Located northeast of Los Angeles, Azusa Pacific University (APU) is home to almost 10,000 students and counts 68 bachelor’s degrees, 45 master’s degrees, and eight doctoral programs within the system.

After years of using the Google Search Appliance for their website, the APU web team was faced with a new challenge. After Google announced it was phasing out the product, they were on the search for an even better solution—and not something so “old school.”

Here, Dustin Reynolds, Assistant Director of Digital Marketing, shares APU’s experiences of implementing and improving their search.

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

At first, we didn’t really know what we were looking for—other than we wanted something that we could build into our website that looked custom and like it belonged there. We also wanted to be able to do keyword matches and pin them to the top of results. If someone types “MBA,” we need to ensure that we always serve Master of Business Administration as the very first result. Customization of search results was very important to us.

As we explored the options more, we started to see features that we really wanted. This included ease-of-use and the ability for many team members in our office to access the tool and work on refining the search options. If a team knew what should appear and they could then do it themselves without having to pass it to a developer, then it would make the process much more efficient within the office.

What was the actual Swiftype implementation like?

It was actually very fast—around two weeks. In that time, we figured out customization and fallback pages. We then went on to really delve into weighting, as well as creating some custom meta tags on our site to help the search engine figure out things we knew the user would be looking to find.

What has surprised you the most with your new deployment?

One of the biggest surprises was cost. Swiftype is quite a bit less than Google Search Appliance and for the tool that you’re getting.

What do you see as the biggest difference between Google Search Appliance and Swiftype?

Outside of cost, it’s having the ability to change things quickly, weight terms differently, and customize how we rank certain sections of our site. This is a big deal for us because we feel like we’re providing better quality service to the user now.

What kind of success have you seen since launching the improved search with Swiftype?

Our main goal is to get potential students to fill out a form and say they want more information on a program. Now we really have a window into what’s happening—whether it’s misspelling of search terms or a way to try and understand why they didn’t click on a certain search result. As far as conversions go, we set up one conversion variable, which for us is the Information Request Form.

Is there a feature you can’t live without?

I would say it’s the results ranking because we have such a robust site and anything can show up for a search term. Being able to control it and know that the first three or four options are on target is key. You’d be surprised—especially when people are searching on mobile— the amount of times a letter is skipped or doubled up. Now we can look and say, “Oh, clearly they were trying to type ‘admissions’ or ‘accreditation'” and account for that. It’s a big deal when we can make sure we’re serving up the content our audience is trying to find—even with terms that are often misspelled.

Last Updated: November 21, 2017

Google directing customers to the ad-supported Custom Search Engine

By now you’ve probably heard that Google plans to sunset Google Site Search (GSS) and direct existing customers to use their free replacement, the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). Unfortunately for these customers, the CSE forces websites to show ads alongside their search results, so the transition isn’t as simple as it may seem. As the dominant alternative to GSS for the past 4 years, we at Swiftype are very familiar with the migration process, and we’re happy to share some of our advice to those weighing their options.

How does this impact your site search performance and site visitor experience?

Companies who choose to stay with Google and its CSE will be sacrificing the end user experience. A few sources have already noted that the changes are “unlikely to be well-received by web users who are already sick of being inundated with ads.” But perhaps even worse than the degraded user experience is the fact that users who click those ads will leave your website, which is the opposite of the goal of the Site Search feature. It’s hard to imagine how any business could justify using a Site Search product that invites their users to leave their website entirely.

A good Site Search implementation helps users find the content they’re looking for and keeps them engaged and active on your website. Not only is this a better user experience, but it is also a rich source of valuable user analytics for website owners. Swiftype was designed specifically to help our customers capitalize on this opportunity. We offer a completely ad-free experience as well as detailed analytics that can illuminate important customer behavior.

What you can expect from alternatives

As a website owner, alternative solutions for Site Search can generally be grouped into two buckets: free plugins and paid SaaS solutions.

