Posts Tagged ‘site search’

So far, we’ve looked at pattern analysis and failure analysis as ways you can use your internal site search data to improve your website (which you should be doing!).  But, there’s more than just search queries to look at.  There are also search sessions that you may be able to look into for more insights.  A search session occurs when a searcher executes multiple queries in one session while trying to address a single information need.  As they interact with your search results and content, it should tell you a lot about how your site is servicing them.

Gain Insight Into the Searcher’s True Need

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We’re currently talking about how to use internal site search data to improve your website performance.  The first type of analysis we looked at was pattern analysis, which entails finding what popular queries have in common or what’s odd about them to gain insights into the content your visitors want and need.  Next, we’ll take a look at failure analysis to find where your site searches are going wrong so you can find what to fix first.

Failure Analysis

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Your site search data, the phrases your website users type into your internal site search engine, is data that is swimming with insights into helping to make satisfied customers with your web site.  If you are someone that is responsible for the performance of a site, this is most likely information that you’ve never looked at and may have not even known existed.  But, you’re going to want to become familiar with it because it’s about the best place you can go online to learn what your users want.  Read the first post in this series for why.

Let’s start with a major analysis type that we can use with this data to improve performance, pattern analysis. Click here to keep learning

When people come to your site, it can be really hard to know why they are there.  The truth is the average conversion rate on e-commerce sites is only around 2-3%…and that’s on sites that are specifically built to sell stuff.  So, what happens to the other 97%?  Why were they there?  Did they find what they were looking for?  If not, why not?  Is the content they are looking for even on your site?  If so, are they able to find it easily?

Keywords that bring users to the site via search engines can help, but visitors are prone to being vague when they use search engines.  But, there’s one place to go for insights into why visitors are on your site that gets overlooked.  It’s a place where your site visitors become much more precise about their browsing intent.  It’s your site search data.  No, not the keywords they used in search engines to find your site.  It’s the phrases they used to search ON your site after they arrived.

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Every now and then I look at a site and wonder if the owner is even trying to make money. Well, I guess I know they are because they do all the “right” things to make money, but they are doing all the wrong things to serve their customer’s needs.

Building a great website is a lot of work, but the job is never really done. There is always something you can do to improve performance, create a better customer experience, or generate a genuine desire for customers to return. And there are also things that shoo customers away, elicit a poor customer experience, and interfere with site performance. Here are just a few:

Too Many Ads

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Back in August of this year, while at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, I sat in a session where one of the speakers talked about site search. He said something that I fundamentally disagree with but it got me thinking about why you should or should not implement a search feature on your own site.

I believe that implementing site search is smart for large sites, but only if you can be sure it works nearly perfectly. On the other hand, the speaker in this session (and I completely forget who it is) said that, for analytical purposes, every site should implement site search, even if it doesn’t do a good job. This is what I fundamentally disagree with.

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What this is about: This list covers in-site search, what features should be included, what is expected by visitors and how the results should be laid out.

Why this is important: Site search is an important element of on-site usability. Both in its ability to help visitors find the information they are looking for, or by being absent if it doesn’t produce accurate results. Site search must be able to improve the visitor’s experience in your site, otherwise it does more harm than good.

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