How to benefit from your Site Search engine’s data to improve your strategy and boost your e-commerce sales

What would it be like if you could read your customers’ minds?

If you use an advanced site search engine you will be closer to get it.

Among many things, you could know:

• Which products will sell for sure.
• Which topics they are interested in so you can write about them on your blog.
• How to optimize product cards to boost conversion.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be a mentalist or a crystal-ball clairvoyant to know everything about this. You can do with your site search engine data.

We have addressed the important role it plays in improving user experience. Besides, the internal search engine data can help you improve your sales strategy.

Would you like to know which data we’re talking about and how to use them to boost your e-commerce?

Keep on reading to learn how to make the best of your site search engine. 😉

👉 Which data can you know thanks to your site search engine?

As we’ve said, the data and statistics available on your search engine can provide you with very interesting information.

For example:

• The most searched products.
• The search terms used by clients.
• Search results that get more or less clicks.
• Product cards with a higher (or lower) conversion rate.

If you know how, you can use them to your advantage to optimize your sales strategy.

Here’s why:

Important: it may be the case your search engine does not offer every all the data or settings we’ll review next. Don’t worry; you’ll learn how to solve that at the end of the post. In the meantime, let’s see everything you can do with a good internal search engine. 😉

👉 4 ways you can benefit from your online store’s internal search engine

Let’s see how we can use the data in question.

Here we go!

✅ 1. Adding new products to your catalogue

Did you know that, on average, 15% of the searches made on e-commerces end up in a frustrating “No results found” page?

Sometimes, the issue is that you don’t sell the product the client is looking for (there can also be other reasons —we’ll go over them later).

For example, imagine you own an apparel and accessories e-commerce for outdoors sports and your search engine “leaks” how many users look up The North Face products.

So far, you had not even contemplated selling products of this brand because it’s very expensive and you weren’t sure your audience would be interested in them (and the thought of having several The North Face boxes piling up in your storage room wasn’t attractive at all).

However, with these data, you can know for sure whether your customers are interested in them.

This way you can place an order with the manufacturer with more reassurance. 😉 

Bonus: check out this exclusive post so you keep on learning how to expand your product catalogue.

✅ 2. Avoiding losing sales because the site search engine “doesn’t get” your clients

We have mentioned that there are several reasons, besides stock shortage, why a search engine shows the user a “No results found” page. 

Put differently, sometimes you do have in stock the product your customer is looking for, but —for one reason or another— your search bar doesn’t display it.

For example, imagine you’re running an e-pharmacy and someone who wants to buy contact lenses goes on your web, but…

• Instead of ‘contact lenses’ they type ‘contacts’: and because your internal browser does not understand they are synonyms, it shows no results.
• They type ‘lensses”: in other words, they unwillingly misspell the word. If your browser doesn’t know how to handle typos, the result will be the same again.

In any case, you’d be losing sales.

Let’s now suppose your search engine informs you that many people go on your store, look for “contacts” or “contact lensses” and leave empty-handed. Now that you know this, you can set it up so that, whenever someone uses any of those two terms, it displays contact lenses product cards (as long as your browser includes these setting features). 

Check out how computer and laptop store HP’s internal browser does this:

Even if we have misspelt Chromebook for “crmebook”, the search engine has been able to interpret the laptop we meant.

✅ 3. Finding long tails for your categories or your store’s blog

Do you know what long tails are?

They are keywords containing 3 or more terms that are usually more specific and get less monthly searches.

The benefit of targeting this kind of words within your store’s SEO strategy is the fact that they are less competed for, which makes it easier to position them. So they are a good way of attracting Google traffic to your web.

For example, let’s suppose you own a pet feed store and in your internal search engine you notice “grain free cat feed” has a lot of searches.

If there’s a lot of people looking up that product in your store, it’s very likely that it also has searches on Google. If that’s the case, you could use it to:

• Create new categories or subcategories in your store: following the pet feed store example, even if in your catalogue there is grain free cat feed, you had not yet considered creating an exclusive category for this product. However, you consider this option as you see how often it is searched for and decide to create a “grain free cat feed” category, thus positioning yourself on Google with this keyword.
• Come up with new ideas for your blog: if you write on your store’s blog, you already know how hard it is to find topics for your posts. Make the best of the information provided to you by your search engine to write about things your customers are interested in. Are there many users looking up “grain free feed”? Then surely they’ll be interested in reading an article in which you talk about this kind of feed and why it is better than conventional ones, how to choose your grain free feed depending on your cat’s age, or about even comparisons of different brands which commercialize this product.

Note: if you feel you lack knowledge on this topic, we recommend you check out this post on keywords and how to use them to get Google traffic.

✅ 4. Optimizing conversion with site search features

So far, we have focused only on the search terms used by your customers.

But there’s some other equally important information that we can benefit from:

• The amount of clicks your products get on the results page.
• The number of impressions (users who see the product but don’t end up clicking on it).
• Searches that lead to sales.

This will be very useful for optimizing the strategy.

Here are some practical examples:

• You realize a product gets few clicks even though it has many impressions: if that’s the case, you probably need to change the image or product title to one that is more eye-catching and incites the user to click on it.
• You have a product card with a solid number of clicks, but conversion is low: this also indicates something is not right. Maybe something is not well written and the user loses interest in the product. In that case, try to write the product card in a way that it generates a higher conversion (by emphasizing on the product’s benefits, and including images and videos, etc.).

Another way of optimizing the conversion rate is by offering the customer customized results according to their previous searches.

For example, imagine that a person has recently been in your e-commerce and bought a boxing bag. A few days later, they visit the web again but this time they look up “gloves”. Automatically, the search engine displays boxing gloves product cards (instead of snow gloves, for instance).

This way, the search engine makes the purchase process simpler for this user and improves user experience.

And that’s how you take it to the next level. 😉

Of course, as you can imagine, not every search engine can do something like this…

👉 Now you know everything a good site search can do for you, but… does yours offer all of this?

As we mentioned, internal search engines are limited by default.

Not every single one of them allows you to:

• Know which products are searched the most (and which the least).
• Know the terms that are more used by your customers.
• Set them up to recognize typos and synonyms.
• Modify search results to optimize conversion.

In order for a search engine to offer all of this, it must be a sophisticated one —or as we call it, “smart”. That is, one that is powered by artificial intelligence and that has its own search statistics.

It may sound like sci-fi to you, but it’s more real than you think.

To name a familiar example; think of Doofinder. This smart browser can make your conversion increase by 10%-20%.

You don’t believe us?

Then see it for yourself. Here’s a 30-day free trial to decide whether Doofinder is meant for you or not.

From now on, you’ll see your internal search engine with new eyes.