The obvious advantage of free alternatives is the price tag, but the disadvantages cannot be dismissed. The main issues to consider are:

• These options are highly unlikely to be cloud-based solutions, which has far reaching consequences when it comes to both the cost of maintenance and the quality of search results. Cloud-based solutions eliminate the maintenance burden for the website owner and also offer much better search relevance algorithms.
• Free solutions are also unlikely to provide general customer service, so if you desire a level of customization, you will likely need to learn to do that on your own.  Your search provider will not be involved in helping you create a good end user experience.
• Poor scalability — because free plugins are often just built on top of complex database queries, they don’t typically scale for sites with a significant amount of traffic.

Swiftype and its modern cloud-based search technology offers a more robust alternative:

• You’ll get all the bells and whistles — best-in-class search relevance algorithms, powerful analytics, and all the modern user-facing features your users have come to expect: autocomplete, faceted search, spelling correction, typo tolerance, etc.
• Built for scale — hosted solutions can scale to millions of search requests per day without impacting the speed of the rest of your website.
• Extensive customization options built to integrate with modern web technology and a direct contact for customer support requests.
• When you’re purchasing from established companies that have helped thousands of organizations implement search, you can be confident in the product you’re buying

Why is Google sunsetting their hosted search product?

GSS has been a fixture of the Internet for over a decade now, and part of its initial appeal was the simple, self-service nature of the product. Unfortunately, consumer expectations of search have far outpaced the feature set that GSS and CSE offered — ironically, due in large part to advances that Google made exclusively in their consumer-facing internet search engine. Add to this the fact that great customer support is an absolute requirement for effectively integrating site search into the widely varying user experiences of each different website, and it’s not hard to see why Google is moving on from their product.

Getting started with Swiftype Site Search – The leading GSS Alternative

Today, Swiftype is the trusted search provider for companies like Lyft, Cloudflare, Twilio, AT&T, Qualcomm, and Shopify. To get started with Swiftype, you just enter your website’s address and Swiftype will index your site and create your search engine in real-time. No coding is required, but developers can use the API for extra control. Swiftype can index any amount of content and new content is indexed automatically, so your search is always up-to-date.

A free trial makes trying Swiftype risk free

Want to try out Swiftype Site Search for your website? You can sign up for a free trial here.

On the Search: Elaine Shannon Web Developer & User Interface Specialist

What kind of challenges with search did you face before Swiftype?

One of the biggest challenges we hoped to solve with a new search tool was the ability to search across multiple domains. Over the years we have created many websites, both internal and public-facing, and there was no good way to search across them. It seems like an easy problem to solve, but on our main platform, we didn’t have a tool that could handle results from more than one website.

We also had a hard time making sure search results were relevant. As soon as we installed Swiftype, we started spending time customizing results. Users don’t need to sift through the thousands of pages and documents we’ve indexed across all these sites, they just need the top handful of results.

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

The most important factor for us was building a search engine that spanned multiple websites on multiple domains. We also wanted to be able to have better control over search results. We can’t always change our content to match searchers’ intentions — for example, we don’t call our residence halls “dorms” — so being able to set up synonyms and custom result sets at an affordable price point sold us on Swiftype.

In what creative ways have you used Swiftype to improve your search?

Students don’t always know what major they want to pursue, so it’s not always easy for them to browse through a university website and find a program they want to commit to. We thought it might make it easier to decide if we set up a list of interests and linked those to related programs. So, we built a dedicated search tool. If you’re interested in art, you can type that in and be presented with five different program options that match that interest.

Our program page used to be a long list of everything we offered, and we found that site visitors didn’t stay on that page very long. Now, we offer a combination of options — you can search by interest, or you can filter through programs by degree or by school, and we’ve found that 34% of visitors are now using the Search by Interest tool and immediately finding what they’re looking for.

How are you making ongoing adjustments to your relevancy model?

I check on the dashboard weekly, even if it is just a quick glance. If there is anything glaring, like a popular search that’s not returning any results, or a search result set that’s not getting any clicks, we’ll quickly update those results. Otherwise I try to make a focused effort once a quarter to go through our data more deeply and customize our results to provide a better visitor experience.

