Best Practices for Site Search

Merely providing site search is insufficient — you must provide clients with a high-quality search experience or risk losing them. According to Forrester, up to 68% of customers would abandon a site that delivered a bad search experience. So, it’s essential to use site search as efficiently as possible. Here are a few best practice tips:

1. The search bar should be visible and easy to find.
2. Utilize auto-complete.
3. On the internal search results page, bold the search query keywords.
4. Optimise for mobile and voice searches.
5. Provide searchers with abundant filtering options.
6. Flexible browsing: go up and down the catalogue categories in real-time.
7. Advanced searches: Allow users to search for more than just a category, product name, or product type. Allow searches to be broken down into more subcategories that narrow down and give more defined information.
8. Faceted searches: Narrow down search results by applying filters.
9. Content aggregation: An aggregated search adds more weighted importance to a particular search term. This helps you to narrow your search and achieve more exact matches.
10. Avoid a “no-results page.”
11. Leave the search terms in the search box.
12. Make sure your site search is tolerant of typos.
13. Don’t optimise for industry jargon, optimise for the terms your customers use instead.
14. Provide search access to things other than your products: Example, SKUs, category, etc.
15. Consider adding graphics and Add-to-Cart buttons to search results.
16. Don’t be afraid to suggest complementary items or offer upgrades.
17. Deliver search results quickly.
18. Control crawl budget by using parameter-based on-site search URLs.
19. Avoid potential duplicate content with URL redirects.
20. Avoid thin content issues by handling ‘No Result’ pages.