Level: Intermediate
For content-rich or product-heavy sites, search functionality is often more heavily used than browsing navigation, and its design deserves proportional attention.
Make Search Genuinely Easy to Find
A search feature hidden behind a small icon in an unexpected location gets used far less than one prominently and predictably placed.
Provide Helpful Autocomplete Suggestions
Suggesting likely queries as a visitor types reduces effort and helps guide them toward terms your site can actually return good results for.
Handle Zero-Result Searches Gracefully
A search that returns nothing, with no guidance or alternative suggestions, is a dead end that a well-designed fallback experience can turn into a recovered visitor instead.
Next step: Use the Keywords Suggestion Tool to research the kinds of terms and phrases visitors are likely to search for, so your autocomplete suggestions actually reflect real language.