August 29, 2018

Go Back to School with On-Site Search

For many students the hazy, lazy days of summer are drawing to a close. It’s time to start waking up early again as the smell of school supplies and laptops fill the air.

As families across America prepare to send students back to school from kindergarten through college, many remain unaware that according to the Deloitte 2018 Back to School Survey, we as a nation collectively spend over $27 billion dollars per year during the back to school season. This is especially great news for online retailers, as $6.3 billion of those dollars will be spent online.

Back to school (B2S) season is a tremendous opportunity for ecommerce businesses to grow revenue during a typically non-holiday time of year. But it’s not just online retailers who can benefit from the B2S frenzy that goes on each year. The websites of educational institutions and other content based portals are also extremely busy right now, as students and parents are searching for information on a wide variety of different topics. Regardless of the type of website that you operate, your on-site search platform will play a critical role in helping visitors find the products or information they are looking for in an easy to use, organized fashion.

As the excitement of a new school year grows with each passing day, here are 5 great tips to make sure your search platform is not only meeting your visitors’ expectations but also converting them into loyal, returning customers for years to come. The concepts and features below are an integral part of why HawkSearch has been so successful as an on-site search solution for organizations of all kinds, regardless of size or industry.    

Personalize Your Visitors’ Journey

Data has proven repeatedly that when online visitors use a search bar, their satisfaction and desire to take action increases significantly if the search results returned to them are personalized. By utilizing such technology as visitor targeting and machine learning, search engines today can produce results that have meaning to each individual visitor. It’s a well-known fact that personalized search results lead to conversions.  

 Recommend Relevance

Having a search solution that makes recommendations based on the type of products or information that already appeal to visitors can greatly increase the chance of conversion. This add-on HawkSearch feature unleashes the power of suggestive selling by populating sections of your landing page with headers such as “also viewed” and “more like this” to interest school shoppers. This tool can also be very effective on informational websites as additional content recommendations can be made based on visitors’ search queries.

Make Sure They Can Find It

Back to school season entices online shoppers to purchase items that all pertain to a certain theme – school supplies, books, pencils, laptops, calculators etc. The boost rule and pining capability features within HawkSearch allows online sellers to feature/highlight certain products to prominently appear when search queries are made. For education or informational websites, these same tools can be used to highlight information that is most commonly searched for or accessed at this time of year.    

Speak The Same Language

When people search for something on a website, they choose certain keywords or phrases that they hope will trigger search results that show the product/information they want to see. Be sure that the most popular keywords that site visitors are using are being recognized by your search engine. HawkSearch allows the ability to load in keywords for greater recognition continuity. In addition, it also offers powerful reporting tools that can help you understand which top keywords/phrases visitors are using. Successful keyword recognition increases conversions for any type of website.    

Ensure Search Success  

HawkSearch’s Smart Autocomplete feature allows your website to become a bit of a mind reader by predicting what visitors want to see. HawkSearch will finish the phrasing of search inquires made by users and even make spelling corrections to maximize results. If a visitor is unsure of how to describe something, the Smart Auto Complete will come to the rescue by helping them complete the search phrasing. This feature is a powerful tool on both ecommerce and informational based websites.      

The new school season is an exciting time for students, parents and teachers. Because there are a ton of school shoppers in the marketplace right now, It’s also a great opportunity to increase traffic on your website to boost revenues from school supplies or to spur action on informational portals. By keeping these five tips in mind, your search solution will play a very important role in delivering personalized and successful search results to every visitor.

To see HawkSearch in action for the new school year, check out these websites:    

www.orientaltrading.com    

www.vandercook.edu    

www.extension.missouri.edu    

www.marist.net

HawkSearch

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