We also build out content as needed for empty search results. A fun example of this is we didn’t have anything on our mascot for a while, so that was an easy one to add.

What kind of success have you seen since improving your search with Swiftype?

Search is one of the most popular ways to navigate our website. We’ve heard a lot of positive feedback on both our main engine (which searches cross-domain, so you can find the main site, the law school, the bookstore, and the intranet all in one engine) and our Search by Interest engine.

For us, the gold standard of conversion is when a visitor applies for admission, but prospective students are a long sales cycle and visit our sites multiple times before they take that step. We know that registering for a campus visit is a high indicator of a user’s likelihood to apply, and we can track those metrics and how site search has impacted them to date.

Like any tool, there was a bit of a learning curve when we first set up Swiftype. We had to learn which factors impacted the search results most — whether it be a headline, title, or page content. Now that we’ve had more than a year to tweak results, we’ve found a good balance and are serving our visitors more relevant results, which keeps them on the site longer.

Congrats on your Swiftype implementation! You’ve already started delivering a powerful site search experience for your visitors. Trust me, they’ll thank you for it.

We’ve been listening to our community and we’re here to answer 4 of the most commonly asked questions from Swiftype customers.

1. Why do my results all look the same?

When Swiftype’s crawler, lovingly called “Swiftbot”, crawls a domain, there’s potential for repetitive template elements to be indexed with the page body. Most notably the navigation/header, sidebars, and/or footer content. With all the great, meaningful content encased in template noise, the quality of the customer’s search experience can be negatively affected.

For example, Apple.com has these elements on their website:

Since these elements appear on all pages, when their site it indexed, in the Swiftype dashboard, it looks like this:

You can easily clean this up by using our Content Inclusion/Exclusion tag recognition. By adding Swiftype specific meta tags (data-swiftype-index=’true’) to the HTML container(s) that holds the primary page content, it’s possible to instruct Swiftbot to index only those sections of the page body.

The best practice is to set the main content container to true. If you want to further refine what’s indexed from that section, you can add additional tags with a value of false to containers nested within.

<body>
    <nav>Blah Blah blah</nav>
    <div id="main_content" data-swiftype-index='true'>
         <p>All of my sweet, sweet 5/7 content is going to go in here.</p>
             <div id="ad_widget" data-swiftype-index='false'>This bit really isn't as important which is why I'm going to add a 'false' exclusion parameter.</div>
         <p>This bit will be indexed though, because it’s still within the ‘main_content’ div that’s set to 'true'. Everything outside of the ‘main_content’ div container will be ignored, yo.</p>
             </div>
    <footer>Copyright Attempting to Sound Official© 2016</footer>
          </body>
        

2. How do I prevent Swiftype from indexing certain pages of my site?

For crawler based engines there are three approaches you can take to determine what pages are indexed from your domains: URL path rules, a customized robots.txt file, and robots meta tags.

Path Rules:

From the Manage > Domains section of the Swiftype customer dashboard, there’s an option for each domain that will allow you to ‘Manage Rules’ for that domain. From here, you can define specific paths to include (Whitelist) or exclude (Blacklist) when crawling your site.

Examples of common cases are the exclusion of /category/ paths for ecommerce sites, so the focus is exclusively on crawling product pages. For other CMS based sites, you’d likely see paths to login or administrative pages excluded, as well as dynamically generated content, like pages based on tags or categories. More examples and tips on using this feature can be found here.

Robots.txt Files:

A robots.txt file is a plaintext document that you can upload to the root directory of your website’s domain. With the robots.txt file, you can define URL path exclusion rules for all or only specific web crawlers to follow. Many websites will commonly have a robots.txt file already in place, and it’s presence is one of the first things Swiftbot will look for when starting a crawl process.

Check out our Robots.txt documentation to learn how you can leverage this with Swiftype.

