The Importance of an Internal Search Solution
Internal site search is a critical function of any website whether content or ecommerce driven. The goal of the user journey on your website is to get a user to their final destination as seamlessly as possible while still providing necessary and relevant information to achieve the desired conversion.
An optimized internal site search solution helps your website do just that. Let’s review five top reasons a search function is critical to your website:
Driving Content Strategy
Content continues to be king so adapting and improving your content strategy improves the performance of your website by both driving and converting traffic. The insight you get from the queries your searches are entering on your website can be imperative to driving what content needs to be created or adapted to meet your users needs. With site search reporting capabilities you may be able to determine what queries are being searched, popularity of those searches, and results from those queries. How powerful would it be to have that data in your hand to ensure your visitors are getting the content they need resulting in higher conversion and satisfaction rates. There is nothing worse than having your paid advertising go to waste if the end result of your visitors is frustration and abandonment after they can’t find what they are looking for.
Improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Paid Search Strategy
Those queries your searches are entering into your site search is critical data not just to adapt your on page content strategy, but also to drive your Search Engine Optimization and Paid Search Strategy. Reviewing those keywords that are searched the most and/or convert the best can be helpful to determine changes in your meta data, or keyword bid strategy.
Increase Your Conversion Rates
Site search studies have shown to improve conversion rates, but also that users that use the search tend to spend more making up a larger portion of the site revenue. Keep in mind of course that there are many site search tool solutions that perform differently so it is key to determine a solution that intelligently delivers results beyond a simple keyword match and has tools to help users such as autocomplete, filtering, sorting and more to give the most optimized and engaging experience.
Improves Mobile Usability
With mobile usage continually rising a site search solution can allow users to more quickly navigate through a smaller screen. This is critical to the experience since mobile websites tend to be responsive so they contain almost the exact same content as a desktop making pages longer and heavier to navigate through. An additional consideration is that Google has also changed to mobile first indexing so having a mobile website with an easy to navigate search solution can improve your mobile engagement metrics which positively impacts your SEO.
No Results, Optimization
There will be times when no matter how optimized your website content or search solution is that a user will hit what used to be considered the dreaded no results . This historically dreaded page can now be a powerful marketing tool within a search solution as your website can adapt to a user that is lost and present content such as: similar results, promotional banners, suggested content, etc. to engage the user back into your website versus having them abandon the site.
A site search solution isn’t just a search tool, it can perform as a marketing tool and also work as a customer representative by presenting alternatives and solutions. With the power available in site search solutions make sure you have both the right toolset, but that it is also being utilized to its fullest to drive the best visitor experience possible.