6 Essentials for Better Search Experience Optimisation | Organic

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We’ve already talked about why we believe that search experience optimisation is vital for e-commerce success. If you’re not thinking about your customers’ search experience, from initial stimulus through to on-site experience and on to purchase you’re always going to be playing catch up.

The fundamentals of building a better search experience aren’t too complicated in principle though, like so much in life, they can be hard to put into practice. But here are some essentials that will help you start to work towards SXO success.

Upping your search experience starts with the right mindset

Effective search experience optimisation (SXO) sees search as much more than about raising visibility of a website in the SERPs. Instead, it’s about a cohesive, holistic view of the customer’s entire search journey and building a rich experience on your site so that the whole journey is useful and compelling.

This doesn’t mean that your search team starts calling the shots on UX, or that your UX team puts the kibosh on suggestions about site changes from the search team. It’s a distinct move away from silos to working in unison and recognising that SEO, UX, and CRO work together to build a high-performing site that drives more sales. Sometimes the needs and priorities of UX, SEO, and CRO won’t always align, and that’s fine as long as there is constant collaboration.

Think of it like three wheels on a trike. They all need to be there, spinning in unison for a pleasant ride. If one is missing or deflated, forward momentum is going to be a struggle.

Essential components of amazing SXO

Because of its broad end-to-end approach SXO covers a lot of ground. But some of the important areas to consider when looking to enhance your search experience are:

High quality, useful content – As Google’s Helpful Content update shows, the need to create content that is useful for people as opposed to created just to rank highly, is of extreme importance. We’ve already discussed how content should be rich and provide the details searchers are after. It should solve problems, answer questions, or in some other way be useful. From an e-commerce perspective there is a lot to do here in terms of product and category content.
Responsive web design – Your site needs to work on all screens large and small. Nothing will cause users to head off to some other site than pages that are a nightmare to navigate on their phone. Are menus easy to use? Do your images scale properly? Are forms simple to fill in and buttons and checkboxes easy to interact with? Clunky design will yield poor user satisfaction and with it bad performance on important metrics that Google cares about.
Optimise for speed – In a similar vein to the above point, your site needs to load quickly and stably even on a mobile connection. Slow sites are a real headache for users and can cause real friction when it comes to customers’ purchasing.
Easy to navigate – This can be a real challenge for big e-commerce sites where there are so many categories, subcategories, multifaceted site search with all its many filters and options, but it’s essential you make your site as simple to navigate as possible. If users struggle to find what they need, or end up in lost in a labyrinth of dead ends and 404 pages getting them to conversion is going to be a real struggle.
Technical performance – Loading speed and responsiveness aside, making sure your site is optimised for crawlability and indexability is essential. Using structured data, optimising meta tags, headings, and other HTML elements are still vital parts of search experience optimisation.
The buying processes – Ensuring the site is optimised for conversion requires a laser focus on what the process to buy is like. From testing page layouts, CTAs, and copy through to the checkout process, if you want your search experience to be the best it can be then CRO is vital.

An awful lot goes into just these areas, and it can feel overwhelming at first to think in this broad way. But this is the reality if you want to truly perform in search as an e-commerce brand. Put the customer at the heart of everything and build your site around them and you’ll enjoy better search performance, happier customers, and more sales.

We’d love to talk to you about how we can improve your search experience to drive more growth. Get in touch today.