Robots meta tags:

If you need to exclude content in a more precise way (page by page or page template basis), we recommend and fully support robots meta tags. We adhere to the robots tag standard that’s a companion to the aforementioned robots.txt file.

This means that we’ll pass over any page we attempt to crawl that contains a meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

You can also configure these tags so they only apply to Swiftype’s web crawler:

<meta name="st:robots" content="noindex">

Similar to the robots.txt file, meta tags are configured and managed outside of the Swiftype dashboard via their webhost/CMS.

You guessed it. We’ve got documentation of robots meta tags support here.

3. “Why are pages missing from my search engine?”

Here are 3 reasons why Swiftbot, our crawler, may not be able to locate and index pages on your site:

A. We’re unable to find the content because it’s not linked to from other pages.

When spidering a domain, the Crawler will examine all links within a page to discover URLs that are part of the domain submitted to the engine and also adhere to any configured path rules (see question 2 above). If content exists within a site that is not linked to from another known page, within the site’s navigation menu, or listed on a domain’s sitemap, chances are Swiftbot will not be able to locate it.

One of the best ways to ensure our Crawler is able to index all desired content is to include a current sitemap. Sitemaps are files that are typically stored at the root of a URL domain and contain a list of links to pages on their site(s) that are available for crawling. Our documentation for sitemap support and installation notes can be found here.

B. Improperly configured canonical URL elements/tags.

A canonical link element is often used like a meta tag, in order to prevent duplicate content indexing issues by pointing web crawlers to the preferred (or canonical) URL version of a web page. A scenario that can occur is that a customer’s site content is configured with static canonical tags that all point to the root domain URL.

Due to this misconfiguration, even if the crawler finds links to all the content on the site, it is being given instructions that all pages on the site are another version of the home page. With that directive in place, only the home page will be indexed. If the customer re-configures or removes those elements, a recrawl will be able to index their content successfully.

For best practices on canonical elements, you can refer to Google’s documentation here.

C. The content is being excluded by one of the methods noted in question 2.

Just as with misconfigured canonical link elements, misconfiguration or conflicts in a customer’s path or robots rules can cause pages to be skipped over.

4. My site is password protected / behind a firewall / hosted on our company’s intranet.

It is possible for Swiftbot to crawl secured content, but you’ll first need to make minor configuration changes to your web or intranet site’s host server.

All Swiftype accounts have an account specific User-Agent ID string. By whitelisting this identification string with your server, you can allow, or disallow, crawlers access to your site’s content.

Swiftype has a unique security feature where we encode our crawler’s User-Agent with a secure key that is uniquely tied to your Swiftype account. This approach enables you to limit access solely to Swiftype’s crawler, and is an extra level of security many customers enjoy.

If you’re interested in using the Swiftbot web crawler to access your secured content, please contact our support team and we’ll be happy to supply you with your account specific User-Agent ID string.

Hopefully these answers to commonly asked questions will point you in the right direction. If you ever have questions, suggestions, or feedback, you can always email [email protected] to reach our team. We’re happy to help!

On the Search: Michael Santoroski, Director of Web and Software Development

Roanoke College was ranked 2nd on the 2014 U.S. News and World Report list of Up-and-Coming National Liberal Arts Colleges. As the Director of Web and Software Development, Michael Santoroski was tasked with improving the college’s site functionality, after a site redesign. The initial search solution was not returning the desired results and with so much on the line after a complete site overhaul, search was critical to help visitors find their way around a newly designed website.

Today we discussed the ease of implementing Swiftype and the biggest impact it has had on both their internal and public-facing sites.

What kind of challenges with search did you face before Swiftype?

Roanoke is a small college with about 2,000 students.  Like many colleges, we don’t have the resources to have the latest technology, but we needed to improve our on-site search experience because our site serves such a wide range of audiences. From prospective students, current students, faculty, and alumni – search is often the fastest way for them to find answers to their questions.

We were using Google’s Custom Search Engine, but it was no longer meeting our needs. The tool wasn’t flexible enough for our site and wasn’t producing the results we expected.

