In 2009, Google’s Avinash Kaushik wrote about the importance of site search analytics, going so far as calling them “life altering”. At that time, Kaushik argued that two major sites were driving users towards search bars: Amazon, because of it’s massive selection, and Google, because of how many users begin browsing with a global Google search. Because these sites have such a powerful influence over users’ expectations, Kaushik pointed out that more and more people “ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box,” when they arrive on a website – a trend which generates invaluable data about user intent for site owners.

Eight years later, these websites have only grown in importance, meaning that Kaushik’s argument is even more important and more relevant than ever before. This begs the question: given this steady stream of incoming data, what analytics should site owners look for from their search bars? Although the answer to this question will vary based on the specific use case of your website, here are some of the key questions that your site search analytics should help you answer:

1. What are the most common queries? This seems obvious, but site owners should pay close attention to their top queries because they offer a looking glass into the precise wants and needs of site visitors. Queries are, after all, user generated, so they allow you to listen to your users in a way that no other analytics can.
2. What are users searching for but not finding? In other words, what are the most common queries that return no results? This data is highly actionable, since you can either create content to meet these users’ needs or reconfigure your results to provide answers and prevent users from hitting dead ends.
3. What percentage of site visitors are using search? How often is search used relative to the navigation buttons? Aside from helping you get a clear sense of just how valuable search navigation is for users, you should track this statistic over time to see user behavior patterns change in response to any updates you make on your website.
4. How do conversion rates differ for searchers vs. non-searchers? If your analytics tell you that users who perform searches are more likely to convert than users who don’t, you should reconfigure your website to feature search as a more prominent navigational tool.
5. What pages are users searching from most? This will give you a sense of what pages are most confusing. It’s a safe assumption that if a user can’t find the information that they are looking for on a certain page, they will use the search bar to try and find it.
6. What autocomplete options are most popular? When a user chooses an item from the autocomplete dropdown, this is a clear indication of what they are hoping to find for that query. Use this data to customize search results and autocomplete display so that these results are closer to the top.

When you configure your website’s analytics, make sure you’re getting all this information. As we stated above, internal search bars provide a unique opportunity to directly listen to your users – and this valuable information should not go to waste.

If you’d like to learn more about site search analytics, read Swiftype’s white paper: Understanding Site Search Analytics, which provides industry benchmarks on important metrics and offers A/B testing ideas to optimize search for conversions.

You don’t have to be a genius to understand why content generation is a good thing. In fact, it’s a very good thing since it’s used to increase awareness, lead-gathering, and conversion rates, and ultimately sales.

But knowing when to prioritize which type of content on your web properties can be tricky without the insights of your visitors’ behaviors. These observations can be beneficial, even advantageous because you don’t have to guess what they’re interested in, they’re flat-out telling you. So where do you start? How should you begin?

Let’s Start With the Basics

Demand and lead generation content come into play at different points in your relationship with your buyer, but both are equally important and should be easily accessible, especially via your website.  Yes, I’m here to tell you there is a difference between Demand Generation and Lead Generation content.

Demand generation content tends to be free and easy. And free and easy are two words people like to hear, especially when they’re initially researching a product or service. This type of content—ie: blog-posts, checklists, infographics, charts, and images—is used to provide information about, and drive interest around your products and/or services, as well as help map out brand positioning and raise brand awareness. It’s highly digestible and begs to be shared.

Lead generation content, on the other hand, isn’t quite so easy, nor is it free. It’s typically gated and leans toward long-form, meaty, highly subject-specific content—ie: whitepapers, e-books, research studies, and webinars. It can’t be accessed without the reader giving away details like email, phone numbers, and workplace information. This rich, curated content is targeted at select, interested readers, already familiar with your brand and actively searching for answers or a solution.

Understanding Search Queries Helps Promote the Right Content

When visitors search for something on your site, that’s clear, intent data. You don’t have to guess what they’re interested in based on behavior. But there is also plenty that can be inferred to help move buyers along. By implementing the right site search solution, you can track these behaviors and then quickly display relevant results, while simultaneously enhancing your library with additional content that addresses these pain points and questions. Your site search solution can also help clarify what people “mean” when they ask certain questions or key-in variants of search queries. This goes a long way toward determining how best to serve up the most fitting demand gen content.

Let’s say you’re in higher education and have a diverse audience visiting your website daily. A general, overarching, site search query, like “campus tour” might indicate your searcher is potentially a prospective student in the beginning stages of their research. This provides you an excellent opportunity to not only prioritize relevant content on booking campus tours, but also highly rank additional helpful information geared toward prospective, on-the-fence students that will increase their likelihood to apply.  

