5+1 ways to improve your website’s search

5+1 ways to improve your website’s search 

🔍 “Can’t find what you’re looking for?”

If your website visitors are asking this question, it might be time to rethink your search function. No matter how good your website navigation may be, your website’s search functionality can make or break a good user experience. 

If the search tool is too basic, it may not allow your visitors to easily find what they are looking for, especially if you have a vast number of resources to surface. If, it’s too complicated then it can be off-putting from the star causing visitors to drop off and making your search as good as redundant. 

This is where Reason Digital can help. Here are 5 ways to improve your website’s search: 

Search Filters

Let’s start with an easy one. Search filters allow visitors to narrow down the results by restricting the search criteria. This could be categories, tags, price ranges, locations, dates, or other criteria specific to your organisation and its content. 

The addition of filters must be carefully considered. There can be a tendency to think that more filters equals more flexibility and, hence, a better experience, but this isn’t always the case. Too much choice can lead the visitor to feel overwhelmed or cause your interface to become cluttered, resulting in a poor user experience. Finding a balance that works for your visitors and your content is important. 

Here is a good example from the King’s Fund site: several filters allow flexible searching without compromising the layout and user experience. 

Intelligent search

Autocomplete/Autosuggestion and predictive search terms can help improve your visitor’s experience by guiding their search from the moment they begin typing. They can speed up the search process and helps users find what they need, especially if they’re not sure how to phrase their query. Additionally, they allow new content to be discovered and provide insight into what’s trending on your site via the suggestions offered. All in all, these features can save users time and crucially help reduce frustration. 

Fuzzy searching allows matches to be found that are close to, but not exactly, the search team used. This is used to handle occasions where search terms are misspelled or incomplete. 

Here is the Scout Association’s website with its fuzzy search implementation. 

Visible and Accessible Design Considerations

How your website design incorporates your search bar is critical in whether it’s used or not by your visitors.  

Location is important, in more ways than one. Make sure that your search bar/icon is in a universally expected location like the top of your webpage, often on the right for western countries where the language reads left to right. If your site is multilingual and supports right to left languages, it’s important that your layout changes to suit, in this case your search bar/icon would move to the left.  

Is your search bar mobile-friendly?  

As of 2024, statistics have shown that mobile browser use is just as prominent as desktop browsing, in some regions even surpassing it by a large margin. Therefore, ensuring the search bar is touch-friendly, with a clean and simple interface can help provide a great user experience on mobile devices where screen space is limited. 

Here is a great example of location and responsive design used for Anna Freud’s mobile friendly website. The search bar appears after selecting the search icon, so to only take up screen space when needed. 

AI (Artificial Intelligence)

AI is all the rage at the moment and seems to be getting more capable each day. Taking advantage of the power of AI could really help boost your website’s search capabilities. Here are a few ways in which it could be utilised: 

NLP (Natural Language Processing)

This allows your search to understand and interpret human language as requests. For example, instead of asking for a recipe for a particular cake, you could ask it “What cakes recipes are suitable for a birthday party” or “Give me cake recipes that don’t use flour”. When combined with voice input, searching becomes something you can ask rather than type, this can be particularly useful for mobile users and improving accessibility. 

Auto translation

AI can be used to not only understand search requested in multiple languages, but it can also translate the search results to the same language as the request, even if all your site content and resources are in one language. 

Related content 

With the ability to scan a site and resources to use as it’s knowledge base, AI can interpret which of your content is related to each other and include this as part of the research results. 

Keep in mind that AI can be expensive, and you’ll often be changed on a pay-per-use basis. Therefore, you’ll need to make sure it’s affordable and the results are worth the cost. One way to do that is utilising Analytics. 

Analytics

Analytics provide key insights into how visitors interact with your website. They can be extremely useful in analysing how visitors use your site’s search and what they are looking for.  

With this information you can see where there may be gaps or changes required in your sites content, by identifying searches that have been met with no results. Knowing what terms and content people are searching for most can be used to help decide/refine which filters are added to your search.  

That’s 5 key areas to look at when trying to improve your website search, however there’s also an alternative that may be worth investing in too. 

+1 Chatbots 

Chatbots can be an alternative to a traditional search bar, but in many cases they operate in tandem with each other. At Reason Digital we’ve found that it comes down to personal preference which visitors will choose to interact with, so it can be beneficial to provide both. 

Chatbots inherently include many of the features described above, and it can be straightforward to get something up and running on your site that uses your content for its responses. However, in cases where an organisation provides specialist support or must deal with complex queries from visitors, chatbots can require more design and refinement to get the experience right. 

At Reason Digital we’ve delivered many chatbot for our clients, here are a few recent examples below, of chatbots we’ve built for WECIL and Tinnitus UK.