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

Two things were really critical for us. Weighted search and being able to rank search results was key for us. Secondly, the type-ahead feature was really important to me. It just made searching so much better when Google first implemented it for the web.

With a limited IT team, I was also looking for a solution that would be easy to implement. I like that it’s a crawler-based solution. I just had to add our domain and set up probably took less than an hour to get it to a functioning state. Swiftype has really made installation as unobtrusive as possible.

What has surprised you the most with your new deployment?

The number of emails to our web support has been reduced to almost none. We were constantly getting emails through our contact page from users who couldn’t find content they were looking for, whether that be an upcoming course schedule or an event. As soon as we implemented Swiftype, the emails stopped…virtually overnight.

What new things did you find readers searching?

We had one instance where a faculty member told me she couldn’t find the academic catalog. I was in a meeting, so I went in and switched the search results around a little bit, but then she emailed me two days later and said “Oh, I found my problem, I was spelling it like British catalogue – with “gue”. So I just added that as a synonym and it’s fixed either way now.

That kind of on the fly customization really helps us keep our site search results relevant.

What kind of success have you seen since launching the improved search with Swiftype?

For higher education, it’s a little harder to quantify our success metrics in relation to site-search. It is all about ease of use. Swiftype does have an engagement module for that, but I haven’t really gotten to play with those. What we end up seeing in the admissions process is that a student comes back to the site over multiple sessions, and when they come to the site, each time they have a different objective.

On the flip side, you also have alumni who receive emails, come to the site looking for alumni events and rely on search. Ultimately those are visitors you want making donations to the college, so each type of visitor has different success metrics.

Higher Ed websites are difficult. The administration wants all kinds of content on the site, but students want something else, so there is a balance in terms of what information to show.

I think in a way, search has solved that problem. It’s one of those things that works great and I don’t worry about it too much. It just does exactly what I need it to do and doesn’t make me spend a lot of time fighting with it. When I’m in a meeting and someone says “I tried to search for this thing and I didn’t find it”, I can just go in there and easily make it happen. Make that be the top search result and it’s super easy to do, even I can’t screw it up.

Swiftype is not just a solution for end businesses, but also a partner to many other companies who navigate site search solutions on behalf of their clients. Today we’re introducing The Web Development Group (WDG™), a full-service digital agency based out of Washington D.C., who has been able to leverage Swiftype technology to effectively and efficiently deploy search solutions for their clients. I had the privilege of sitting down with Ab Emam, their Agency Director to discuss the challenges they face as a business and how they’ve been able to make great strides for their clients when it comes to optimizing on-site search.

The Web Development Group

The Web Development Group works in a wide range of verticals, from associations, foundations, and nonprofits to government entities, higher education, and Fortune 1000 businesses.  When clients sign on with WDG for a website redesign, it becomes critical to determine a robust site search plan at the beginning of a project due to the amount of content the typical WDG client normally houses on their site.

The Web Development Group offers both Web Design & Development services as well as Digital Marketing Consulting.  Partnering with Swiftype has allowed them to offer a robust site search solution that is not only easy for their developers to implement but has SEO and usability benefits as well. Initially, there was concern that developers would prefer to develop their own site search solution, but WDG has learned developers have become some of the software’s biggest fans for its ease of installation. WDG has since dedicated several developers who are completely knowledgeable with the implementation and functionality of Swiftype’s solution.

When a company is considering a site redesign it becomes an opportune time to evaluate their existing site search functionality. Many site platforms have built-in solutions or basic add-ons like Google Custom Search. But with such limited customizations available, WDG has chosen to work strategically with Swiftype on behalf of their clients to introduce the advantages a customizable solution offers within the initial exploratory phase of a project. In turn, Swiftype is able to provide comprehensive support to answer technical questions and help WDG implement successful site search functionality.

