The following article will explore how site search might positively affect your website, including improving:

• Navigation
• Discoverability (of titles)
• User experience
• Conversion rate & number of sales

User habits are always changing, and now with so many devices the rate of change is faster than ever before. Most of us search with Google on a daily basis and how we use Google becomes a habit we take with us to other website environments. What does this all mean?

It means a significant number of users use “site search” now over traditional navigation to look for content, and given the fact that most people who use ‘site search’ do not go past the first page of results, we can conclude a lot of people are not finding what they are looking for and are leaving dissatisfied.

Publishers have an added problem which relates to a varied website audience coupled with huge amounts of data.  From authors, retailers, libraries to consumers all looking through a product inventory in the 10,000’s making visibility poor and providing a workable navigation even harder without a decent ‘site search’.

We’re hoping to cover off in some detail why it is important for publishers of all sizes to prioritise “site search” and ensure that not only are they opening up their catalogue to enhancing discoverability, but they are actually looking to increase visitor satisfaction.

Effective ‘site search’ has proven to significantly reduce bounce rates and provide customers access to additional relevant information.

We estimate that Supafolio 3 API will decrease your bounce rate by up to 50% in the first month

Publishers often have content heavy websites with 1,000’s of titles, titles in different formats,key authors, sales rankings etc - finding a way to ensure your users have access to all this information is complicated and often difficult. So being able to search all catalogues at the same time whilst controlling the weightings applied to products in the search results provides for the ability to promote key authors, recommended reads, push newer titles, and apply special promotions whilst keeping the search results relevant is a real challenge.

Read on to see which features on Supadu’s Supafolio 3 will improve your site search:

Typo-tolerance - Hobit, hobbit, hobbitt! 'Misspell' detects mistakes, concatenation, split words & applies ‘Did you mean’ logic.

Synomyms & wordforms - help shoppers find the pants when they if they call them trousers! or 'Dr' instead of 'Doctor'.

Ordering & relevancy product boost - apply a weighting to boost product position in search results for improved campaigns.

Search analytics Analytics - provide insight to what users are searching for and how to improve product keywords.

Language-agnostic - Parlez-vous Français? Over 100 other languages recognised without extra work.

Search filters - make your entire catalog visible with filters to refine search – such as price, author, collection.

Find-as-you-type - from the first keystroke this 'Type-ahead' search brings back instant results when users type a succession of characters.

Advanced search - for an in-depth search of your entire inventory.