What is Search Relevance?
Search relevance is the process of matching the content on your website with the user's search query. It is a key factor in determining whether or not the proper products will appear in search results, and can ultimately impact your sales and traffic.
Users are more likely to purchase from websites that show relevant products to their search query, so it is important to ensure that your website's onsite search is accurately representing what users are searching for.
How do I know if I need adjust Search Relevance
There are a few ways to test the relevancy of your website's search results. The first is to identify keywords that are being searched on your site, and then test the returned results against those keywords. If the results do not match the keyword, you may need to adjust the recall and/or precision within your search platform.
Another way to test relevancy is to ask yourself if the products that are being returned in search results are ones that the user is actually looking for. If not, this is an indication that your website's search relevance needs to be improved. Improving search relevancy can be a complex process, but it is important to ensure that your website's onsite search is returning accurate.
What is Search Recall?
Search recall is the percentage of relevant documents that are returned in the result set. For example, if your website sells jackets and the most frequent term searched is "red jackets," and you have a high search recall setting, you can expect to see red jackets, jackets, and any item that has a color of red. If your website's search recall is too low, you may miss out on potential sales by not showing relevant products in the search results.
What is Search Precision?
Search precision is the percentage of documents in the search results that are relevant. If we continue with the above example and you have a weighted search precision and your most frequent searched term is "red jackets" you would expect to have ONLY red jackets returned.
If your website's search precision is too low, you run the risk of showing irrelevant products in the search results, which can frustrate users and cause them to leave your site without making a purchase. However, if your search precision is to high you run the risk of excluding other relevant search results for keywords.
Review your Search Data
Onsite search is becoming increasingly popular as a way for users to find the products, documents or services they need. As a result, it is important to review your site search data on a regular basis. By doing so, you will be able to identify any areas where your site's search relevance could be improved. This can be done by making changes to the content on your site, by adding new keywords or by altering the way that search results are displayed. By taking these steps, you can ensure that your site's onsite search function is as effective as possible.
The next time you are keyword searching on your website, test out the most prevalent searches and the searches with poor results to identify improvement opportunities i.e. adjusting relevancy, updating curation rules, adding synonyms, popularity, personalization and more. Contact us to see how we can help streamline your keyword searches.