Customer Success

The City of Alexandria recently relied on the expertise of WDG for a site redesign, which included a new site search solution. As a government entity, the City’s site is home to a significant amount of content that needed to be easily accessible to end-users. While navigation elements remain a prominent feature of the site, an easy-to-use and efficient search feature greatly improved the new site’s usability. The site features a prominent search bar within its redesign as the site needed to deliver content efficiently to a wide range of users – tourists, residents, and local businesses. All these audiences have unique needs and by implementing a prominent search bar as a way of navigating through the site, AlexandriaVA.Gov is able to quickly serve up relevant content.

WTOP.com has also worked with The Web Development Group for a site redesign and, as one of Washington DC’s top news sources, a robust site search was critical for them due to the high volume of content published on a daily basis. Swiftype’s solution is a seamless integration for publisher sites where website managers can adjust search results to feature the newest or breaking content, as well as prioritize sections of their site based on selected keywords. The Swiftype product dashboard also provides publishers with insights into the keywords their audience is looking for which can help to shape news stories that haven’t even been written yet.

These partnerships are just that – true partnerships that allow for clients to benefit from the mutual efforts of expert digital teams. By leveraging the talents from both Swiftype and The Web Development Group, our clients stand to benefit from robust search capabilities with the potential to see exponential returns.

Search has changed the way our customers do business, and we are on a mission to communicate the value of it. “On the Search” is a new series to help uncover the good, bad, and ugly of what many companies face with search today–and how Swiftype can help.

On the Search:  Travis Clark, EO Media Group

Travis Clark was in a search bind.

As the digital development manager for EO Media Group, Clark needed to improve their search results—and fast. With only three weeks before launching a new ad marketplace platform, he was on the brink.

Here, he discusses the challenges and ultimate success of moving from a “black hole” to new business and revenue opportunities. And it’s all thanks to a transformation through search.

What kind of challenges with search did you face?

We are a small publishing company with 11 newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest. We built some things with newspaper vendors and used WordPress, but the search for both was awful. Plugins didn’t work very well for us either.

I worked on building a new ad marketplace that is now running on the Capital Press site. We were looking to hit hundreds of thousands of searchable bits of content, and nothing we tried could handle that for us. It was very frustrating.

As a small team, we couldn’t say, “Okay, let’s throw a bunch of money at a developer to build something from scratch.” I wasn’t sure what we were going to do. Then Swiftype was recommended to us to check out.

What was your “must-have” for search in your new ad marketplaces?

Speed was definitely key. When we found Swiftype, we were able to implement it in just a couple weeks and right before our launch. And it had all the power we had been looking for.

It was also a priority to finally be able to do facet searches. The faceting part is super important because we really need to be able to drill down through the content. Now that we have Swiftype we can’t live without the results ranking. We literally need that to do our business.

What has been most surprising with your new deployment?

Before we pretty much had a black hole. We could track users, page views, and all the normal Google analytics. But we didn’t have any idea what people were actually searching for.

Case in point is our Capital Press site, which is an agriculture publication. We thought we knew the customers for it, but this changed once we started receiving the metrics on search queries from Swiftype.

There are parts of our audience we never knew existed. Now we can take these metrics to new advertisers who wouldn’t think we are a fit for them. Or, on the flipside, go back to old customers with new pitches and the numbers to back it up. We’re so happy with what we have now.

What new things did you find readers searching?

A couple surprising search terms were “Christmas trees” and “livestock.”

Christmas trees as a term starts popping up in the summer and tapers off after Christmas obviously. We didn’t know anyone was looking to our agriculture publication to buy and price the market online.

Our print publication had always sold to the livestock business. But there are also a lot of searches on livestock online, which we didn’t realize. This is a great example of a wide, open market because most of our advertisers for the digital site are not in that industry. We can now outreach to those businesses in our region and show them a market they haven’t hit yet.

What kind of success have you seen since launching the improved search with Swiftype?

Most telling is that ad revenue has increased 145% since implementing Swiftype. We’ve also seen some really incredible results with an increase in users (43%), sessions (17%) and new (46%) and returning (31%) users. This tells me that the new platform is attracting more people and more often.

