Adding powerful search to your company knowledge base or help center is an essential step toward helping users resolve issues without filing tickets, but the process of implementation can often be a daunting first step. To make this process easier, we added a new resource to our website for customers looking to improve search on their help center or knowledge base.

Last week, we added a new resource to our website for customers looking to improve search on their help center or knowledge base. Written with a non-technical audience in mind, 15 Steps to Help Center Search Implementation introduces readers to the most important questions that companies should familiarize themselves with before getting started, including:

• What are the pros and cons of building search internally?
• How long will implementing search take?
• What team members are required to implement new search?
• How can I evaluate the performance of a new search experience?
• What ongoing work is required after implementing search?

With a step-by-step checklist that clearly lays out each phase of implementation, this resource will be an invaluable guide. Implementation is often an intimidating prospect with any new software, but with this guide in hand, your team will start with a much clearer sense of what needs to be accomplished and what team members will be involved.

To access the checklist, follow the download link below. To receive a personal demo of what Swiftype can do for your knowledge base or help center, contact us today.

Congratulations! You’ve got an article that is gaining lots of attention online and going viral. As you start wondering how to keep your article top of mind for as long as possible, consider taking advantage of these four web optimization secrets that take no time to implement.

1. Use your site search analytics to see which queries are generating the most engagement for your viral content.

It is now easy to find out what search queries your users are typing into your search box before they click on your viral article. Because this data is readily available today, you can now click into those queries and understand where your viral article is ranked in that search query’s results. Because this data is changing in real time, you can change your data range to get a better sense of which search queries are generating the most engagement with your article over time.

2. Placement of sharing buttons is important.

The only way a piece of content goes viral is if it’s shared. If your shared buttons are only in the header and footer, then you’re missing out on an opportunity for the reader to share your content WHILE they’re engaging with it. Make sure that this is done tastefully as users will quickly discount your content if you push it in front of their face too much.

3. Add top performing site search queries to your SEO strategy.

Even though this tactic is more acquisition than optimization, it’s important for you to consider taking your site search analytics data and conducting research to see where you rank for your top performing site search queries in Google.

4. Meaningful content evokes a willingness to share.

Readers only share content when they experience an emotion so strong that they just have to let someone know how they feel. For example, the ice bucket challenge went viral not only because it was so simple to do, but because it made everyone feel good because it was for a meaningful cause. But tapping into your audience’s emotions with meaningful content will get you well on your way to a long shelf life for viral content.

While personal customer support remains an essential ingredient for attracting, retaining, and creating loyal customers, this level of individualized attention is expensive to support difficult to scale as your company grows. In response to this challenge, creating a comprehensive user-facing knowledge base that enables customers to resolve support issues without contacting your team can save companies time and money while also improving the overall user experience.

Once in place, any steps that a customer support team can take to optimize this knowledge base and create a more efficient user experience can substantially decrease inbound support volume. In this pursuit, creating a centralized search experience that allows support center visitors to quickly and easily find the content they are looking for is vitally important.

Still, while the importance of search across knowledge bases is fairly self-explanatory, customer support teams often overlook the valuable insights available from user search behavior—insights which include:

• What are the most pressing issues my customers are facing?
• What issues are users unable to resolve on their own?
• What new support content needs to be created?
• How relevant are the results for users who search across my knowledge base?

To give support teams a clearer sense of precisely what information they should be looking for from their search analytics and to provide actionable recommendations about how they might improve their on site search, Swiftype has created the Knowledge Base Guide to Site Search Analytics.

To access this guide and learn how customer support teams can leverage knowledge base search analytics, follow the download link below.

When creating search engines, the first and arguably most important step is indexing website information in a structured format that is optimized for a specific search algorithm. The specific information you index and the structure by which you organize this information (also known as the schema) dictates how your search engine will determine relevance, what your users can search by, and what information you can display in search results.

How does indexing work?
While there are numerous ways to customize and control the information you index in your Swiftype search engine (for example, via our API or one of our platform integrations) we aim to make this process as simple as possible for non-technical users by automatically indexing website information with Swiftbot—our high performance web crawler designed to index information from a specific URL.

Swiftbot allows non-technical users to get up and running with a working search engine in minutes by simply entering their website URL and letting Swiftbot index their website for them. A major component of Swiftbot’s technology is the logic that our engineering team has built in to parse website HTML and index it in a structured format that works with Swiftype’s advanced search algorithm and information retrieval method. (To learn more about the technical challenge of building a search engine, read our white paper on the subject, written for a non-technical audience).

Building an intelligent web crawler
Because almost every website is built and structured in a different way, teaching Swiftbot how to effectively read, sort, and organize information from a website’s HTML base is an ongoing challenge. While we do allow site owners to completely customize the default information Swiftbot indexes from your website with custom <meta> tags, not all users have the technical resources or knowledge to do this on their own, so Swiftbot is also built to make many of these indexing decisions on its own.