Or say your brand sells invoicing software for freelancers. A visitor to your site may have been recommended by a friend but not yet be sold on the benefits you offer. If they search for “easy invoicing,” you can weight and rank your results to focus on promoting your best and highest converting pieces of content, ensuring that you give them results that show that you’re the experts.

And Voila! You Have Leads That Are More Likely to Convert

This is why investing in an intuitive site search platform that utilizes advanced search algorithms and language modeling intelligence is important. Not only does it help customers find what they’re looking for faster, but it helps you investigate your top site searches and ensure you’re delivering the most relevant and optimal demand/lead generation content buyers are looking for. By delivering the most relevant and topical content, no one clicks off your site underserved or unhappy.

The result? Your content has actually helped those looking for help, in one way, shape, or form. Whether they want information or they want answers, when they find the right content, they willingly engage, provide their contact information, and look to you as a leader in your space.

Want to learn more about site search and how it can kick start lead conversion on your website? Download the Abderdeen Group Buying Guide: “4 Key Considerations for Acquiring an Effective Site Search Solution” and get all the details.

Diverse audiences create diverse challenges, particularly when you’re attempting to curate and showcase the best and most relevant content on a website. Universities and higher education organizations feel this pain point more than most. Delivering content efficiently to your audience can become complicated when your website visitors range dramatically from prospective to current students, faculty, parents, alumni and donors. In addition to this, you often find yourself fielding homepage politics amongst faculty about what content should be featured and what they feel your visitors are actually searching for.

With so many different types of visitors coming to your site, are you really delivering what they’re looking for? Are you frustrated being the middleman without the access you need to analytics to support content decisions?

Does Your Website Search Make the Grade?

We’ve talked to top universities and explored some of the challenges unique to higher education that can best be solved with a robust site search solution. These are the 5 limitations:

1) The ability to rank search results or adjust the core algorithm of your on-site search
2) The overall search experience and matching the look and feel of standalone software to the rest of the website
3) The ability to implement advanced search features like autocomplete and spellcheck
4) Implementing quality search on mobile devices
5) Tracking conversions and quantifying your search traffic

As the person responsible for the website, do you know how to take these issues head on while staying out of home-page politics? It can all start with the help of a site search solution that just works. But before you make any changes, you’ll want to make sure the tool you choose meets these basic requirements:

• Ability to customize search results
• Flexibility in design to match look & feel of the site
• Reporting insights to track the impact search has on traffic

Download the full eBook: 5 Website Challenges Universities Will Face in 2017 now to make sure you’re armed with all the detailed information needed in order to select the site search solution that’s right for you.

Or if you’re ready to see how Swiftype can help your college or university, reach out to request a free website search assessment. We’ll provide you with a report card of your current search experience and include recommendations that will help your site, make the grade.

Understanding and optimizing how buyers arrive and navigate through your website can be difficult. It’s especially frustrating since you know not capturing this information can leave you with costly gaps in conversion data.

The Aberdeen Group, widely known as a leader in the research and analysis of information technology and products, recently gathered insights on these data challenges. Their findings focused on “Site Search Solutions.” These are traditionally defined as platforms or tools that analyze and optimize a website visitor’s search experience. They can also shed light on the most popular content on your website or app. This ultimately gives you the real-time search analytics needed to reveal what, and whether, buyers are actually looking to buy.

Did you know that 37% of marketers actively invest in search solutions and 26% of those marketers average higher contribution to company revenue from marketing?

Aberdeen has assembled a full Buying Guide to outline all of the considerations you should take into account when evaluating an effective site search solution for your organization, but here’s a brief snapshot of what you need to know:

1. Ease of Use and Implementation: Dealing with personnel limitations (available headcount, skillsets, bandwidth) is the top operational challenge cited by marketers in our research. Few marketers are coding experts, so it’s vital that the solution you choose doesn’t make already complex marketing operations more complex. 
2. Customization for Performance Optimization: Best-in-Class marketing teams are 55% more effective than all others at maintaining consistent, relevant, and personalized messaging. Staying up to speed with what’s relevant to buyers while maintaining consistency requires that site search solutions be customizable. The terms and topics buyers search for change; solutions need to allow users to adapt accordingly.
3. Analytically Driven Alignment to Buyer Needs: The best solution for your business will serve up results that prompt the best actions for your buyers. 
4. Real Time Updates: The benefits of your site search solution should be immediately obvious. Marketers who use search solutions are 91% more effective at increasing productivity with integrated marketing technology. Real-time capabilities are critical for bringing the full utility of the technology to bear.

