all results, whether they were relevant or not.”
According to McTamany, if a visitor, for example searched ‘bike tire’, they would get any and every result from the website with the word ‘bike’ and ‘tire’ in it. To make matters worse, the very first results tended to be seemingly unrelated to tires, such as a ‘car bike rack’, because the description had “secure your bike tires” in it.
“Ask many a visitor and they’d probably say our site search was possessed,” he said.
Good luck trying to sleep after visiting a retail site with horrific search!
A good site search will distinguish between keywords and surface the most relevant results with every search. SLI systems does this by learning the behavior of the visitors and their shopping experience and precisely tailoring the search to ensure the visitors find what they need.
Conversely, highly-relevant site search can be thrilling. When items that customers want materialize in front of their eyes, they are more likely to click through and make a purchase. A great eCommerce user experience is dependent on showing customers want they want quickly and reducing the number of pages that they need to click through to purchase the product.
“Our sales from site search were a paltry half of one percent!” said McTamany, of their initial site search solution. “Since using SLI, that figure has grown exponentially.”
Site search doesn’t have to be horrifying. Pick up your torch and pitchfork and take a stand against possessed site search results and exorcise the demons that return irrelevant and downright scary results.
