Site search is an invaluable business tool that increases conversion rates and improves the customer experience. As a business owner, optimizing search settings provides value to users and empowers you to stand out from competitors.

Why do you need to optimize your site's search bar?

Companies that pay attention to improving their search functions receive the following advantages in return:

• Reduced number of search failures
• Increased conversion rate
• Quickly matching customers to desired products
• Effective A/B testing for maximum results
• Improved the user experience
• Personalized content.
• Thorough analytics to better understand customers

Top 5 ways to increase search efficiency

Have you set up a basic search function and decided that it's enough? Discard those thoughts and think about ways that you can add useful features above and beyond your current base design.

1. Filter results

Give people the opportunity to not only enter a query in the search bar, but to also customize its results. Let customers apply filters by price, color, style, etc. Narrow down the search as much as possible.
This way, it will be far more likely that a customer will be able to find the right product in a timely manner.

2. Autofill

Do you like it when a smartphone helps you type a message faster and offers word options? Why not implement such a function on your site? Smart autofill or query suggestion is a great user interface tool.
With this function, a list of potential options will populate when a customer enters their query. How does this benefit you?

• The client spends less time typing and can explore site pages faster.
• People make fewer mistakes when entering a query, which reduces the frequency of typos.

One more interesting fact! The search function allows you to create the illusion of “conversation" between the customer and your site's smart search. The user understands that they are taken care of here, which contributes to increased loyalty.

3. Personalization of results

Everyone is selfish to a certain extent and loves special attention. People have become accustomed to personalized search results (which, for example, Google offers). You can also personalize the results on your site, taking into account each user's behavior. In other words, the client will receive highly relevant offers that show they matter to you.

How will this help you? People will see products that are relevant to their interests and will be more likely to buy. And this, of course, will increase your profit.

4. Competent analytics

The need for competent analytics follows from the above paragraph. If you conduct high-quality analytics, you can easily understand what your clients are interested in, which products are searched for most often, and which items are not in demand. With this information, you can filter products out of your inventory and only carry things that users are interested in purchasing. This way, you can increase your competitive advantage by basing your product offerings on actual customers' shopping habits.

5. User experience and search design

To increase the effectiveness of your search bar, try to use different colors to help it stand out. For example, make the search field one shade and the contour another. Do the same with fonts. Add a magnifying glass icon so that users can quickly find the search bar. Put it in a prominent place so that visitors don't need to waste time.