Download the FULL Aberdeen Buying Guide now to make sure you’re armed with all the detailed information needed in order to select the site search solution that’s right for you.

Unless you’ve spent the last 15 years living on a desert island somewhere, you’re probably well aware that ecommerce is booming. B2C is riding a healthy wave, with retail ecommerce sales expected to hit nearly $2 trillion this year. And B2B results aren’t too shabby either, predicted to hit 6.7 trillion (yes, with a “t”!) by 2020. So how do all these purchase-happy consumers find what they want to buy?

In today’s digital world, we take search and search results for granted. We may not think about it, but they actually do lead to many of those sales. However, at the macro level, search for businesses can be complicated. Companies need to be found online, and they have no choice but to “play the digital game” in order to get those coveted spots on Google’s first page of results.

Everyone knows that organic search is important and requires time and effort. However, there are times when organic search just doesn’t serve your audience well enough, and in those cases, a targeted on-site search is far more effective.

Where Organic Search Falls Short

While organic search ranking is extremely important and definitely something you should be working toward when it comes to your digital real estate, it’s also a part of the search process that you, as a brand, have little control over.

For instance, one of the biggest problems with organic search from a business standpoint is that you can’t decide what the algorithm will display. For example, if a user Googles “pants,” then organic search will give them the pants you sell. Maybe, in a best-case scenario, you’ve done some SEO optimization to promote a specific style of pants that you are looking to push so that style comes up near the top of the search results.

But what if that customer really needs warm pants because she lives in the north and it’s winter? Or maybe this particular searcher wants men’s pants because, well, he’s a he.

That’s where you come in. Once a visitor makes it to your site, you can control what he sees in the search results by providing him with targeted search options to help move him along the purchase process.

3 Ways Targeted Search Results Can Beat Organic

1. You control what your visitor sees: Targeted site search allows you to optimize search results and ensure the content you want highlighted is filtered to the top. This could mean that when a prospect visits your B2B site, you may recognize her IP as coming from a certain region and be able to show her targeted content. Or it could mean that you place a newly released piece of content as her first search result. This is a key feature of a well planned site search, and is especially important because year-over-year, growth in unique site traffic is nearly eight times higher for content marketing leaders, and showing customers what they want to see—even if they don’t know it yet—is what makes or breaks content leaders.

2. Filters, filters, and more filters. Personally, I can’t stand scrolling through hundreds of product search results, and I know I’m not alone in that regard. Filters like price, size, color, category, author, date, location, and even content type allow consumers to weed out the unwanted items and zero in on what they want, resulting in higher sales. To no one’s surprise, Amazon is one of the most successful ecommerce sites out there today. And in a recent survey, 54 percent of respondents chose great site search capabilities as one of the main reasons why they placed Amazon at the top of their lists.

3. Intuitive site search and autocomplete. Shoppers who use internal site search convert at a 216% higher rate than those who do not. And with 81% of shoppers abandoning shopping carts before completing their purchase, your goal is to get consumers from search to check out completion as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s why having site search capabilities like auto complete, intuitive search, and comprehensive spell check is vital to your success.

Overall, organic search is a huge component of any type of content related marketing. But having a targeted search system in place that allows you to provide the very best digital experience for consumers—and delivers the right content at the exact right time—is another huge step forward when it comes to customer satisfaction and corporate success.

 

Have you ever found yourself on one of your favorite websites, hunting for something very specific, typing query after query into the search field, thinking to yourself: “I wish my computer could just read my mind and find what I’m looking for!”

Well, great news, search fans! Swiftype, the largest independent Site Search and Enterprise Search provider on the web, has solved this long-standing, life-menacing problem just for you. If you ever thought hands-free site search was just a distant thing of the future, you’re wrong! The future is now and now is the future. Today, Swiftype is revealing a cutting-edge site search helmet designed to find what you’re looking for before you even know you’re looking for it: Introducing the Swiftype Search Sallet.

Powering Site Search While Searching Your Mind

We’ve extended our platform to include our patented Neuro-Learning Behavior Recognition technology (NLBR) – you think it, we search it! Get started with the Swiftype Search Sallet in 3 easy steps:

• Step 1: Wearing Swiftype’s Search Sallet, stare at your computer’s search box for 3 seconds.
• Step 2: Using Swiftype’s AI, NLP, ML and NLBR technologies, our search automation will recognize that you were searching for, (ie: “Do elephants have elbows?”) and auto-populate your query and immediately trigger the search.
• Step 3: Review the set of results and stare for 3 seconds at the source you’d like to see more of – additional similar content will automatically appear! Voila! Search that reads your mind.

