A high-quality search function and clear product information are essential in improving the shopping experience and increasing sales. With the help of a PIM system, product information remains clearly structured, up-to-date and search engine friendly, which ensures better findability both in the online store and in search engines.

High-quality and comprehensive product information ensure better visibility in organic searches

Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to make products easily found in organic searches, such as on Google. If product information is not in order, the site's search engine visibility will suffer and the ranking in the results listings will decrease. For organic search engine visibility, it is worth investing in informative product names, product descriptions and keywords that are optimized for search engines.

No good site search without excellent product information

Product information – its scope and quality – significantly affects how site searches work and how relevant results they provide. The structure, level of structuring and atomicity of product information determine, among other things, what kind of search filters can be created. At its simplest, for example, searching by brand “Show all products from brand X” cannot be done without structured product information.

It is a good idea to automatically import product information used in searches from back-end systems via interfaces. The PIM system can also provide dynamically generated search term lists tailored to each target system, so that not everything related to online store searches, for example, needs to be done on the online store side.

What makes a good on-site search?

By improving the internal search of a website, you can influence how easily products are found within the service. Good site search consists of several things:

• The search function should be easy to find. It should be easy, logical and fast to use.
• The search field must support smart suggestionsa: When the user enters only part of the search terms, the service starts suggesting suitable products.
  • There is also often talk about semantic search, where the search engine tries to recognize the user's intentions and context and thus produce the most relevant search results. For example, the search "men's work trousers 50 black". Instead of the former showing all men's products and all work trousers, the search engine can show the products the user actually searched for.
  • Managing synonyms is important – make sure that the products can be found with many different search terms.
• Provide relevant search filters to further narrow down your products.
  • Make sure that the user always sees relevant search filters in each product category or search result listing, but not unnecessary ones that just confuse.
  • High-quality product information is key in filtering: for example, if color options are missing from the product information, search filters will not work properly and customers will become frustrated.
• Show enough information already in search results – especially the product image, name and short description are important so that the user can easily choose the right product.

Track, develop and improve to keep up with the pace

It is worth constantly monitoring and analyzing the site's searches to keep track of how well the search is working and what needs to be improved. Product content, keywords, filters and selection can be developed by analyzing how searches are used and how well the products and content searched for are found. Search analysis can be used to support other marketing channels and the results can be used, for example, for marketing targeting or personalization.

Investing in good search features and product information is worth it. Even relatively small steps can significantly improve the user experience and data usability – ask for more tips if you're interested!

Read also: eCommerce growth with product information management

Or watch the video: Product information management and websites