If you have a web search system and a list of search terms, you can analyze what your visitors are looking for and improve the results.
In the list of results, you will see all the search terms that you can modify to lead to the right products. Often, these are simple typing mistakes made by prospective customers, where a letter may be out of place or unnecessary. You can use common mistakes to your advantage by redirecting customers to the correct results or even providing a URL link to the pages you want the customer to visit. This way, potential buyers will reach their desired products more quickly, and the chances of making a purchase will increase. Analyzing search terms and making corrections may take some time, but the analysis is definitely worth it, as all future searches will be more efficient.
Search in a store is often the best indicator of what visitors want: whoever searches knows what they are looking for. A good solution corrects typos, understands synonyms and plurals, shows suggestions while typing and never returns empty pages.
Modern search engines (OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, Algolia, Typesense and similar) also offer semantic search, which understands the meaning of a query and not just the words. Review queries with no results regularly and fix them: with a new item, a synonym or a redirect.
Frequently asked questions
Customers who use search often already know what they want, so search is an important indicator of purchase intent. If search does not find the right product, the customer leaves. Good search is directly linked to sales.
Auto-suggestions (autocomplete), typo tolerance, synonym search, image display in results, and filtering of results. Search speed is equally important.
Regularly review the search log - you see what customers are searching for and whether they get relevant results. Add synonyms for common misspellings and appropriate redirects for empty results.
Internal search does not directly affect SEO, but search result URLs should not be indexed (add ?s= to robots.txt or meta noindex). Otherwise Google detects duplicate content.
When the store has many products and search is frequently used. Advanced search engines (Elasticsearch, Algolia) are more expensive but greatly improve the experience in large catalogs.
My name is Anže, I am a certified Magento solution expert and the maker of several award-winning online stores. I am the architect of all Degriz projects.
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