Unbelievable, Way-Too-Good-To-Be-True Features!

Standard Features include:

Split-Second Search: Our NLBR technology gets smarter over time by learning your eye patterns, brain activity and queries so your search results are returned to you even faster.

Productivity Filtering: Got a deadline coming up, but can’t stop wondering who would win in a fight between Iron Man and Batman? The Search Sallet knows you have to finish your work and won’t show you those results until after you get your work done.

Vocabulary enhancement: Still not sure if it’s “your” or “you’re?” The Swiftype Search Sallet knows which one you actually meant.

Available Enhanced Features:

Song Recognition: Ever get the melody of a song stuck in your head, with no way to figure out what it is? If you’re wearing the Swiftype Search Sallet, our algorithm will pick out the tune and find you that song!

Hunger Recognition: Craving Thai food?  Swiftype will find the restaurant you want in milliseconds before you even know you’re hungry.

Additional Sallet Specs:

• Breathable, moisture-wicking liner, removable and washable – since you’ll surely work up a sweat -while you feverishly query
• Color: Flat Black and rubber finish making it the ideal accessory, even for a night out on the town!
• Incredibly lightweight! Only 10.5 lbs
• 5-year warranty
• Batteries not included

Our Customers Have Amazing Things to Say

(Statements given totally and completely by their own free will!)

“Before the Swiftype Search Sallet, I couldn’t find anything I really needed on the internet. Now, I can get information from any website just by thinking it!” – Dave, International Geographic

“I can’t believe I spent all these years wasting time using my hands to search!” – Mindy, Buzzton Post

Dozens of satisfied customers agree – Swiftype’s Search Sallet has not only revolutionized their modern search querying habits, but has made them more likable, attractive, and generally successful. Don’t wait. Order yours today!    

Just kidding. Early April Fool’s! But real talk, our search is pretty damn good. Try it for yourself.

Dear GSS,

I’ve been wanting to write you this letter for a long time. We’ve had some good moments, but 11 years is a long time to be together, and you just aren’t fitting my needs anymore. I know you started it by saying you were leaving next year, but I can’t wait until then to start taking care of myself. So I think we should break up now.

It’s Not Me, It’s You

I need a site search tool that’s going to keep working on improving itself, not one that’s going to leave me in a year. I want the best version of you, but I clearly can’t get that anymore. So I’ve found a better version. That’s right, Google Site Search. I’m leaving you for Swiftype Site Search.

When we first met, you promised me I was the only one, that only my content would appear in the search results on my own website. I counted on you to keep the ads from other sites out of my search results. But now you’re going to start letting others’ results show up on my results page? Even my competitors? When my visitors enter a search query on my website, I definitely don’t want to show them results from another website, especially my competitors. I didn’t sign up for an open relationship, and I’ve never felt so betrayed.

I Need More Freedom to Customize

It’s getting harder to deal with how restrictive you’re getting. Even at your best as GSS, I already had to deal with the inability to customize my search algorithm to show the results I knew to be relevant. I let it slide because you do know a lot about organic rankings. But what if I want to promote a brand new page that hasn’t had the time to build up its rank organically? My visitors would be missing out on a lot of important information that they wouldn’t see immediately if I left it to your algorithm. What I really need is to be able to trust in an algorithm to know which content is most relevant to me and my visitors. And if I want more control over it, I can change the ranking of my result pages. You won’t give me that, but Swiftype does.

And I don’t think I should have to change my looks for you. My site’s style should look like what I want it to, and not be restricted by the style of your search engine. My visitors shouldn’t feel like they’re leaving my website to run a search. I want it to perpetuate my brand, not Google’s.

I Deserve a Better Search Experience

But maybe the most important reason I’m leaving you for Swiftype is that Swiftype knows I’m an independent site owner who can achieve anything I put my mind to, but sometimes I want a little extra support. Swiftype encourages me to customize my search however I want by providing me with implementation and support engineers who can answer any questions I have. I’m all about solving problems on my own, but sometimes it’s nice to feel the support of a team behind you instead of having to figure things out alone.

I’ll always be grateful for what you did for me in the past, and I’ll never forget the time we spent together. But I deserve more control over my site search experience, and I’m going to get it with Swiftype. I hope you can find someone out there to love you like I no longer can. Please move on, because we are never, ever getting back together.

Sincerely,
A Site Owner Who Needs More

Learn why you deserve a better search experience. View infographic.

