Enhancing E-commerce Search Relevance for Increased Online Sales

Intuitively, we all know what it means. If we get down to brass tacks, search relevance is the correlation between a query and provided results: how closely the latter match the former.

Search relevance is made up of 2 elements: search recall and search precision. It's easier to explain those terms using an example:

Imagine a customer typing "plush toy cat" into a search box on an eCom website selling toys and pressing the "Enter" key. The search returns ten results: 6 are for plush toy cats, two are for plastic toy cats, and two are for other plush animals. The search's precision is 60%: 6 out of 10 results matter to the visitor.

Now picture the owner typing the same query. He'll get ten results for plush toy cats (only 6 of which are actually relevant), but he knows the store sells 20 different plush toy cats. That means his search engine's recall is a mere 50%, as it only showed half the stock!

Customers generally have a low level of tolerance. According to an SLI survey, 3 in 4 visitors will leave in 120 seconds or less if they can't find what they want. That's the most apparent reason why store owners should invest in their internal search engine. There are a couple of other reasons, though:

43% of consumers go directly to the search box on an e-commerce website. These are the most valuable visitors: they already know what they need, meaning they are close to making a purchase. They only need to see that a store has the product in stock and for a reasonable price. If users are greeted with fast and relevant search results, they'll quickly become customers.

Potential shoppers come for the product, but they stay for the experience: PWC tells us 7 out of 10 consider it pivotal when making a purchasing decision. If visitors' journey through the site was pleasant, i.e., they found what they needed and checked out successfully, casual browsers will turn into clients and return for more of the same.

A company's website is inextricably linked to how its brand is perceived. And one of the cornerstone qualities that define a website is navigation: 94% of consumers think of it as the single most crucial feature. And, of course, the search box plays a considerable role in navigation, especially on sites with massive catalogs and layered menus.

You can bump up your store's search relevance in many ways without hiring a software developer and getting into the nitty-gritty of boosting and stemming. Our smart no-code search app comes pre-equipped with all of them.

That's a key aspect in shaping your marketing strategy. Shoppers have all the products and services they can possibly think of at the press of a button: what they crave is an offer tailored specifically for them. According to the same PWC study mentioned above, buyers are willing to pay a premium for a personalized experience – and even give up their personal data in exchange for an individual approach.

Searchanise will help you delight your customers by personalizing the search results they receive. This will improve user experience and drive sales for your business!

🎥 Turn complexity into clarity and browsers into buyers.

When shoppers understand your products, they trust your store. And when they trust you, they return.

Learn how one merchant used Searchanise to deliver accurate, educational results that make complex products easy to find and easy to choose all while boosting conversion rates.

Watch the video now!

The term sounds scary, but the concept is pretty straightforward. Search weights are used to improve relevance in search results based on keyword matches across all product fields: title, description, and any additional fields. This means that when visitors do a query such as "red shoes," only relevant products with matching keywords used will appear first.

Searchanise, however, allows users to control the order in which search results appear by prioritizing certain fields.

Filters are a great way to extract relevant search results: they help narrow down search results once buyers enter a search query. Many websites disregard those: only 1 in 3 can boast they provide shoppers with a good experience.

With Searchanise, you'll get a selection of default filters right from the off (facets like price, vendor, and color), and you'll be able to configure as many custom ones as you'd like to suit your unique catalog.

Understanding the needs and pains of your customers is the essential step in stocking up on products they'll sweep off the digital shelves. Don't spread yourself too thin by aiming to please everyone. Instead, focus your efforts on your target audience, be it teens trying to show off before friends or corporate clients buying office equipment in bulk.

To know what they need, analyze what they search for, click on, and purchase – and what they can't find, all using the Searchanise analytics dashboard. Use the data to shape your strategy accordingly.

It's a well-known fact that digital natives are a lazy bunch: 95% don't go beyond the first Google results page. But you can do your customers a favor: show your products and entire collections/categories in-search and on the first page of results.

You can use Searchanise to bring products to the top of the list, get them noticed, and promote the ones you think are most worthy of it to shorten customers' path to checkout.

Synonyms are more challenging to use than literal equivalents, but they can still be effective in helping people find what they're looking for. Different types of people use different words to describe the same thing, and there's no way around that. The best you can do is make sure their alternate terms don't hide your search results from them.

Using Searchanise, you can create a list of synonyms in seconds so that customers will easily find the items they are looking for. That way, people looking for kicks still find your Air Jordans.

This is the "Did you mean?" feature. Potential customers don't want to spell out their queries in full because they are on the move and browsing from mobile devices.

So, suggestions based on what your shopper started typing in the search box's drop-down is a neat idea – and it gives you another way to promote your products right inside the search bar by manually adding your own apt product suggestions in Searchanise.

These are junk words or special symbols that your customers may use in the search box. Articles and prepositions, for example, will be ignored by default if they appear in a sentence.

The Searchanise stop word feature allows you to exclude certain words from your search. When this option is enabled, the search engine will ignore words from the stop word list and will not affect the results. So if your visitors are looking for a stainless steel knife and you don't want other knives to show up in the results, you can make "knife" a stop word, thus excluding it.

According to Baymard, 31% of queries end in "no results,'' and when users get no answers from search engines, there's a high risk they will give up on the site. But by paying attention to design details, you can transform what would otherwise be a disaster into an opportunity for content discovery.

You can offer recommended products that closely match the search query. Or else break down which queries end in no results using our Searchanise Analytics – and stock up on those goods.