Seven tips for a successful onsite search

Onsite search is a major weakness of many websites. Too often it delivers irrelevant hits or - even worse - no hits at all. This is fatal, because it is actually an effective tool for more sales and more customer contacts - and with comparatively little effort. The digital business specialist Arithnea explains what measures companies can take to revamp their on-site search.1. Search input field clearly visible. The input field for the search should be placed at the top of the screen in the middle or right-aligned. And it should be immediately and intuitively recognizable as such.2nd hit page as useful as possible. Instead of just showing a bolded search term and a passage from the body text, thumbnails and icons can also be integrated into the results. It is particularly useful if the user can quickly recognize the area (product, service, customer experience) from which the hit originates based on visual information. Search term-relevant advertisements and recommendations also significantly enhance the results page.3. type ahead use. With Type Ahead - i.e. search completion - possible search phrases are suggested as soon as the first letters are entered. This significantly increases user-friendliness. It is also possible to control the type-ahead function editorially. It can be useful to display current models or products from current campaigns for certain search queries. Segmentation according to areas (suitable products, service tips, related content) gives the searcher the opportunity to differentiate their query.4. suggestions for corrections and phonetic search. As more and more users are using their smartphones to search, correction suggestions are becoming increasingly important. Especially with long search terms and complicated technical terms, spelling mistakes are easy to make. This is where an onsite search must accurately detect errors and make sensible correction suggestions. The phonetic search approach also helps here, as it recognizes words that sound the same.5. blacklist and whitelist function activate. In some cases, it may be useful to exclude certain pages as hits for certain search queries. On the other hand, some content should also appear as a search hit if the specific wording is not searched for directly. Onsite searches offer the so-called blacklist and whitelist function for this purpose. This allows, for example, synonyms to be maintained or phrases and search terms to be defined that should be included or excluded in Type Ahead or the search results.6. With Filters and faceting refine. In addition to a search based on terms, it should also be possible to select properties and characteristics. This is relevant for large product ranges and configurators, for example. Faceting or filtering assigns further properties to the displayed product or content. The aim here is to refine the results. An example from the clothing sector: If you are looking for a coat, for example, you may also be interested in the brand, material, colors, sizes and seasonal classification.7. "No hit" must not be. Even if a search query does not fit at all, this should not be a reason for an empty results list. It should always be possible to display a meaningful link with the help of the aforementioned additions. Ideally, users will land on pages or products that promise particularly high sales.