Searches with no results
What the platform already does about them on its own, and what only you can decide from the list they form.
A search with no results is the cheapest thing to fix in a store and the quickest way to send somebody away. And it's the only list that tells you, in the customers' own words, what they expected to find and didn't.
What already happens without you touching anything
Before a search returns zero, it goes through four layers of correction: accent normalisation, typo tolerance, collapsing what was still being typed and, with the feature in the plan and the switch on, an AI reread of what the person meant.
Beyond that, a zero is never an empty screen: the search panel shows the message, keeps the box and the filter column within reach, and (with recommendations on) has somewhere to carry on.
What is left at zero after all this is what really matters.
Where you see the list
In three places, from the most immediate to the most actionable:
- Overview: the No results figure for the last 30 days, with the change, and the list of terms that came back empty.
- Analytics: the same list with a window of your choice, a filter by device and export to CSV.
- Optimisation: the terms classified by type of problem, with an estimate of what is recovered per month. This is where you decide, because it orders by money and not by volume.
The four causes, and what to do about each one
1. Vocabulary. Customers use another word for what you sell. It's the most common cause and the easiest: synonyms, and the screen already brings suggestions taken from these searches.
2. You don't sell it. Part of the searches with no results is real demand for things you don't have. It isn't a fault in the search, it's purchasing information: a brand asked for fifty times a month is a catalogue decision, not a configuration one.
3. It's in the catalogue, but it isn't findable. The product exists and the word isn't in any indexed field, or it's in a field with weight zero. See products that don't show up.
4. It isn't a search, it's a question. "How long does delivery take", "can I return this". The search box is where people type, and there's no point being cross about it. Two possible answers, and both are switched on somewhere else:
- index the blog and the pages, and the answer starts appearing in the results (articles and content);
- hand whoever writes questions over to the assistant, which is one of the doors in getting to know the assistant.
A fifth one, which you only see if you look
Terms that return zero in spikes. A campaign, an influencer, an advertised product. Monday's search with no results that didn't exist last week is rarely a configuration problem; it's almost always new traffic looking for one specific thing.
A redirect rule solves this in two minutes and without reindexing anything: whoever types that goes straight to the campaign page.
Marking as resolved
In Optimisation, each term you've dealt with can be marked as resolved: it leaves the list without deleting anything, the record of the decision stays, and it's undone with one click. It's what lets you come back to the screen in two weeks and see only what's new.