Having an efficient synonym feature in your e-commerce site search is undoubtedly the most important factor if you don’t want to lose your prospects and deliver a faster shopping experience. If you run a physical retail store, you are already familiar with a natural advantage of understanding customer needs and showing the right products.
For instance, a customer in a physical store may use different words like T-shirts, tee or jerseys with the intent to buy ‘T-shirts’. You know all the words mean the same and you get the right products for your customers. The same concept works in the online world. Your online store must have somebody (site search equipped with synonym feature) who understands your customer intention and help them find the right products.
The Significance of Synonyms
Today, customers from around the world have access to your store. They may use general synonyms, different spelling variations, little language differences, abbreviations or layman terms to find their desired products. Using synonym feature optimized with appropriate synonyms rules, businesses can display results relevant to their commodities in their domain.
For a site search, it is crucial to know what terms in the search query should match although they are spelled differently. The purpose of the synonym feature is to create equalities between different words, in such a way that no matter what synonym your users use, it should always return the same result.
Since every business offers different products and services, every business owner should define appropriate rules that render the expected results. When you use any efficient on-site search like Wizzy, it is already equipped with a synonym feature that learns what your users’ search and help you make the most of your store’s search engine. If your search system is not competent enough to understand what your customers are intending to buy, you are losing the game here.
Increase Your Click Through Rate (CTR) with Synonyms
The first thing that most visitors do as soon as they visit your site is to use your site’s search engine to find the products of their choice. The users always tend to input the phrases the way they spell and expect the system to show the same results. You cannot expect users to enter the same terms that are defined by you in the search index. Therefore, adding a robust synonym feature in your search can help you fill those gaps and show enhanced results. This enables e-commerce retailers to improve customer engagement and drive CTR. When you reduce the frequency of ‘no results found’ page, you are indirectly increasing more conversions.
Optimizing Your Site Search with Synonyms
Optimizing site search is of the utmost importance as it allows site search to identify misspellings, short forms and equivalent terms, so you can show relevant results. If you don’t want to show erroneous results or ‘no results found’ that may waste your customers’ time, you have to make an effort to improve your search engine. Here is how you can tweak your site search in order to yield maximum performance:
#1 Using Wizzy Site Search
Wizzy’s site search is powered with advanced Machine Learning technology that understands what your customers are intending to buy and show them the exact same products. With powerful ML technology, online stores can combine catalog data with keywords that brings that most relevant products on the results page. Wizzy’s self-learning algorithm will automatically suggest new synonyms and key terms that your users are searching, which you can add in your data table.
#2 Using Search Analytics
Wizzy’s search analytics is a powerful tool that can help you understand your users behavior and enhance store performance. This tool will give you a keen insight on what terms your users are searching, which terms are trending and what products your customers are buying. It also shows you common words and spellings that your visitors search, which you can include as synonyms in your site. With a wealth of information, you will be able to choose the right synonyms that appeal to your users the most.
#3 Brainstorming
Sometimes it is possible that you may come up with synonyms or misspelling ideas that may not be discovered yet. You can prepare this as an activity and ask your employees to spell certain products, and see what mistakes do they do. Whether they use double letters or single letters, add apostrophes or not, break up compound words or not, join words where they should be separate or not. This could help you discover terms that you may have never heard of before.
Conclusion
While using synonyms, it is of the utmost importance to choose them with care. When implemented correctly, synonyms can drastically improve user experience, but if they are not set up properly or they are too many, it may cause confusion and hurt your reputation. Find out which synonym needs to be optimized first, such as prioritizing your flagship products, best selling products, top misspelled products and high margin products. Synonyms will surely help your business stand out and boost conversions.