The ability to refine the platform and begin seeing classified advertising more like a retail business has been very exciting. We believe powerful search has streamlined our user experience.

We have some really great stories from our customers, too. One has a tractor rental business and, after three months, he had to pull his listings because the booking was so far out. He switched it to used parts he sells and had to pull that because he got low on inventory. It’s pretty amazing.

We live in a world where the solution to nearly any problem can be solved instantly. When you need the answer to a question, there’s Google, or Siri. If your refrigerator is empty at dinnertime, you have Postmates or Munchery to the rescue. So when you need help for a product you purchased or service you subscribe to, waiting is not an option. As a Customer Success Manager at Swiftype, I help our clients build upon the success of their own customer service departments through the business of instant answers.

Many of Swiftype’s customers use our search software for their Knowledge Base. Knowledge Bases can vary from a FAQ or Help section provided for end consumers as a first stop in the customer support chain, to internal documentation for developers using a product. No matter what the final application looks like, help centers are becoming an integrated part of the product experience today.

Customers are searching now more than ever
Thanks to Google, we’ve all been trained to search. Customers and employees alike expect a self-help channel to service themselves prior to getting on the phone for support. In fact a Forrester survey shows that for the first time in the survey’s history, customers of all ages are using the FAQ pages on a company’s website more often than speaking with an agent on the phone.

This change in user behavior has generated a significant need for our customers to have not only a robust Knowledge Base that they themselves can navigate and find answers within quickly, but the ability for their end customers to quickly search those databases and find answers to their questions instantly.

The need for instant answers is not confined to one industry or solution. Speed and accuracy are critical in a search solution within knowledge bases across the board.

Providing Instant Answers Three Ways
Customer Support teams are using Swiftype as a means to aggregate content in one location. A customer of ours has content that sits in multiple subdomains of their site for developers, designers, their sales team, within their blog, training center and help center. As each individual portal grew, it became increasingly difficult to quickly find the information you were looking for. They’ve successfully leveraged Swiftype to search across all content types, creating a one-stop locale for all internal users when they are unsure of where to locate content.

Another way Swiftype has been implemented by customers internally is to better support call center teams. We are the internal search engine for a global enterprise organization with many call center teams who need to be able to answer questions for their end customers quickly and accurately. If decreasing call time and increasing customer satisfaction are critical metrics for your team, consider ways to make your employees more successful with a customizable search solution.

Lastly, we’ve even been leveraged for instant answers before your customer is even actively searching. Swiftype results are shown to users in a right-hand drawer that slides in when users are in their dashboard for our customer’s product, suggesting answers that are related to the page they are on.

Maintaining a best-in class customer support system is critical to businesses. Knowledge bases are a key component to providing an excellent experience. Gone are the days where your customer is willing to wait 10 minutes on hold with a customer service representative, and another 20 minutes to explain their issue, and hopefully receive a solution. The faster you can provide an answer to your customer, the happier and more satisfied they leave.  And I’m in the business of making happy customers.

As marketers, we’re always looking for ways to tweak our website to improve conversion rates. As a fairly new member of the Swiftype team, I’ve thought a lot about how Swiftype search could have helped me on past projects. I always thought Google was our only option for site search, or that something custom would need to be built. Little did I know there are amazing tools that help marketers focus on marketing without needing extensive IT support. Do you know if visitors are finding the results they expect when they type into the search box on your site? What results are they getting? What if you could control which results they see.

Improve your site conversion rate in three easy steps, just by optimizing one seemingly small, but mighty feature on your site – the search box.

Actually deliver the results your visitors are looking for. How frustrating can it be to find what you’re looking for on certain sites? If your site is returning poor results, you’re leaving your visitors frustrated and unlikely to return. Teams spend a ton of time optimizing site navigation and structure for usability, but your visitors may still be aimlessly clicking through pages looking for what they want. Look for a search solution where you can customize your results or let visitors filter what they’re looking for.  Take control of key information that already exists on your site, and guarantee that your most recent content is included in search results thanks to real-time indexing.

Pin your best performing offers on top. Consider what offers are best at driving meaningful conversions on your site. You can pin these to the top of your search results pages to drive more traffic into that content.  What if your awesome product demos always showed up at the top of search results? Or your best selling products?  Give your customers what they’re looking for, right at their fingertips. You know what converts best on your site, why make it hard for your visitors to find the good stuff.

Create the content of the future. Depending on the solution you’ve used in the past, you may not have been able to track your customer’s search queries, or what results pages they clicked on.  Wonder no more, with a complete dashboard of actionable insights. When you know what your customers are looking for, you can build content or products around the missing pieces.  Your content marketing team will thank you, and your customers will leave your site with the information they need.

As a marketer in charge of driving improvements to our conversion rates, I know I’m always looking for new ways to optimize our site experience for our visitors. Site search is so often overlooked in exchange for testing landing pages or navigation structure, but with the right tools you can make search have a meaningful impact on your conversion rate. Finding a tool that allows you to be flexible and have total control of the results your site displays goes a long way and in the end will help you generate more leads.

If you’re considering a new site search solution like Swiftype, you’re probably already
aware of the benefits of upgrading your website’s search experience—things like
greater control over search results, a better user experience, and the ability to gather
analytics from user searches. You also know that taking your site search to the next level
will increase conversions and positively impact your company’s bottom line.

But before you can start enjoying the benefits of enhanced site search, there’s one
important decision to make: how to index the content on your site. Indexing lays the
foundation for your search engine by taking inventory of all your site data, then
organizing it in a structured format that makes it easy for the search algorithm to find
what it needs later on. Essentially, if your website is a stack of thousands of papers, the
search index is the mother of all filing cabinets.

There are a few different ways to go about indexing site content, but the two main
options are using a web crawler or a search API. Both choices have pros and cons, so it’s
helpful to understand which one is the best fit for your situation. Here’s the lowdown on
each.

Web Crawler

You may be familiar with Google’s web crawler, Googlebot, which perpetually “crawls” the internet, visiting each available web page and indexing content for potential Google searches. Swiftype’s crawler, Swiftbot, does the same thing for individual websites like yours.

Using a web crawler to index site data has a couple of key advantages. For one thing,
it’s extremely plug-and- play. Rather than pay a team of developers to build the index,
simply select the crawler option and let it do its thing—no coding required.

A crawler also allows you to get your new site search up and running very quickly. For example, Swiftbot creates a search index within minutes by simply crawling your website URL or sitemap. And it stays on top of changes to your site, immediately indexing any new information so that search results always reflect the latest and greatest your business has to offer.

In our experience, the web crawler option works best for the vast majority of our customers. It’s fast and easy to use, yet also creates a powerful, comprehensive search experience that’s a huge improvement over a fragile plugin or other antiquated site search solution. However, there are some situations where the customer needs a greater amount of customization, and in those cases, an API integration might be the way to go.

Developer API

The main advantage of using an API for search indexing is that it gives you full programmatic control over the content in your search engine. There are infinite ways to build a search experience, and an API (like the Swiftype Search API) lets you choose your own adventure and make changes as often as you like.

For example, if you want to index sensitive data that cannot be exposed on your website such as product margins or page views for a particular article, you may want a more custom indexing setup than the one that comes with the web crawler. The developer API allows you granular, real time control over every aspect of your search engine.

Unlike the web crawler option, using an API usually requires a fair amount of coding, so
we usually see this option used by large businesses with bigger budgets and/or a developer team on staff. Also, since an API integration is custom, the initial indexing process can take time to set-up, so it’s less attractive to customers who are anxious to get started.

Which one is best?

The choice between the web crawler and the developer API will come down to your specific situation. Most Swiftype customers are extremely happy with the crawler, but some do require the flexibility and control inherent in the API. We offer both options so that you can choose the best one for your site and business.

No matter which option you choose for indexing data, the ultimate outcome will be an enhanced site search experience that’s more relevant—and more profitable—than your current solution.