Search engines are powerful tools that can guide shoppers to the right products on retail websites. To maximize revenue and provide the best possible experience for shoppers, it’s not always the best idea to rely solely on search engines.
Instead, retailers can also benefit from search merchandising. Search merchandising gives retailers more control over their search results. This helps them achieve business objectives, which search engines are often unable to do.
Let’s look at four benefits of search marketing and how retailers can use them to their advantage.
What is Search Merchandising?
Search merchandising (also known as “searchandising”) is the art and scientific process of presenting search engine results in a way that takes into account relevancy, customer intent, and business goals.
Search merchandising is usually done by modifying the search engine results in a way that adds more value. Some examples of this practice are:
- Search results can be personalized by highlighting the products that shoppers are most likely to find useful based on past searches and purchases.
- Promotion of products or brands with higher profit margins
- Presenting dynamically facets and filters according to the context of a shopper
Search merchandising is a way to improve the effectiveness of search results. Instead of relying solely on search engine results, it uses analytics, shopper behaviour, and other contextual indicators, as well as marketing and sales objectives.
Four Key Benefits of Search Marketing
After we’ve discussed the basics of search marketing, let’s look at the benefits this practice provides online retailers and their customers.
1. Search Relevance is Improved
The key benefit of search marketing is that it helps shoppers find the results they are looking for. This improves their shopping experience, and it is also good for business because it increases conversions.
Online retailers are aware that product data, and the preferences of shoppers change over time. They need to account for these changes and evaluate them. An effective search merchandising campaign is built on a well-tuned search algorithm. The most effective search merchandising strategy is when the search engine’s base results are calibrated in order to deliver accurate, relevant product for broad, common queries that shoppers use frequently.
To achieve the best possible results, you should regularly evaluate and tweak your search engine. This will allow it to adapt to any changes in your product catalogue, queries or shopper behavior. Metrics, such as revenue and margin, sales rank and customer ratings and reviews, are essential for improving search results and relevance. These metrics, either individually or in combination, can make it easier to see high-rated and well-performing products. If shoppers can see popular and profitable products, they are more likely to make a purchase.
2. Personalized Shopper Experience
Search merchandising also allows retailers to provide a more personalized experience for shoppers. Search merchandising allows retailers to customize results for certain visitors based on factors such as clickstream engagement, purchase history and geographical region.
- Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning AI and machine learning have made it possible to accurately analyze shopping behavior, search histories, and other interactions in order to determine the user’s intent. These technologies allow for dynamic ranking of search engine results to ensure that the most relevant items are always at the top.
- Shopper behavior data: Clickstream data provides a wealth insight into how shoppers navigate your site. This in turn can reveal their preferences and interest. Other data, such as cart additions and purchase history, can help to create a better understanding of each shopper’s preferences. Merchants can then use this information to customize and rank their search results.
By presenting search results that are informed by the behavior of shoppers, users will see only relevant products. Aggregating behavior data of all shoppers can be a good solution when individual data are limited. Search results are based on behavior data gathered from shoppers. This helps to highlight popular products and improve the shopping experience.
3. Strategic Product Marketing
Search engines have no idea what products a business wants to promote. Search merchandising allows online retailers to influence and control the placement of products within search results. Search merchandising gives merchandisers the power to promote or bury products or brands. They can ensure that certain products are highlighted while others are buried.
This approach has the advantage of allowing you to place products in the best positions possible within the search results. This allows you to give the most exposure to your best-selling products or promotional items.
A merchandiser can also provide content to be featured in dedicated merchandising areas, which feature selected products, brands, or categories prominently, instantly catching the eye of shoppers. A second advantage is that you can curate product collections tailored to specific campaigns, themes, or seasons.
This level of precision allows highly personalized shopping experiences, which present shoppers with products aligned to their needs and preferences. By using human touch control, merchandisers are able to create search results that help meet business goals and improve customer satisfaction.
4. Experience a better shopping experience
Effective search merchandising improves the shopping process by providing seamless, intuitive interfaces that reduce friction, while maintaining engagement. This, in turn, boosts conversion rates. Search merchandising can help in this area by several means:
- Navigation improved: Sites can improve navigation by using machine learning techniques to generate dynamic facets and filters based upon search queries. They can then guide users intuitively and quickly to the products they want. Machine learning and merchandiser curation can drive visual navigation elements. This is especially useful when the search terms are too broad.
- Highlights of the Visual Arts Banners strategically placed can be used to draw attention towards important brands, special promotions or products. They can be used to highlight important products, calls to action or promotions. They also break up long product lists and add visual interest.
- Advanced query handling Search features like typo tolerance, query rewrites, and synonyms ensure that minor mistakes or variations of search queries do not hinder the journey of shoppers. Another area that is worth investing in is autocomplete suggestions. These can quickly guide shoppers to relevant products and popular searches. These features are all candidates for AI and machine-learning, which will also add value by understanding the context of the search query.
Search Merchandising to Ensure Online Retail Success
Search engines can be a very powerful tool to help shoppers find the products they are looking for. Search engines are powerful tools, but they become even more effective when combined with search marketing. Search merchandising, which gives retailers more control over search results and a smoother experience for consumers, can help boost conversions.
