Why searchHub?
SEARCH OPTIMIZATION WITH SEARCHHUB
tl;dr - Increasing search revenue by +10% from day one!*
If you are responsible for site search, you understand the strategic significance of this “small” yet important element for your online store. No place is this more visible than in bottom line conversion statistics. It would be remiss to disregard the disproportionately high rate of conversion from users who have in some way interacted with the site search. Conversion rates three to five times higher than sales via site navigation are not trivial. However, maintaining the search, monitoring the top search terms and zero hits is a Sisyphean task.
What Are Longtail Queries?
These types of queries sit somewhere between the top100 search terms and the zero result queries.
It’s no surprise that most search managers are happy when at least their top100 searches perform optimally. The unfathomable scale of site search longtail, dissuades even the most hardened ecommerce professional from touching it with a 10 foot pole.
However, the search terms that make up ecommerce longtail, account for the motherload of all search queries. Yep… over 90% of all queries entered on ecommerce retail sites fall into this longtail category. Understandably, they usually don’t get any attention. And that’s no fault of the search managers. It’s already damned near impossible to ever feel like you’ve adequately optimized your top100. But it’s bloody mind-boggling to even glance at the list of longtail keywords. Let alone consider optimizing them. There’s simply that many.
Manual Site Search Optimization is Impractical
It goes without saying that in everyday life, no human has the time to deal with all search queries. Oftentimes, the day has barely enough hours to do little more than a quick “once over” the zero results. If all goes well, you might be awarded the luxury of squeezing in the top50 to top200, give them a high-level analysis, check whether the results are, relatively, good and proof the KPIs.
This modus operandi has a catch: you never can, confidently, say that the search is optimized. Especially, considering the vastness of the longtail! We have customers with searchhub clusters exceeding 1,000 different spellings for a single search term! Manually attempting to manage scale of these proportions is clearly unthinkable.
That's where searchhub plays a critical role.
We created a one-of-a-kind AI to analyze the search history stuff referenced above. Now, we can easily answer common questions that we encounter among customers across every flavor of site search:
- Which terms are being searched, in all their conceivable, and inconceivable variations? To get this, we had to measure the importance of each minute KPI that in some way has to do with site search.
- How do shop visitors behave after searching for a particular keyword or any of its variants – tracking of anonymous customer behavior?
- What would it look like if I had a knowledge base with clusters of similar search terms that I could enrich with external data sources (e.g. product data).
How Is Searchhub Different From a Site Search Vendor?
The struggle to answer these questions led us to a unique solution. searchhub’s AI takes queries that lead to similar product purchases, and merges them together into clusters. For each cluster a so-called Master Query is defined. We get this by analyzing the KPIs of the individual search terms within a cluster further.
How Does Searchhub Pick a Master Query?
KPIs important for Master Query selection include:
- were there results?
- how many results were shown?
- was there interaction with the search result?
- what was the quality of the interaction?
- was something added to the cart post interaction?
- was something purchased?
Once a Master Query is defined, all other query variations within a cluster are excluded from the search and instead substituted by the master query!
The following is an excerpt from the cluster “nike air max” with 196 different spellings. We would replace all of these with “nike air max”.
Not only does this ease the strain of search management by decreasing time spent on search maintenance, but marketing and purchasing also benefit from this clustering!
How Do Marketing And Purchasing Departments Benefit From Search Query Clustering?
Marketing departments invest significant resources into enriching frequent and relevant search terms with redirects, curated results, marketing campaigns, product promotions and product advisors.
To this end, searchhub makes it easy to access rich search journey insights that can be used for targeted SEO actions. searchhub generally increases traffic to these keywords upwards of 20-30%. This is a consequence of more customers being funneled to master query landing pages. This translates into additional value for the colleagues in server side advertising!
Additionally, onsite search suggestions also benefit from query clustering!
Our proprietary tracking not only measures search frequency, but also transparently quantifies any other search KPI and trend. This means we know exactly which products to display from the very first letter your customers type. Naturally, these suggestions are based on our learnings drawn from master query performance.
Our SmartSuggest makes search suggestions more relevant, significantly varying the result-set in the process. This means we are able to put into practice what many search technologies only give lip service to: