Search Merchandising: 5 Tips to Optimize eCommerce Site Search

Connecting shoppers to products quickly is the goal when planning an effective search merchandising strategy. A strong Site Search, in combination with a robust Guided Navigation system, is the first step to reducing the number of clicks for your customers. Once these tools are in place (and we realize many high-growth B2C and B2B websites are lacking in this area), it is important to constantly optimize your eCommerce platform in response to how shoppers are using your site.

Below are the Top 5 Search Merchandising tactics that should be part of your routine.

Monitor Search History
Keeping on top of what keywords shoppers are using on your website is a good way to understand how you should merchandise your products so they'll find them faster. An effective Search History report should provide you with the ability to drill down to each of your websites, define a date/time range, and immediately see the keywords used by your shoppers along with 1) How many times these keyword was used and 2) Average search results. This will allow you to zero-in on key consumer searches and prioritize the rest of your Search Merchandising Plan.

Optimize Product Keywords
Once you're armed with real-world data of how your Site Search is producing (or not producing) search results, you can begin to optimize the fields searched by your platform. This usually includes adding or removing keywords to your products, adjusting titles and descriptions, and any other fields your site search platform uses (like product attributes for example).

Create Search Overrides
Search Overrides are a great way to ensure a specific set of products are included in the natural search results or that they're the only products that are displayed. For example, if you have a promotion running for a group of products, using Search Overrides you can ensure these products are at the top search results when the shopper searches specific search terms, regardless of the natural results the platform may produce. An example might be appending these promotional products to the natural results when searching Product Sub-Categories that these products might appear in or competitive brands you do not carry.

Adding Search Redirects
Search Redirects are used to when you want to totally avoid sending shoppers to the product search results. It usually involves sending the shopper directly to a landing page that is better suited for the customer and thus more likely to result conversions. For example, some merchants will redirect shoppers to a Guided Selling Page, Category Page, or Brand page for broad-based search terms brand names, topics like "Gift Cards", and more.

Add Attributes for Guided Navigation
Product attributes that are available for use with Guided Navigation (also referred to as Faceted Navigation) make refining large search results quick and easy. This involves creating or updaing Product Attribute Groups with key attributes that can be used with guided navigation. Then each product is updated with its associated attribute value. For example, a sock that is made of wool vs. cotton. Using this efficient search merchandising tactic, shoppers can immediately filter their search results with what interested them the most.

For more information about Search Merchandising tools from OrderDynamics, contact us today!