Myth #4: Search engines are one and done.
While it might be tempting to think that once an eCommerce search engine is built, customized, and running, that’s the end of the job. Unfortunately for Marketing, eCommerce, and Search teams this isn’t the case. Search engines and the teams that manage them need to be prepared for frequent updates and fine-tuning. Factors like these all affect the relevance of search results:
Product catalog updates
Promotions and sales
Inventory management
eCommerce strategies
Seasonal merchandising
That said, there’s one factor that supersedes all the others, and that is the voice of the customer. Understanding the way shoppers search for products should be the number one priority for retailers. Not only will this knowledge directly affect how the search engine is tuned to understand real customers, but it can also inform a retailer’s external SEO strategy. Retailers can understand the way shoppers are asking for their products by
a.) analyzing customer search data and
b.) examining how the marketing/branding teams are describing products
Both data sources are an essential part of discovering how customers search for products. For example, developing a color library that encompasses commonly used color names, brand-specific color names, and an index of accompanying color synonyms is essential to returning accurate search results.
Rather than training customers how to search for their products, retailers can instead learn how customers are actually asking for things, allowing them to optimize their search engines accordingly.