Onsite search can be one of the most valuable aspects of your website.
A better customer experience directly affects the success of your business: increasing sales, improving revenue, and ensuring high-value, repeat business. But did you know, the onsite search function – where customers search your site for terms, products, or services – plays a significant role in customer experience? Onsite search directly impacts customer engagement, conversion, loyalty, and revenue.
3 methods to improve onsite search
Content and Copy
Optimizing web pages and content to improve search engine results is probably a familiar strategy. You can optimize the content on your website similarly. Look at page titles, page descriptions, metatags, previews, and interlinking to ensure key terms are addressed (both primary keywords and long-tail keywords) to improve accurate matches between search terms and results. Even better? Changes made here may improve SEO as well.
Analytics and Tracking
A great onsite search experience is vital, but a dashboard is also necessary. Businesses need the ability to measure results and get a hands-on view of search success and failure to identify opportunities to improve results further. The right analytics tools can help provide the data necessary to make these assessments and gauge the success of optimizations, additions, and improvements.
Search Intent
When reviewing keywords, put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. A single search term may match more than one result – and some results may be more relevant to answering the question being asked through onsite search. The more you can identify what a site visitor is looking for, instead of how you think about your offerings internally, the more refined you can make your search results. Refer back to your analytics to see which terms they use most often, and consider refining your onsite search to match frequent searches with the most relevant results.
