Our Search Best Practices

Follow these steps and make your webshop successful in no time!
Products:

You have subscribed to Clerk.io’s Search tool and now you want to make the most out of it!

Clerk.io’s Intelligent Search Function makes it effortless for your customers to find what they are looking for, by always showing the most relevant products according to current sales trends on your site.

This article will guide you throughout our Best Practices for the Search tool that will make your webshop successful in no time!

The video below summarises the points in this article:

Clerk.io’s Instant Search is built for speed and will instantaneously find the top products, categories, related contents and more as the visitor types.

Through natural language processing, it is able to predict visitors’ intentions, always showing the results according to current sales trends on your site.

In your Instant Search, the primary focus should be on products, but Clerk.io easily allows you to include additional elements, based on the query typed in, that will deliver a great user experience for your customers.

We advise to include the following elements:

  • Suggestions - shows suggested keywords specifically tailored on your product data
  • Categories - shows relevant categories with a direct link to reach the corresponding page. This will allow you to expose your catalog even more
  • Pages - Show both CSM and Blog pages. This addition allows customers to find great contents that match their interests and will often lead to more conversions by placing you as an expert in your field.

Clerk.io’s Instant Search

2) Implement Clerk.io’s Search Page

Our Search Page will allow your customers to dive deep in your product catalog and filter the results with Clerk.io’s built-in Facets (Filters).

The Search Page can be thought of as a backup for those customers who didn’t find the products they were looking for in the top results returned in the Instant Search.

Facets provide an improved user experience for your visitors, showing them products based on the selected filters. They will also increase the Click Through Rate and Conversion Rate of your Search Page.

With Clerk.io, you can base them on any product attributes synchronised in Clerk.io.

Clerk.io’s Search Page

3) Create customised designs

Users become familiar with small details of your webshop so it is important to maintain design consistency across the whole website.

Whether you want to make a new design from scratch or edit a pre-built one, with Clerk.io’s intuitive Design Editor, you can create a completely customised design that matches your company branding in just a few clicks.

The designs are fully responsive and they are ready to be used with any mobile devices.

Clerk.io’s Design Editor

Create customised designs for all Clerk.io’s elements:

  • Instant Search. In the dropdown Search,  it is important to include rich product information such as images, names, prices, and even a call-to-action button to place the product in the basket. This will give your visitors a clear overview of the top products they are searching for.
  • Search Page
  • Facets. Read more about customising the layout of your Facets in this article: Customizing and Styling Clerk.io Facets

Even though not managed by Clerk.io, the positioning and the layout of the Search Bar in your webshop is also really important. You will be able to dramatically increase the % number of visitors using your Search tool and thus your conversions with a few tricks:

  • position the Search Bar in an expected location, either the top-right or top-center of the web page
  • size it appropriately, according to the other elements on the page
  • include a Search icon

(source: Hubspot)

4) Analyse and Optimise

Finally, it’s time to analyse the results.

Our easy-to-read dashboard will provide you a clear overview of the performance of the tool and detailed analytics for each search made by your visitors.

We advise our customers to check the dashboard periodically and, in particular, the two sections: Non-converting Searches and No Result Searches.

You will be able to improve your performance even further by adding products on top or synonyms for the queries listed here.

With these few and simple steps you will not only increase the user experience in your store and thus your customer happiness, but also integrate our AI Search engine to boost your conversion rates.

The section No Result Searches can also be used as a reliable source of information regarding the interests of your visitors and, therefore, as a suggestion for products or brand additions to your catalog.

Search Dashboard - No Results Searches section

Additional Information

Customize

Every business is unique, so sometimes you might need to interact with Clerk.io’s AI in order to apply some level of customisation and have control over which results should be presented.

With Clerk.io you have a number of functionalities that easily allow you to control the results returned by our AI, both in the Instant Search and in the Search Page.

Got any questions?

Our support is ready to help you! Just use the live-chat in the corner of this page.