We speak often and in depth about why you need site search on your website. This is because we believe in the difference it can make, not just for the website, but for your entire business. Site search offers smoother customer interaction, provides an additional touchpoint for information gathering, and shortens the customer journey. Businesses in any industry can benefit from these characteristics, but it’s especially true for those with a heavy load of information and products for customers to sift through to find what they need. Site search for equipment and machinery solutions industry businesses can meet customer needs and bring in revenue, so we organized an AMA webinar to help our customers and prospects address the pain points of site search in their industry.
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Investing in site search for equipment solutions providers
The first and most important question for anyone considering an investment in site search would be, “What can it do for our business?” Basically, site search can help you guide your visitors within your website. It can help you increase sales and conversions, while decreasing your helpdesk and customer support workload.
This applies to all businesses. But what’s special about site search for equipment and machinery solutions? There are problems that are unique to the industry that search can solve.
Manage volumes of information
Typically, an e-commerce website for machinery will carry thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of products. It’s not just the products, either. There are catalogs, user manuals, and specifications, all of which need to be easily accessible to customers. This data really deserves a good search.
You may also have customers looking for a part you don’t have, and you may want to show the closest alternative for a solution. However, if you do have the part they want, you would want them to get to it quickly so they can make the purchase with the least inconvenience. Even if customers know the exact model number of what they want, finding and navigating to it without an effective, relevant search can be overwhelming.
Search on the go
This means that you need a search solution that performs well. But performance on a desktop browser isn’t enough. People looking for machinery and spare parts are often not at a desk. They are out in the field trying to solve problems. When they get client or customer orders, they may want to quickly search a catalog. So, for site search for equipment solutions providers, mobile compatibility and performance across devices is important.
Focus on core strengths
Most businesses in the machinery industry are great at their line of work. However, their e-commerce website was probably developed by a third party as a one-time implementation. In addition, they don’t necessarily keep full-time developers to manage that website. Working with a site search solution provider will allow them to deploy search functionality quickly without requiring developers, since their implementation and development needs would be minimal.
Enhance cost-effectiveness
That would also make it more cost-effective, as building an advanced search solution can be costly. If starting from scratch, your developer would need to have experience in or be trained on search solutions. It would also be important to choose the right technology to implement. Using a readymade search solution for equipment providers allows you to avoid upfront investments and have the search created for them by specialists.
Getting ROI from site search
If you’d like a deeper understanding of all the factors that go into getting the best ROI from your site search, we have discussed it before. But how does it work?
With site search, the numbers will speak for themselves, and you can track the increase in conversions using your analytics. What makes this happen?
Findability
As mentioned earlier, site search gets your customers to their destination faster. This creates an enhanced user experience for them. Even if you don’t take orders directly from your website, and you may just put a product catalog on the site, you’d get more calls when people can easily find what they’re looking for. The flip side is that people usually get frustrated if they can’t find what they’re looking for. So, this is a quick way to increase customer satisfaction, which will also lead to positive word of mouth and create repeat business for you.
Upselling products
Search is no longer just search. It can be a discovery tool, offering opportunities to upsell. For example, showing our “Frequently Bought Together Products” widget on your product pages can encourage customers to purchase additional items. Customers who are unsure of what they want may also benefit from the “Recommended Products” feature.
Analytics & insights
The insights you get from site search for equipment and machinery solutions can also give you a competitive advantage. This can look like defining your inventory strategy based on the most popular searches so you never run out of stock or understanding which products that customers want aren’t currently in your inventory.
So overall, investing in site search can improve the user experience on your site, increase customer satisfaction, and drive revenue for you.
Implementing search painlessly
Once the “why”s are clear, it’s time to get started. That’s usually when the potential pitfalls of implementation start to loom larger. The first concern is how long the implementation will take. At AddSearch, we consider every search implementation and integration a project. A standard implementation is usually a small project in AddSearch terms and can 2 to 4 weeks. This timeline can be lengthened by a few factors like A/B testing or decision makers deprioritizing the search implementation.
We take our search seriously at AddSearch, and we have put in place certain important elements that make integration smoother:
Stringent security
A major concern that customers have is security. We understand how important trust is and have ensured the security of our servers. They are compliant with the highest security standards, like SOC2 and ISO 27,001, but we also do vulnerability assessments every six months to check and fix any technical vulnerabilities that might crop up.
Structured support
No matter how well thought-through, every project comes with questions and sometimes even obstacles. The key to dealing with this, we’ve found, is to document everything! Our robust documentation ensures that solutions are easy to find.
Our excellent support team forms our next line of defense. With in-depth knowledge of the product, years of experience working with it, and the curiosity and willingness to help that makes them go above and beyond to find solutions, the team is well-equipped to troubleshoot effectively.
Our dedicated implementation manager for each Premium and Enterprise project takes customers through the process from the start to the end of the implementation. We model the user search experience with wireframes and then design and implement it, integrating it seamlessly with the overall user experience. We also train our clients to use the tools and adjust the initial settings to fine-tune their search algorithm, giving them control over their search so they can benefit from it from day one.
Fine-tuning site search
As you have already heard, site search for equipment and machinery solutions providers is about more than just the initial setup of the search itself. Settings can be adjusted to maximize the effectiveness of search.
Personalized search
Search results and product recommendations can be personalized based on clients’ previous purchases or demographic data, or on authenticated crawling, which allows clients to personalize search more for specific user groups. The second type of search experience is behind a login, allowing for a more customized experience.
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To find out more about how to customize search for equipment and machinery companies, you can watch the webinar. Or, if you have specific questions that have not been covered, our expert team would be excited to have a conversation with you about how we can help.