With every website structured differently, how do we teach Swiftbot to intelligently index this information?

Still, with websites differing so dramatically from one another, indexing the right information in the right format from each page is no easy task. In particular, identifying the most important image from a web page and associating that image with a search result is a multifaceted problem, since there are many images on every page and these images often have different filename structures and/or occupy different locations on a page.

Adding images to search results pages and autocomplete menus can create a much more engaging search experience.

Nevertheless, indexing images allows site owners to create much more engaging search experience, adding thumbnails of varying sizes to their autocomplete and search results that let users see a preview of the page content before selecting a result. So, in a recent update to Swiftbot, we’ve built in conditional logic that automatically indexes images from your website pages (provided there are no Swiftype specific image tags already in place).

How does Swiftbot decide which image is “best”?
To teach Swiftbot how to index the “best” image from web pages, we had to build in logic that would overcome a series of challenges that result from the varying nature of website pages.

1. As a starting point, we decided to leverage existing open graph <meta> tags (such as Facebook and Twitter <meta> tags) that many site owners use to prepare their content for sharing on social media platforms and other content distribution networks. By teaching Swiftbot to obey these <meta> tags if no Swiftype specific <meta> tags exist, we created hierarchical indexing logic that more intelligently sources images from existing website metadata.
2. Secondly, we know that many websites have a large number of images that repeat across many, if not every page on their website (for example: a company logo, images in the header, footer, and sidebar, author headshots, ads, etc.). To ensure these images are not considered the “best” image for a specific document, we built in logic that identifies and rules out these repeating elements as candidates. Similarly, we do not want to index advertisements, so we run any images on the page against an ad server blacklist to ensure these remain out of consideration.
3. Thirdly, we compared data in the alt attribute of each <img> with the url and <title> of that page, assigning a relevance score to those images based on how closely the alt description matched this page information.
4. Lastly, Swiftbot looks for common CSS classes and id’s to locate the main content area of each page—another step that helps rule out extraneous information such as the header, footer, and sidebar.

Taking all these pieces of information together, Swiftbot assigns the images on the page a relevance score and indexes the image it judges to be the “best” image for that document. As this new indexing process gains wider use and we gather feedback from customers, we will continually work to improve our image extraction technology over time.

Adding these images to search
Once these images are indexed from your website and in your search engine, the question becomes: how do I display these image thumbnails in my search results and autocomplete dropdown? While there are many ways to style your autocomplete and search results (including using Swiftype’s web components or jQuery library) the best choice for users with very little technical experience is the Result Designer, which allows users to style their search results entirely from the Swiftype dashboard without writing any additional code. To learn more about the Result Designer, watch our dedicated webinar explaining this tool and offering best practices advice from the Swiftype customer success team.

One of the coolest features that Swiftype’s site search software offers is the ability to drag and drop to rearrnage results that users see for any search query. Using the Result Ranking tool, the Marketing Team has been having a lot of fun coming up with the different ways to have this feature help us generate more leads and close more business. So, we decided that we would share our top 11 most useful use cases and how they could be useful for our customers.

1. White paper – If you’re a publisher who offers guarantees for lead gen packages or a demand generation team at a corporation, consider pinning your white papers and ebooks at the top of relevant search queries.
2. Webinar – Making sure that upcoming and on-demand webinars are at the top of key search results will significantly increase the chances of increasing registrants and upping the percentage that attend.
3. Video – searches with thumbnails get strong engagement from users. Pinning video testimonials or demos can help your prospect move down the marketing funnel at a much faster velocity.
4. Unused inventory (so that you can get rid of it) – E-commerce companies always struggle to find ways to get rid of last years collection. Need a new idea? Just pin those SKUs to the top of some converting search queries and watch your inventory fly off the shelves.
5. Top selling product(s) – Already have a product that’s selling like hot cakes? Then leverage your site search analytics to find other opportunities to sell that product.
6. Viral article – Similar approach to top selling products. If you know that an article is going viral, then increase the number of search queries that that article should be at the very top of to generate even more engagement.
7. The day’s top story – For publishers, the day’s top story can sometimes be buried in search results. Make sure that your top search queries show the newest and most relevant top stories.
8. FAQ/Support pages – If you are seeing that a piece of support or knowledge base content is helping lower call volumes, then find other queries that this content can help support.
9. Highest priority job posting – Recruiters should take advantage of site search analytics to see what kinds of jobs prospective candidates are looking for. These insights will help you pin your highest priority jobs to appropriate searches to help you generate more applications to that job.
10. Most recent op-ed – Have an editorial that delivers your company’s new fresh message, make sure to pin it to the top of relevant search queries for highest visibility.
11. Sponsored content – If you are a publisher who offers your advertisers sponsored content, you can work with your advertiser to make sure that their content is pinned to the top of the search results that they’re trying to target. This is a great money making opportunity and easy way to build deeper trust with your advertisers.

