Internal Site Search: Improve UX and Increase your Relevance

Personalized search can help you provide relevant search results that will improve the customer experience.

Personalized on-site search has several features that make it easier for a user to find what they are looking for: Typo correction Multi-language support Elimination of results that are expired or give no results Promoting results that are new, related, or have a higher margin Demoting results that have a low rating or are sold out Predictive “live-search” results. (In the example to the right “sh” is typed in the search box, and we are already seeing shorts and shirts.)

Combining these basic features with personalization technology can improve user experience even further. Search results that are based on cookies and real-time browsing behavior will always be more relevant to the user, which means that your conversions will increase.

Read more: Personalized Search: Increasing conversion rates on INDI.nl

Why personalized search?

People that search is much more likely to convert than people that just browse because they are better engaged since they actually interacted with your website by searching for a specific product, category, or brand.

To illustrate why personalized search will improve the user experience and conversion rate on almost any site, we can consider this example:

Let’s say I own a small townhouse with a front lawn, but you own a large mansion with a yard and gardens. I’m looking for a small electrical lawnmower and you might be looking for a larger riding mower.

If we both go to the same e-commerce site and search for “lawnmower”, we would often be presented with the same products. If the on-site search engine displays regular petrol push-mowers, neither one of us will be very happy with our first search. We might even leave the webshop and go looking for our lawnmowers somewhere else.

With personalized search we would each be presented with a lawnmower in the category that we are looking for, making us less inclined to leave, but more inclined to make a purchase.

Raptor Personalized Search

At Raptor we have developed a Search Advisor. We offer a layer of relevance that you can integrate into any existing enterprise or SaaS search solution on your site. Our Machine Learning Algorithms will make sure to present only the most relevant results by re-ranking your on-site search. Alternatively, if you do not have a search function, we can provide you with the entire search solution.

Our Search Advisor algorithm is based on tracking from millions of data points in the form of real-time browser and purchase behavior. We track everything from most sold products to most relevant products in relation to time. We can even recommend products based on weather conditions and geographical position.

When site-owners start to utilize 1:1 communication tools, such as Search Advisor, they will almost always experience a drop in internal site searches, but this is a good thing! When users are presented with the most relevant results, they simply convert faster, and more often, because they don’t have to search as many times.

It increases their user experience and it increases your revenue.

Read more: BilligVVS choose Algolia + Raptor to power their new e-commerce search solution