Dave Lloyd from Adobe
- Unsuccessful experiences hurt your business - and this can affect your bottom line
- On-site search is a great way to keep your customers happy
- 4 steps to make on-site search better:
- Start with creating a search box on your site
- Encourage visitors to search
- Amazon puts their search at the top of the page, makes it easier for customers to find and use it
- Look for how users are trying to search and solve for their troubles
- Assist visitors using linguistics or predictive search
- Again, make it easier for them to search
- Look for terms that will make it easy for first-time visitors to your site
- Use paid, organic and other search query data to educate you
- Look at synonyms and missspellings
- Use auto-complete as a great tool - and don't "set and forget" - update regularly
- Filter results with refinements
- Filters are very important to help website visitors find things faster
- Again, Amazon is very good at this
- Refine results to align with the customer journey
- Deliver relevant results that align with your business strategy
- Use this to promote content that's related or "you might also like"
- Think about how you might do paid search, adding ad-like content blocks in the on-site search results - this can work great for new products/services on the site
- Focus on searcher intent - again, make it easier for them
- Remember, on-site search is not a "set it and forget it" thing (he mentioned this several times, and I agree that it's important)
- Don't forget analytics - you have to measure KPIs to know if your on-site search is working as it should ... Data-driven decision making
J.P Sherman - Manager of Search and Findability at Redhat
Note: Kudos for using references to The Clash and Bob's Burgers
- Optimize your on-site search
- Data needs to tell a story - there's a lot of data out there and you need to avoid data overload
- Stories can spur action - data by itself is not the story
- Don't think about keywords as just words, they're how your users' intent is expressed
- Don't use CTR as the lone metric to understand user intent - also look at conversions
- Consider using META Keywords tag for on-site search ... not for Google and Bing. Be sure not to spam if you do this
- If your CTR is <85%, your on-site search needs a lot of help, if it's higher you're doing great
- Look for searches that get no results - this is a great way to get content ideas
- Look for misspellings - This is a place to get ideas for autosuggest and "did you mean" suggestions
- Don't forget your mobile on-site search experience
- "Don't be Google - be you"
- Consider using images and alternate ways to display search results to help your visitors do better in your on-site search
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