CRO Quick Tip: Pay Attention To Search Synonyms

One of the quickest ways to supercharge the on-site search of your ecommerce store is to use search synonyms if your CMS platform or app allows you to do so.

A ‘Very’ Poor Search Experience

In this example, I’ve shown online retailer Very who have a perfect example of how it could be done better. The keyword term “‘trainers” is often associated with “sneakers”. Yes there’s a massive disparity in the amount of monthly UK searches for sneakers, but nevertheless it’s always good to cover your bases.

You can see here that the search for “trainers” serves 4118 results. Yet on the flip side of that, the search for “sneakers” only results in 83 pairs. That’s a massive difference to a business that has a huge stock holding in trainers.

Check Your Top Search Term Reports

Don’t be a busy fool. You want to maximise your gains for the least amount of effort. Check out your top search terms on your site within GA4 or from within your CMS dashboard. Make sure that you focus your efforts around these first to maximise your ROI.

Consider Misspellings

Within your optimisation strategy you might want to consider how people are likely to misspell words on your site and how your search engine results page generates the results. For example “‘adidas” is quite commonly spelt “addidas”.

If you were a sportswear retailer who didn’t implement synonyms or optimisers for words like this, you could be missing out on a lot of potential sales and hurting your overall metrics in GA with poor bounce rates and time on site.

How To Create Search Synonyms in Magento 2

Adobe have a good article showing how to implement search synonyms on their Magento platform. It is a relatively simple process that can be implemented within minutes – https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/commerce-admin/catalog/catalog/search/search-terms.html?lang=en#search-synonyms

Implement A Synonym Group

1. Within your Admin panel, navigate to Marketing > SEO & Search > Search Synonyms. Upon using the Search Synonyms feature for the first time you will find that this screen will be empty.
2. Click New Synonym Group.
3. Set Scope to the store views where you want your synonyms to be implemented. If you only have one store view then the default option will be what you choose.
4. Input words that you think people will use as search terms on your site. Ensure that these are comma separated. Examples of these include
   • trainers, sneakers, kicks, runners
   • chair, seat, stool
   • addidas, adidas, adidas originals, adiddas
   • computer, pc, laptop, desktop
5. If you want to combine synonyms into a group with others living within the same scope, select the Merge existing synonyms checkbox.
6. When you are finished your changes and ready to implement, click Save Synonym Group.
7. You may need to flush some of your cache’s if it doesn’t show on the front-end immediately.
8. Check your work on-site after any changes.

Final Thoughts

CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) audits can be very expensive for small businesses to undertake. This small step of implementing some key search synonyms is one small but productive change you can implement before having to reach out to an ecommerce consultant or digital marketing agency.