New Wave of Personalization Is Here: Time to Optimize Your Site Search

As a marketer, you are always looking to improve the user experience on your business’s website and provide revenue efficiently. Normally, you would be looking at the navigation and data of your site and make improvements, probably beginning with analyzing your goals and website metrics to gain insight at how your website is drawing in customers. You then move to the content strategies and campaigns to make adjustments. So far, so good, right?  No, not so good. You are looking in the wrong place for where you are missing out on not only revenue, but you are not taking advantage of your customer’s instincts to go directly to the search bar.

The acceleration of search capabilities, as seen in places like Google and Amazon, have given online visitors and shoppers the desire for instantaneous success when trying to find what they want. This movement is becoming more and more apparent and important to realize during the current economic situation. The ecommerce platform is surging, and more and more people are looking to find what they need fast. The majority of website visits occurring today are not customers casually scrolling around and window shopping. Although this obviously does happen, most people know what they want, and they look to your website to find that item when they arrive.  

There is only so much you can optimize and configure with your sites navigation until it will prove ineffective. Now, you may be looking at the analytics of your site search and do not see an overload of people trying to find your items through search, which is why you have kept choosing to improve your navigation functionalities. But there is a reason why no one is rushing to go to your search bar. You have not invested in a powerful and provoking internal search function to handle your customer’s desires. If your search bar is left undeveloped and lagging behind your competitors, why would your customers spend time on it? You are losing potential revenue and most likely are losing them to your direct competitors, who are only a few clicks away.  

Adjusting Your Goals  

So now that you have recognized the gaping hole in your UX, the focus/improvement upon your search bar, what tools should you be seeking out to make a search capability worth investing in? First, you need to know what your customers are looking for constantly and being able to keep up with the everchanging shift of customer’s interests. That means keeping up with shopping trends on a click-by-click basis and have the ability to adjust to those in order to successfully feed your visitors what they want without them having to look for it. This sounds like loads of content needed to be written and too much work for your website admin to handle. But it is not. With AI and Machine Learning, your site will constantly be understanding and soaking up your visitor’s movement throughout your website from the moment they enter. This includes anything from search queries they type to products that they click on and purchase or not purchase.

Based on these actions, relevancy will be improved by boosting or burying certain product or content results.  Also, as a marketer, without this knowledge of your customers, you will not have the knowledge nor ability to produce content that will keep your customers interested and staying on your site, which might have led to more conversions. If you do not have these capabilities on your site, customers will be bouncing from your site much quicker and at a higher rate. As a result, you will be losing possible revenue and returning customers. The priority of your website should remain the same: to present a personalized structure for your visitors and help their journey to find your products easier. But if you feel the amount of content on your website is immense, imagine how you site visitors feel.

This does not mean scrapping the content or drastically changing navigation, it means merging all of the content from all databases and providing relevant results through search. How does this happen? Intelligent Recommendations and the AI power. As customers begin to type, recommendation, synonym, and auto-complete functions all work together to sort through your data and provide suggestions to you customers as they type their query.  There is no better solution to launching your online sales than a search tool that works in unison with the rest of your website.  

Recommendations and additional features such as “More Like This” or “Customers Also Bought” show how good Search capabilities and AI Learning can you out of the search box. They already are moving on to what else the customer might want by showing them items similar to the one they are interested in. Although you may not be able to sell physically to customers, you can have your own virtual sales team working for you on your website.  

Catch Up to the Competition  

All of your instincts tell you to fix the metrics that look as if you have pitfalls in your website navigation, but site search success across industries proves that those tactics are insufficient and will lead to customers bouncing from your site or taking up time trying to find the right product but leaving your site with an unpleasant experience.  Website visitors are so attuned to external search engines being able to diagnose and adapt to their search history and tendencies. This makes it even more important that you adopt these principles and abilities into your internal site search. Anything short of that will give the customer a sense that they will need to dig and find what they are looking for instead of the website bringing them what they want. It is time for you to change your strategy and look for a solution that can learn and sell to your customers for you, and now is the most vital time to do so.  Learn how HawkSearch can help. Click here to see more on the HawkSearch platform.