Do you enjoy shopping online? Isn’t it the most convenient option to shop for whatever you want with just a click? So, when you search for a product, and the exact product pops up on your screen, that’s where faceted navigation comes into the forefront. The convenience of ordering by brand, color, size, etc., all is achieved through the optimization of faceted navigation in a website.
Almost every e-commerce giant has benefited from this navigated search solution and has witnessed better conversation rates and impressive sales growth. It is a proven fact that if customers are unable to track or trace the product they are looking for, they will deviate to a different business. Thus, it becomes pivotal to pay attention to an advanced and seamless user interface that will drive more traffic and sales. Faceted navigation does exactly the same by helping the customers refine their search to the exact product they are looking for. Learn about the power and capabilities of these search solutions in boosting online sales:
How does faceted navigation help businesses?
Big enterprises with a vast catalog of products and services need to develop an effective search solution that helps customers filter out what they are looking for. The faceted search helps simplify the navigation process by offering customers predefined search criteria.
In addition to narrowing down the results, the faceted navigation also helps with the following:
- Better user experience: Faceted search helps to remove unnecessary analysis paralysis and allows users to filter the search results based on their attributes. This offers a seamless user experience to the customers and increases the chances of conversion rates.
- Remarkable efficiency: With the enhanced search solution, customers can efficiently search for their products without having to go through the entire catalog.
- Customization convenience: Faceted navigation can be customized to cater to the unique requirements of businesses based on their product attributes.
- Upgraded analytics: By optimizing their website with faceted navigation, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior, product preferences, and search patterns. They can further use these data to optimize the product and pricing to target customers.
What are the common facet filters to include in e-commerce?
If you want to make the search solution work in the favour of your business, you must effectively optimize the filters to help your customers narrow their search results. Here are a few filters that are found to be effective:
- Price: This has to be one of the most essential filters to include in your faceted navigation settings. Price is an essential factor in online shopping, and most customers use it to compare between merchants or to search for something within their desired budget.
- Quality or ratings: Market surveys suggest that 46% of customers trust online reviews and ratings to purchase an item. Thus, enabling the ratings in the faucet filter can be a smart marketing strategy.
- Brand, color, and size: Many customers consider brand-specific shopping, while others want something of a specific color and size.
- Category-specific: Customizing the search based on product category is essential to filter out relatable products for a particular search action.
Best practices of faceted navigation that could benefit E-commerce enterprises:
The bigger the enterprise, the more complex its catalog and line of available products are. Thus, faceted navigation is an effective solution to streamline search results based on desired attributes. However, enterprises can implement some practices into their navigation solution to target customers and boost sales. Here are a few examples of best practices to incorporate:
- Prioritizing customer requirements and designing the facets that make the user experience seamless. You can optimize the search solution based on market insights and thinking as a customer.
- Maintain clean and accurate product data, as incorrect or incomplete data can prevent product indexing in search results.
- Incorporate checkboxes or multiple selection options that allow users to specify their requirements in a search result.
- Implement dynamic facets in e-commerce sites as it allows for real-time upgrades. Dynamic facets also help to customize the data based on customer behavior.
- Refrain from over-engineering the facets, as it could be complex and clutter the search process.
- Finally, ensure that the facets are displayed in a user-friendly manner that is logically placed, clearly labeled, and easy to use.
The technicalities that need special attention while optimizing faceted navigation:
Although faceted navigation is a great solution for enhanced user experience, if not implemented properly, it could negatively impact the website’s search engine ranking. In order to maintain a balance of user experience and ranking, you need to implement the following:
- By adding “Nofollow noindex” tags, you can prevent search engines from indexing faceted search results and preserve the original rankings.
- Choose to disallow the facet pages in robots.txt; this will prevent search engine crawlers from crawling these pages and affecting the ranking. This will further prevent duplicate content from demoting the search engine ranking.
- Canonicalize the primary pages to prevent duplicate content from appearing on multiple URLs.
How do you treat the faceted navigated pages?
Faceted navigation is an effective and result-oriented solution that boosts sales and is a popular option in e-commerce websites. However, knowing how to treat your faceted navigated pages can make them more effective. The above-mentioned technical optimizations are necessary to achieve the best results from faceted navigation. By blocking crawl, implementing no indexing, and canonicalizing the primary pages, you can achieve better sales, enhance your customer experience, and maintain your search engine ranking.
Stay tuned for more information on faceted navigation and how it can help your business grow and flourish.
