Businesses need advanced search for their CMS’s
Content management systems (CMS’s) like WordPress and HubSpot make it easy to create and manage content including landing pages, blog posts, and other types of media. In general, CMS’s provide a robust platform that can be implemented with much less technical expertise than a system built in-house.
Navigating CMS’s with lots of content
CMS’s are great platforms for enabling you to create and publish content, but they can become difficult for visitors to navigate once you have published a lot of content.
Take a moment to think about how website visitors land on your site and how they navigate around once they are there. If a visitor didn’t come to your site by directly entering your URL in their web browser, they probably found your content through social media or a Google search.
Once a visitor consumes the content that they originally visited your website for, are they able to easily find other relevant content pieces? It’s likely that you have a header or sidebar menu for the visitor to find additional content but do you also have a search box?
If you have advanced search implemented on your website, visitors have a single window into all of your content.
Site search keeps visitors on your site and gives you insight about their interests
It’s important to have a search box on your CMS website because visitors who utilize in-site search are high intent. They trust your website enough to explicitly search for content, and they’re expecting relevant results. If you have advanced search implemented on your website, visitors have a single window into all of your content.
Additionally, site search provides you with rich analytics including popular queries, queries that return no results, and CTRs. After reviewing your search analytics, you can optimize your search results and add new content based on queries that are returning no results.
Gain full control over your CMS search
If you’re using out-of-the-box CMS search, your site search might be delivering relevant results. Unfortunately, if it’s not, there’s not much you can do to fine-tune the results. On the other hand, if you add Swiftype Site Search to your CMS, you will have full control over your search experience including the ability to weight certain data fields, re-rank results on a query-by-query basis, and set synonyms.
Adding Swiftype Site Search to any CMS
You can use the Swiftype web crawler or API to index your content and make it searchable on your website. If you elect to use the Swiftype web crawler, you can easily optimize content extraction with HTML tags. If you elect to use the Swiftype API to index your data, you will create a search engine schema that makes sense for the data you want to make searchable.
To implement a search UI on your website, you can use the Swiftype Embed Code or our jQuery libraries.
Adding Swiftype Site Search to WordPress (via a plugin)
The Swiftype Site Search WordPress plugin replaces the standard WordPress search with a better, more relevant search engine. It is used by many of the largest WordPress sites (including TechCrunch) and has over 3,000 active installs.
The Swiftype Site Search plugin doesn’t require coding and takes a minute to install. Swiftype uses the WordPress search results template, so you have total control over the design.
To get started, just create a Swiftype account, copy your API key and paste it into the Swiftype WordPress Plugin. Then you click a button and Swiftype will index your WordPress site. For more advanced use cases, Swiftype supports the WP-CLI.
