You’ve probably made some New Year’s resolutions like getting healthy and going to the gym or watching less TV – but have you thought about how to improve your business?
Now that the holiday rush is over, it’s a good time of year to take a closer look at all the components that make up your eCommerce business and see which ones you can improve.
We’ll be taking a close look in the coming weeks at ways you can improve the online shopping experience for your customers by improving relevancy of search results and other aspects of search and navigation.
The full list is available in our free Big Book of Site Search Tips. Here’s a close look at some of our tips for helping improve ‘findability’ on your mobile site.
Understand mobile users’ intent: Think like a detective, and follow your users around – virtually speaking. You need to learn how visitors find your site, and the paths they take once they get there. This is especially important in the mobile environment because without fast, easy ways to get to the products and content they want, mobile users are more likely to abandon your site. Make sure your mobile reporting systems can record how visitors arrive, which products they view, and how much time they spend on your site.
Account for misspellings and synonyms: Tapping out words on a mobile keyboard isn’t easy for most of us, and it’s common to misspell words – or, to type short synonyms instead of longer keywords, in hopes that you can locate a product with the minimum number of taps. Anticipate that your visitors will run into this challenge, and create synonym rules in search. These rules build linkages between words so that the correct product or piece of content is shown even if a word is misspelled or a different term is used.
Convert links into buttons for easier navigation: Similar to the problem above, even experienced mobile device users can find it hard to click on tiny links within text. (It’s painfully easy to click on something you didn’t want, forcing you to go back to a previous page and start your search again.) You can solve this problem by converting links to buttons, especially for functions like choosing sizes or colors, and adding items to shopping carts. By avoiding mistaken clicks, visitors can choose products and proceed to check out more quickly.
We’ll be covering more tips from the Big Book in the SLI blog over the next few weeks, but if you want to benefit from the full list of more than 100 ideas for better search, download the Big Book now.
