Optimizing Site Search to Increase Shopify Sales

Today we’re going to talk about your site search functionality and how we can optimize it, and increase your sales in the process.

Fun fact, did you know your users that engage with your site search make up 20% of your revenue? Customers that use site search are more valuable than those who don’t. Your site search customers convert about four times higher, with a higher AOV and a per session value of about five to six times that of your regular traffic.

Site search is not just a functionality for new customers, we’ve found in split testing that the users that benefit the most from site-search optimization are your returning customers. This is because they know what they are looking for, and want to get to it quickly. Even if you have a store with only a few products, site search can still be beneficial. Find out why below.

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1. Learning from your search data

We can learn a lot from site search data. Even if you have a store with only a few products, you will find people searching for problems in the site search.

For example, if you have a high volume keyword for a product that you don’t offer, this would tell you that customers are searching for that product and it may be worth rolling out.

We can also find top keywords for products that already exist. We will use these later in our search optimizations, and it also tells us what products or pages users are struggling to find.

You can access your site search data in GA4 under Reports > Engagement > Events > view_search_results, and then you will find a widget with the more popular search terms (or, you can also go to Reports > Engagement > Events > view_search_results).

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2. Prominent Search Bar Desktop

The #1 most common problem we see with Shopify stores is that they tuck their site search away in a little magnifying glass where no one can see it. This is the worst practice when it comes to site search.

You want to have your site search prominent in your header, like this:

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3. Prominent Search Bar Mobile

Now with mobile you can take one of two approaches to make your site search more prominent. This is case by case, and like all things should be split tested. But we’ve found both of these methods to work.

Having a prominent search bar under the navigation:

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Having a prominent search bar inside the breadcrumb menu:

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4. Search Placeholders

This has been a repeat winner in our site search split tests. Having suggestive placeholders is an easy way to optimize your search bar. This is giving suggestions before the user even interacts with it.

Find your top 3 keywords and include them in the placeholder. Instead of “Search..”, try “Search for Lotion, Gels, Masks”, like this:

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5. Search Suggestions

Suggestive search is another quick win for site search optimization. All the eCommerce giants have perfected suggestive search, such as amazon. If you’re using Shopify, you can implement predictive search in your theme with a developer or through an app.

Search suggestions setup properly will look like this:

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6. Synonym Results

Not everyone will use the same lingo when searching for your products. For example, if you are selling running shoes to a UK audience, they may search “trainers”. If your search isn’t configured to handle these synonyms as alt words, then the user won't find what they’re looking for.

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7. Typo Tolerance

Typos are inevitable, and a properly configured site search will be able to provide results even with a typo. This is baked into a lot of the site search apps, otherwise you could manually set up the typos as alt key words for the products in your search.