Optimisation de son moteur de recherche.

You need to invest in an efficient search engine for your website

The user searching for a product on your website through your search engine has a higher transactional rate than users who only use the menu and the navigation. So, you can understand quite easily the need to have an optimized internal search engine.

When a person uses your search engine it might be for one of these reasons:

- He wants to find a specific product quickly.

- He looks for a product but doesn’t know if he will find it on your website.

- He looks for a product that he has previously seen but doesn’t remember the exact name or reference.

- He couldn’t find what he was looking for thanks to your navigation menu (and you are lucky that he prevails in looking for because he could have easily left your website).

People have multitude reasons to use your search engine but all of them have a common purpose: to buy the product if it fits their needs. Therefore, your search engine can be a formidable sales assistant as long as he answers several basics and it’s up to you to encourage your visitors to use it.

Make sure your search engine is

1) well located (ideally in the header or at least on the top of the page nearby your navigation bar)

2) visible :

o adequately imposing : not too small, not too big

o with an intelligible icon (the magnifying glass is now a tradition)

o with a specific design (not completely different from the graphic standards of your website but enough to be “noticed in a nod”)

o present at the same place on each page of your website

Ex AMAZON

But if you want your visitors to use and re-use it you need to develop features around it.

Having a search engine is nice but you have visitors that don’t really know what they can find on your website (or where). Let’s take a cliché example where I, a woman, go on Norauto.fr (The website of a French company in the car maintenance industry) for the first time because one of my friends told me that I could find product for my car. I am a bit lost but … thanks to the search engine I see what kind of products I can find on the website and as they give search examples “tires, revision…”. This place holder can also be dynamic and present trendy searches regarding which product your visitors are currently mostly looking for (ex : snow tires in winter or ice-box in summer).

Same when the user writes down the name of the product he is looking for… If he has a poor spelling when it comes to mechanical things he might look for an “Hubcap” by writing “Ubkap”, a flexible and smart search engine will present him the “hubcap list page” even with this spelling mistake. You can’t expect all users to write the exact key words you had in mind. Synonyms, plurals, spelling mistakes need to be taken into account.

Another friendly

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