An effective on-site search solution has a direct impact on conversion rate in many cases. Check this out!
https://twitter.com/alexdurston_ss/status/1328575981938991106
Alex followed up with a bit more detail:
Hi, just reaching out following our tweets about e-commerce conversion based on user who do a site search vs those who don’t.
We have a number of e-commerce sites that sell B2B products and work to a target conversion rate of about 3-4%
What we have found is users who do a site search have a conversion of up to 7%, while users who don’t do a site search convert at around 1%.
That’s an amazing statistic for anyone keeping track of their metrics!
Alex from Search Station followed up again with even more detail:
SearchWP fills a massive gap in that it not only improved the standard search (the biggest downside with WP out the box) but also with the search metrics allows us to see what content is working and also fine tune the results.
We have a couple of strategies with search, first one being for SEO we build a knowledge base for clients, this is a custom post type so keeps this neat but the search metrics helps them work out what people want to know more about: https://www.equilaw.uk.com/knowledge-base/
For ecommerce sites we have a slightly different approach we apply a custom order value to products which groups products into best (best revenue, availability etc), then we display products by default in that order (not relevance). This means we push the products we want in front of customers – these are often not the most relevant based on search! This strategy works well with SearchWP.
Synonyms are great for industry slang i.e. official name for a product is ‘Widget’ but trades people call it a ‘Noggin’. Also good if a company changes their name or is known by a shorter version.
We also add a custom meta box (could use tags or something) to include competitor part numbers or SKUs, sometimes we don’t want these visible on the site within the content but want the search to trigger when they are typed.
Improving your ecommerce conversion rate is one of the many reasons to use SearchWP to fix, refine, and fully utilize your on-site WordPress search.
Alex and his team are taking advantage of SearchWP in a fantastic way, using Metrics to observe how their customers interact with the site, synonyms to ensure that results aren’t limited by industry jargon, and intelligent utilization of searching Custom Fields to fine-tune search results.
With the holiday shopping seasons coming up, site owners who take their on-site search solution seriously will likely being seeing increased conversions as well!
