How to Optimize Your On-Site Search Experience
When it comes to the internal search functionality of websites, the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage — and for good reason. But there are a lot of non-AI housekeeping items that you should address to optimize your on-site search experience, either before or in tandem with diving into those more sophisticated solutions.
A Look at Some Common Problems
The main issue is that the on-site search interface offered by almost every content management system (CMS) falls short of the user expectations set by Google & other search engines in several key ways. Let’s take a look at a few.
Problem #1: Irrelevant Results
On-site search results often simply miss the mark on accuracy, especially for larger websites with hundreds of pages. If relevant results don’t appear, users will go elsewhere — in many cases, back to Google or another preferred search engine — even if they’re seeking information that lives on your site!
SOLUTION:
Leverage advanced search plugins and/or third-party tools like Solr to enable your CMS to better index content to match keywords and queries — and to manually boost certain pages to show at the top of search results based on selected criteria.
Problem #2: Overly Restrictive Criteria
The specificity required for on-site search is often very rigid and doesn’t accommodate the “fuzziness” of some queries. For example, it shouldn’t matter if a user types “run”, “runner”, or “running”: the interface should recognize these as similar requests and return the same results in each case.
SOLUTION:
There’s a variety of solutions you can implement that work together to enable your internal search feature to recognize users’ search intent — even if they include stemming or typos — and to accommodate for other forms of natural language processing. Again you’ll usually need to look beyond the out-of-the-box functionality to more advanced plugins, modules, and configurations.
Problem #3: Sub-Par Overall User Experience
Search results need to appear immediately and be visually appealing in order to maintain user engagement. Keep in mind that users who engage with internal search have already shown a level of intent to invest their time on your site. If the experience is less than optimal, they’ll abandon their session — and your conversion funnel.
SOLUTIONS:
- Ensure obvious placement and clear labeling of the search bar.
- Incorporate auto-complete functionality for search terms.
- Integrate solutions that increase the speed with which results are returned.
- Avoid the temptation to add meaningless search filters for content types or tags. Users typically don’t care if the result comes in the form of a blog post, news article, or case study, so this shouldn’t be the first stop for making search UX better.
- Create a thoughtful results page format that is organized in a way that you would find easy and pleasing to scroll through and digest if you were the end user. You’ll want to pull in related thumbnail images, as well as titles and text snippets or meta descriptions within each summary display. Particularly in the case of B2B, B2C, and ecommerce sites, the summaries displayed need to do the heavy lifting of enticing viewers to click through to detail pages to gain more information, evaluate buying decisions, speak to a representative, and more.
Need help with improving on-site search as part of your overall UX strategy? Let’s talk.
