How to Improve Magento Website Search

Source: mageworx.com

According to the research conducted by Crazy Egg, 37% of respondents feel like abandoning a site if their experience with site navigation is poor. Does your Magento website search have poor UX? Is it slow and irrelevant?

Then, you’re pushing 37% of your customers away from your site. In this article, we share some working tips and tools to help improve search on a Magento website. Let’s dive right into it.Improving

What Does Website Search Include?

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Website navigation makes it easy to find your products. To make the best use of its capabilities, you will need to tweak the following areas of on-site search to perfection:

  • Live search. Available for Adobe Commerce users without any extra charge, it is aimed to deliver highly relevant and fast results.
  • Catalog search. Adobe Commerce users can investigate how shoppers do catalog searches on their sites. It helps better understand the queries and improve search results accordingly.
  • Catalog navigation. Optimization of how the users navigate from one site page to another one throughout your site needs exploration, implementation, and instant improvement.
  • Search terms. Leveraging and improving search terms is a must to achieve high results relevance.

Valuable Insights to Improve Magento Website Search

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While you can always opt for a paid third-party extension or a free Search Autocomplete add-on from Mageworx to improve Magento 2 website search, let’s figure out what can be considered and performed to improve the built-in functionality.

Search speed optimization

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No matter how much your customer base loves your offerings, we are living in a high-paced world where no person would sit and wait for search results to load. The shopper will either choose to ditch your site or get irritated because of having a poor experience from interacting with it. Either scenario is no good for your business.

Relevant search terms

The Search Terms Report that the default Magento 2 offers helps you access what terms users enter in the search field, how many times, and in how many hits they result. To access such data, log in to the Magento 2 admin panel. On the left, go to REPORTS, and then click Search Terms.

To assess the available data in more detail and analyze it conveniently, you can export it from the same location too. Based on the data you obtain about the words that people use to look for items in your catalog, make sure to add them as new terms and guide the site visitors to the most closely matching products in your catalog.

For that, you should go to the MARKETING tab on the left, and then click Search Terms under SEO & Search. To add a new term, click the Add New Search Term button and follow the setup flow and descriptions to the setup fields.

Treating misspellings and typos

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When typing, errors are common. Many make them, and just few try to eliminate such mistakes and deal with misspelled words. Thus, your e-store search should be typos-friendly.

For that, conduct the research to find the most common typos and spelling mistakes and introduce error tolerance in your Magento website navigation. The improved UX won’t boost the users’ experience only but help display accurate suggestions. As a workaround, you can consider displaying the misspelled terms next to the correct ones in the results.

Labels and synonyms

It’s not less important to ensure customers land on a searched page when using synonyms. And the best way to achieve that is by including different terms that shoppers may use to describe the same product.

For example:

You do not want your customers to ditch your site if they are looking for a couch, but your items are listed as a sofa. Or, you are selling cardigans, but your site shoppers are searching for zippers or sweaters.

The more possible synonyms you enter, the higher the chances the customers succeed in finding items they were looking for. To create a synonym group in Magento 2, first, log in to the admin panel. Next, on the left, go to the MARKETING tab, and then click Search Synonyms under SEO & Search. You’ll need to click the New Synonym Group button to generate a new synonym group.

Alternatively, you might want to add more words of exactly or near the same meaning to an existing synonym group. For that, in the Search Synonyms grid, you should choose a group you wish to edit and make the necessary changes. Do not forget to click the Save Synonym Group button in the upper-right corner to save your edits.

Auto-suggestions and auto-completes

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Automatic suggestions and completes are proved to be time savers. Integration of such a tactic has been found the most effective for Magento-based sites that have a wide product range.

As soon as site visitors start typing their queries, they can overview the list of the most relevant results that appear in the search box. Commonly, the list of most relevant results appears in a drop-box that unfolds as soon as the user starts typing. The Magento Community boasts a fair number of free add-ons to help merchants make the most of the functionality.

Some may even help you add a clickable recommended results block inside the drop-down with auto-complete suggestions that will take the shoppers to the right page. Other solutions enable a customizable AJAX popup to ensure instant search results. Thus, the pool of available options enables merchants to find a solution that meets their needs to the fullest or settle upon the native Magento 2 functionality.

Bottom Line

With all that said, it’s not always enough to integrate the mentioned strategies to make a good Magento 2 website search. Following the rules and relying on what you think a Magento site with good navigation should look like won’t guarantee that the visitor agrees.

To ensure your site visitors have a positive experience when using site navigation, it’s a must to monitor their behavior and experience, run A/B testing, and make adjustments based on the obtained data if necessary.

We hope you find this article useful. Are there any other activities that you regularly perform to ensure your Magento website search performs well? Please take a moment to share.