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June 16, 2016

Using Natural Language Site Search to Scale Your Conversions

Most online stores start off small. Maybe it's just a few core products and some info pages, or perhaps it's only one certain type of product. And while this might be the right way to get the ball rolling for your business, there's going to come a time when you start to expand. Those few products become many, a couple of info pages expound into blog posts and FAQs, and your inventory begins to diversify as you look for ways to grow the business.

As your Magento ecommerce site grows, it's going to need an on-site search function that grows with it. Why? Because more products, pages and options are going to bring more customers – and each customer is going to need tailored help to make sure they're getting what they need. A better and smarter site search solution is going to directly correlate to increased conversions, especially as your store begins to scale up.

Scalable searching

Unfortunately, the stock search (SOLR, Elastic Search) options just aren't going to cut it – not all search functions are designed the same. To scale with your store's growth, you're going to need an intuitive site search tool that's powered by scalable technology: Natural Language Processing, Semantic Site Search (NLP).

The reason NLP is such a powerhouse for growing businesses is simple: it doesn't get bogged down by complexities. No matter how many products you have, pages you author or options you provide to your customers, NLP is going to cut through every piece of data, separating out refined search results based on the exact needs of your customers. Providing them the exact results for their simple or complex queries.

Take a look at just how important having natural language site search on your side can be for something as simple as a query for "red nylon polo shirt" on an eCommerce site with pages and pages of options:

• A keyword or textual search function is going to recognize the search query as a series of keywords: "red, nylon, polo, shirt." It's going to process these keywords individually, not as part of the whole, returning results for every single red shirt, nylon shirt, polo shirt and potentially every product with "shirt", "red", "nylon" and "polo" in the name! Rather than the sum of its parts, you're going to get all of the pieces of a search phrase, which isn't helping anyone.

• NLP is going to take a top down approach to searching, recognizing the needs of your customers via the big picture. As a result, it's going to look for products that meet all of the criteria together, or in other words, "red nylon polo shirts!" The results are going to be only products that meet these cumulative requirements. Furthermore, semantic search will also return the correct refinements to allow your visitors to filter down and find their exact product.

NLP becomes incredibly important as your store scales because the more variables you have floating around, the more confused and convoluted your text-based search is going to become.

On the flip side, whether you've got 500 products or 500,000 products, NLP is going to understand what you're trying to say, which means a more helpful search function for growing Magento eCommerce sites.