Navigating site search can be challenging. Many companies struggle with guiding customers efficiently from a search query to relevant products or information. This post explores common challenges in search redirects, explains why typical solutions often fall short, and introduces a dynamic, AI-driven approach to manage redirects effectively. By the end, you’ll have a clearer understanding of modern search optimization techniques and a hint of what’s next in the evolving field of search engineering.
The Challenge of Onsite Search and Redirects
How do you accurately redirect customers to the right product or result page without creating a tangled mess of rules?
Site search engineers often face the complex task of directing customers from their initial search to relevant results in an efficient, user-friendly manner. Imagine a well-organized library where visitors quickly find what they need without knowing where every book is. Similarly, an optimized search system can guide users directly to the relevant “shelves” without manual interventions—minimizing both time and frustration.
However, traditional built-in systems for managing search redirects are limited. They often leave customers with irrelevant results and businesses with missed opportunities to optimize sales. So, how can you know if a search result aligns with customer intent? Or if your manually-set redirects perform better than the default search results?
This is where searchHub can help. Unlike search engines, searchHub enhances your existing search capabilities, aligning users more accurately with the products or pages they’re looking for. Let’s dive deeper into how different redirect methods compare and why some fail to deliver the results you might expect.
Common Redirect Approaches: Their Limits and Drawbacks
To address the challenges of search redirects, teams often rely on three common strategies:
1. Pulling Data from CMS with Keyword Pairing
Many start by pairing top product data from the CMS with obvious keywords. This may seem straightforward, but with fluctuating stock and product attributes, it quickly becomes unmanageable. Constant updates turn into a full-time task, often becoming obsolete before they’re completed.
2. Relying on SEO Keyword Lists
Leveraging SEO’s keyword lists might seem logical; however, static SEO keywords don’t adapt quickly to changes in product offerings. This leads to mismatches in search results, such as a search for “pink skateboarding shoes” showing no results, even though there are similar products in stock. SEO-driven lists rarely reflect the nuances of inventory and customer intent, creating a frustrating experience.
3. Using Regular Expressions (RegEx)
Some try to handle search term variations with regular expressions. While useful for some scenarios, RegEx often creates an overly complex and error-prone system when applied to unpredictable customer queries. For instance, broad expressions like “Under*” to capture brand-related queries may mislead users searching for unrelated terms.
These approaches are often inefficient and lack the adaptability required for a dynamic eCommerce environment. Without data-driven insights, it’s nearly impossible to gauge whether redirects improve user experience and conversion rates.
A Smarter Solution: AI-Driven Redirect Management
To overcome these limitations, searchHub’s AI-Redirects takes a different approach. By automating keyword mapping based on user intent, AI-Redirects adapts dynamically to the variety in search terms without requiring extensive manual adjustments. For instance, whether a customer searches for “Nike running shoes” or “lightweight shoes from Nike,” AI-Redirects can guide them to the same optimized landing page, reducing error and maintaining consistency in customer experience.
This shift to AI-based redirects provides several key benefits:
- Efficiency: Streamlines redirect management by consolidating variations without endless manual input.
- Consistency: Enhances customer experience by delivering relevant results, regardless of wording.
- Insightful Tracking: Provides data on whether AI-driven redirects outperform default search results.
Why This Matters
Using AI-driven redirects not only saves time but also enhances the customer journey. A frictionless search experience leads to higher conversion rates, and fewer abandoned searches—contributing to improved customer satisfaction and business outcomes.
Recap
We discussed:
- The challenges in creating effective site-search redirects.
- The limitations of manual methods like CMS data pulling, SEO keywords, and RegEx.
- The advantages of AI-Redirects in automating and enhancing the search experience.
What’s Next?
In this post, we explored the limitations of traditional redirect methods and introduced an AI-driven alternative for managing search. In a follow-up, we’ll delve into specific metrics to track the impact of redirect optimization, helping you evaluate the success of these AI-powered changes.
Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll dive into performance metrics to optimize and refine your search strategies even further.