They’re college students! They’re excited! They’re raring to go! But they need information to get started. More often than not, they hop online and search your university’s website to find everything they need without issue, right? Wrong. Their cursory search yields pages and pages of less-than-relevant search results. After exploring the first few options, they get frustrated because they can’t immediately find what they’re looking for. So, what do they do? They contact you. Over and over and over.

A university’s website is an important intersection for its varied audiences who are all looking for unique information. Often times additional menu options and subdomains are added in order to meet everyone’s needs, but web developers are increasingly realizing that site search is the key to making the right information more accessible.

Getting Smart with Site Search

Join us on Tuesday, March 28th to hear from the web development leaders from Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia and St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. They’ll explain their own experiences and how they made the choice to make site search a strategic part of their web experience. They’ll cover:

• Why their old solutions didn’t work and what they looked for in a new solution
• How they made search the focus of their website and how visitors reacted
• Where they ran into challenges along the way and how they overcame

Don’t miss this great opportunity to hear directly from your industry peers about how site search was a game-changer for their website. Register now!

Learn How Top Universities Put Site Search at the Head of the Class
Tuesday, March 28th at 10:00 am PT, 1:00 pm ET

When evaluating your next Site Search solution, you may come across some terms that you’re not familiar with. We are often asked, What does this mean? From Bigram Matching, to Corpus, to Autocomplete, having a grasp of these common terms will help you better understand and evaluate your next website search engine platform. This post provides you with explanations for the most popular/common site search terms.

Autocomplete
Autocomplete (also known as typeahead or autosuggest) is a language prediction tool that many search interfaces use to provide suggestions for users as they type in a query.

Bigram matching
Bigram matching is a language analysis tool which advanced search engines use to find results for multiple-word queries that are similar to but not exactly the same as the text in the searchable index. (example: iPhone, i phone, i-phone are all different terms, but the algorithm recognizes them as the same)

Clickthrough behavior
Clickthrough behavior is a type of data that records what results users are clicking on from an SERP.

Constant Crawl
Constant Crawl is a Swiftype feature that allows your search engine index to be updated in real time. This means that any time a page is created or updated, Swiftbot will immediately index the new content and make it available in search results.

Conversions/Conversion rates
In the world of search, conversions occur when users perform a query and click on a result from the SERP.

Corpus
The corpus is the entire body of searchable text in a search index.

Document
The term document refers to a single page or item in a website search index. On a publishing website, for example, a document could be a single article. On an ecommerce website, a document could be a product listing.

Document frequency
Document frequency is the number of times a given term or query appears in a specific document within a larger search index.

Exit rate
Exit rate is a measurement in search analytics that records how often users perform a query then leave the SERP without clicking on a result.

Filtered search
Filtering is a search tool that lets users to restrict their search to a certain section of a website or a specific document type.

Phrase matching
Phrase matching is a language-dependent process which advanced search engines use to identify sets of words that should be treated as a cohesive unit when scanning across a search index for the most relevant documents.

Search query
Queries are the strings of text that users type into a search bar when looking for a specific result or set of results. Queries can be one word or several.

Stemming
Stemming is a language-dependent process of removing suffixes from words so that words with the same root match each other.

Term frequency
Term frequency is the number of times a given term or query apears within a search index.

To see the complete list of keywords, visit our Search Concepts overview page.

By now it should be no surprise that Google is sunsetting its Google Site Search (GSS) product, in favor of its much more restrictive Custom Search Engine (CSE). In addition to forcing ads into your results (to no one’s benefit but Google’s), CSE has a much more limited feature set, proving that sometimes change can be bad.

Here are just 3 of the many limitations you’ll be stuck with if you settle for Google’s CSE:

They’re not just your results

When a visitor comes to your site, you want your search box to only show results from your website. With CSE you’ll be forced to display ads from the entire web universe in your results, taking away your visitors’ attention from your own content.

Customization

There are much fewer customization options with Google CSE – not just visually, but more importantly in the ability to control the way your content is displayed. While you can tweak little things like link colors, there isn’t much you can customize beyond that. The overall experience still looks and feels like Google, not your own. And if you have a new piece of content you want to promote, you have to wait until there are enough organic rankings for Google’s algorithm to show it anywhere close to where you want it.

Support

The Google Help Center is a list of articles that assume you can do everything yourself. But what if you have a more specific implementation in mind that you aren’t sure if you can achieve on your own? If you aren’t a developer you might have some trouble.

If you aren’t worried yet, you should be. With free, you get what you pay for. Watch our latest 15-minute webcast recording to learn more about why you shouldn’t settle for CSE.