How Excellent Internal Search Ability Drives Faster Conversions

Ultimately, e-commerce boils down to numbers. Are you generating enough revenues to support business needs and even spur growth?

A reliable SEO agency can help you determine realistic goals and hit or surpass your targets. Your overall success also relies on practical but highly effective strategies, including adding an internal search engine.

In this guide, you will learn about the three biggest reasons this tool drives conversions:

• Gives you better insights into your leads and customers
• Decreases exit and bounce rates
• Enhances user experience (UX)

We also include some great ideas for optimizing your internal search engine. Don’t want miss out on these and more? Then, read the article below. Let's go!

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

3 Ways an Optimized Internal Search Engine Pays Off

What is an internal search engine? As its name suggests, it is a tool built into your online store or general website that enables customers to search for specific information, products, and services on your pages.

Unlike navigation menus or product and article categories, it features a prominent and nifty search bar on the page’s right side or topmost part.

Although small, its ability to hasten conversions is understated. When done right, it offers these three huge benefits:

     1. Better Insight into Your Target Leads and Customers

The impact of poor customer care can be detrimental to business. According to McKinsey, it can result in poor brand loyalty, dissatisfaction, and market share loss.

It takes more than prompt phone or email responses and expensive customer service software to keep customers happy.

Your market craves a personalized, exclusive site experience, which can only be provided when you know what they want.

This is where the internal search engine becomes beneficial.

It can give invaluable insight into your target leads and customers by helping you easily access, search, and analyze all the data associated with them. You can:

• Easily uncover trends in customer activity to effectively segment your market, and create customized campaigns that communicate the right messages to the right people.
• Use the information to refine different site elements, from designing navigation menus to writing resource pages and product descriptions.
• Glean data about user preferences and buying history
• Spot trends quickly and make any pivots needed in real-time
• Quickly adapt to significant changes in consumer preferences or behavior, such as what happened during the pandemic

Further, like Google or Bing, your internal search engine can harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for predictive analytics. In other words, you can:

• Use these technologies to analyze customer intent, making it easier for customers to instantly find what they need and purchase
• Continuously improve your search engine performance so that it aligns with customer behavior changes

     2. Reduced Bounce and Exit Rates

Many marketers do not get bounce and exit rates right. For example, they do not share the same meaning.

Benchmark rates also vary among industries. In fact, taking those percentages at face value can sometimes do more harm than good because they might not tell the complete story. For example, a high bounce rate for a congratulations page is not unusual.

But you cannot take them lightly either. Consistently high bounce and exit rates strongly correlate to lower revenues and poor conversions:

• They suggest incomplete customer journeys (e.g., leaving the shopping cart before they can buy).
• They indicate that your content fails to engage and motivate viewers enough to take action.

Internal search engines can help you address these issues:

• They create a frictionless experience for customers by enabling them to check your entire site inventory in just a few clicks. These include promotions, products, and services.
• They allow customers to quickly land on the page they want by showing them accurate and relevant search results. They then encourage viewers to keep exploring your site and move closer to making a purchase.
• You can optimize the internal search tool by adding filters and autocomplete suggestions, features that appeal to “spearfishers” or customers who visit a site with a specific product in mind.

     3. Enhanced User Experience (UX)

As the saying goes, keep customers happy, and the money will follow.

Converting leads into customers is good, but retaining them because of an excellent user experience is better. Many studies already showed that marketing to existing clients was more cost-effective than acquiring new customers.

Further, because of your relationship with existing buyers, you can potentially create more income streams and higher revenues. They are more receptive to cross-sells, upgrades, and other offers.

The internal search function is one sign of a good UX for an e-commerce website for several reasons:

• The search bar can be accessible in both desktop and mobile site versions. It can also be static, so prospects and customers can use them whether they are on the homepage or product pages.
• Through filters, the most popular products or feature those that might need an extra push can be highlighted. You can also entice passive leads to actively consider buying with categories such as On Sale, Limited Offers, or Clearance.
• Customers can land on compelling landing pages with highly detailed, clear product descriptions. For example, they might include various size options, reviews or ratings, maintenance or care, or use cases.
• You can customize the internal search engine to provide the best answers according to user intent. An informational keyword such as “How do you wash denim jeans?” can lead to blog articles. Meanwhile, transactional key terms such as “Levi’s 2XL jeans” can list styles as autocomplete suggestions.

Summing Up

These three benefits of internal search engines should solidify their role in your overall digital marketing tactics — they should never be an afterthought.

The one way you can truly maximize their power is to design a helpful, easy-to-use, and intuitive search engine, a skill that Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has mastered for years.

We have an amazing team of UX designers, developers, and strategists who can deliver an internal search engine tailored to your business needs. Contact us now to schedule a discovery call.