For Magento store owners and merchants in particular, this shift to mobile computing is one that simply cannot be ignored. Today’s websites need to be optimized for small-screen viewing, enhanced with smartphone capabilities and need to be streamlined for touch-enabled browsing. Most of all, however, they need to be powered by a semantic/natural language site search solution.
Semantic supremacy
What puts semantic searching at the top of the list for optimization necessity is the role it plays in bridging the gap between mobile computing and e-commerce conversions and your visitors language and your product catalog.
Consider a customer who prefers to shop on their smartphone. Rather than clicking through categories and going through page after page of products, waiting for each to load on their screen, most shoppers are going to head straight to the search box to at least narrow down their options first. Herein lies the problem for text-based searches:
- Text-based searches may not have the comprehension to narrow searches as far as they can be refined, meaning more results that your shopper has to scroll through. On a smartphone, this is going to lead to lost sales quickly if the product your shoppers are looking for isn’t in the top 10 or so results.
- Predictive text on smartphones can cause some real issues that text-based searches simply cannot overcome. If a smartphone corrects “shoes” to “shows” for example, there’s a good chance your text-based search is going to return zero results for “red running shows.” Semantic search, on the other hand, is going to recognize the mistake and return the intended results.
- The average smartphone screen is just under 5” in size, which means a smaller keyboard and typing area. To this end, your customers are going to search more succinctly: “red run shoe” rather than “red running shoes.” Having a search function that fills in the blanks and bridges the gaps means returning the right search results. Semantic search does this; text-based search doesn’t.
Being able to adapt to mobile browsing search trends is what makes semantic search such an asset to Magento merchants. Mobile computing is only growing in scope, which means satisfying the needs of your (mobile) smartphone and tablet shoppers is becoming more and more a burden for your on-site search function.
Capturing mobile conversions
The mobile users don't have a lot of time to waste, nor do they like to waste the little time they have of getting bad results. These people browse on the go, make instant decisions as they shop and get frustrated when they’re not able to accomplish what they want to do. Make sure your Magento store’s on-site search function is helping, not hindering when it comes to this growing group of shoppers.
The quicker you can connect them with products through your mobile-friendly semantic on-site search function, the more apt they’ll be to shop again.
