An essential element of your e-commerce business, the internal search engine is often underestimated. Yet nearly 50% of customers will leave your site if their search results are irrelevant*. As a result, it plays a critical role in visitor satisfaction and your on-site conversion rate. In addition, Shopify's native search engine and analytics can be complex to navigate, even for the most experienced e-merchandisers.
Let's take the example of a customer browsing your website. They're looking for a specific product, but they're having trouble finding it quickly. After a few minutes, the frustration will drive them away from your site. An inefficient search engine is an obstacle to your e-merchandising and conversion efforts. How can you improve its performance on your Shopify ecommerce site?
1/ Trouble tuning relevance and search engine performance
As an e-merchant, it's imperative to constantly monitor search engine relevance to ensure it's as effective as possible. Adjusting relevance often involves implementing numerous manual and redundant rules to improve the quality of results. But these rules, no matter how many you make, can never cover all possible searches and are very difficult to maintain over time.
Additionally, there are few data dashboards available within Shopify to know whether or not the search engine is actually converting. Analytics such as identifying trending keywords, the most searched terms, or even queries with no results are often limited, making it difficult to continuously optimize the search engine.
However, there are simple and effective ways to improve the search experience for your customers while making life easier for e-merchandisers.
2/ How Sensefuel’s AI can improve internal search engine performance on Shopify
A. Hyper personalized results for each visitor
This is where AI comes in. Sensefuel has developed deep learning technology to optimize search performance on your Shopify site. This AI technology makes it possible to understand shoppers' intentions and provide them with relevant results from their very first search. This is hyper-personalization in real time, for every visitor. By analyzing each consumer's behavior, you can tailor the shopping experience and search results to their specific wants and needs from the very first session.
For example: If a customer searches for "bike" on your site, the search could be for a personal purchase or for his son's birthday.
The AI then analyzes the visitor's context and intent, learning in real time from their online behavior to deliver results that are always relevant and appealing.
B. Auto-adjust relevance for all search results
Moreover, using a search engine powered by Sensefuel AI offers significant benefits, saving both time and money.
It saves you time because you don't have to spend a minute adjusting the relevance of your search engine. The AI does it automatically. It also learns from Shopify's product catalog, what it's made of, and the semantics used by your site's visitors to automatically adjust its relevance. No need for manual adjustments or synonyms to get relevant results that convert.
And it saves you money because the results are optimized for 100% of the searches performed on your site :
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Sensefuel’s AI learns current trends and which products are performing best. It will then push your top products from the very first search results, to highlight the products that convert the most.
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And even "long tail" search results, which are multi-word, precise, highly targeted, and highly converted, are relevant, optimized, and require no manual intervention.
3/ Integrate e-merchandising strategies into search results on Shopify
Yes, a search engine needs to do more than just respond to user queries; it needs to include the ability to highlight your e-merchandising strategies directly in the search results and be able to measure their impact on your performance.
For example, it can highlight specific product selections, events such as temporary promotions, sales, or clearance sales right in the search results of your Shopify site.
By optimizing margins and promoting strategic products from the very first results, a well-configured search engine can become a powerful tool for increasing conversions, gross margin, or any other business goal.
It also comes with enriched dashboards to understand your top searches, zero results, trends, and best performing campaigns. All accessible from a back office dedicated to business teams.
In short, investing on your search engine optimization can have a significant impact on your conversion rates and e-commerce performance.
To improve this, there are search engine optimization apps available on Shopify. We recommend using our app "Sensefuel Personalized Search". Powered by AI, it allows you to :
- Hyper-personalize search results, in real time, for each visitor
- AI delivers 100% relevance with 0 minutes of setup time
- Customizable search UX, including enriched filters and guided experiences
- AI-powered merchandising and back-office capabilities, enriched dashboards and analytics
With its own app, Sensefuel integrates into Shopify in just a few clicks, providing a powerful tool designed specifically for e-commerce. Click here to try it on your site!
* 2024 Edition of Sensefuel's Survey of product search habits on e-commerce websites.