Have any pinning use cases that we haven’t already mentioned? Send them our way at [email protected]—we’d love to hear how you’re using Result Ranking to improve your on site search experience.

This week we are excited to announce a new white paper from Swiftype: Designing Ecommerce for the Mobile Shopper. Here at Swiftype we’ve been fascinated by the steady growth of mobile across every corner of the web, and wanted to summarize our research and findings in a report that looks closely at the influence of mobile in the ecommerce space.

As a starting point, the report aims to uncover the differences in behavior that distinguish mobile shoppers from those on desktop, looking at the relationship between online sales and online traffic across different types of devices. Questions addressed include:

• How has mobile ecommerce grown in the past few years and how will this trend develop moving forward?
• How do the aims of mobile shoppers differ from shoppers on desktop?
• What strategies have industry leaders adopted to optimize their mobile ecommerce experience?

This report also looks at the differences between ecommerce trends within apps and on mobile browsers, helping site owners determine where they should focus their development efforts as they look to optimize their business for the increasingly prominent mobile shopper. To access your copy of the report, follow the link below.

Creating an engaging user experience is paramount to the success of digital publishing. A primary component of any engagement strategy is helping your users find content that is timely, interesting, and relevant to their interests. But how can you do that? Your first consideration should be your data and analytics.

Join Ben Lack, Senior Director of Marketing and Business Development for Swiftype, and Clare Carr, Director of Marketing for Parse.ly, as they cover the best questions to ask of your data and analytics to find out what your readers want and how to get it to them. See how top media brands and digital publishers are using the answers they find about their audience to power their editorial and product strategies.

• What metrics really mean and what they’re telling you about your audience
• 5 Questions about what your readers want that anyone on your team should be able to answer
• Examples of how premium publishers are using analytics to grow their loyal audiences
• Insights from Swiftype’s billions of search queries and Parse.ly‘s billions of network page views about what audiences want from all publishing sites.

So sign up today, then tune in on August 19 for a deep dive on how your editorial and publishing teams can improve your users online experience. Invite your colleagues to join, too!

For any business pushing a content marketing strategy, every white paper download, webinar registration, and video view is critical to generating quality leads and achieving a positive ROI. While SEO, email marketing, and paid acquisition are all useful strategies to drive users to this content, at Swiftype we also use our own tool to promote content based on user search activity. Here’s how.

Swiftype offers site owners a unique tool to promote content for visitors who use site search: Custom Result Ranking. This tool lets site owners customize the order of search results for a specific query, dragging and dropping existing results to a new order, adding new results that don’t appear by default, or eliminating results they don’t want displayed.

With this tool, site owners can “pin” specific pieces of content at the top position for related searches to drive users to these high value landing pages. For example, we have pinned our white paper Understanding Ecommerce Site Search Analytics, as the top result when people search “ecommerce.” With this new result order, we see a significantly higher number of white paper downloads each week that result from site search.

Adding marketing automation landing pages
However, in many cases (including our own) these landing pages are hosted on a different domain than your main website, generated by the specific marketing automation platform your team uses (such as info.website.com, go.website.com, or many others). Because these pages exist on a separate domain, Swiftbot will not automatically discover and index these pages on the initial crawl of your website—meaning they will not initially be discoverable through search. To add these external landing pages to their search engine, Swiftype users can use the Domains tab in their Swiftype Dashboard. Let’s take a look at this process in action.

To access the Domains tab, simply click on the icon from your Dashboard home page or navigation bar. Here you can manage the domains that comprise your search engine index. For example, we combine our main site (https://swiftype.com) and our blog (http://blog.swiftype.com) in one search engine to let users search across both properties at the same time.

To add your landing pages, you simply have to add your landing page URL as a new domain. To do so, paste the complete URL of any landing page in the new domain box, then click verify to have Swiftbot index the page and add it to your search engine. Note that because these landing pages often don’t contain links to other pages of the same domain (which Swiftbot uses to create an index from a single url) you may see an alert warning you that Swiftbot will not be able to index additional pages beyond this one landing page. However, this will not cause any problems, and you can simply click Add Domain to proceed.

From here, you can add additional landing pages by managing your domain rules, accessible by clicking “Manage Rules” next to the domain you just added. To add another landing page, simply click “Add URL” in the top right corner and then paste the unique URL of each landing page you’d like to add. Once these pages become part of your search engine, you can add them as a top result (or any other result) to any query you would like from the Rankings tab.

As your users interact with your on site search engine, you’ll be able to see the number of clicks these pinned results receive for specific queries in the Rankings tab, as well as the top referring queries and autocomplete prefixes that lead users to this page by looking at the Details section of each page in the Content tab.

With this tool, Swiftype allows site owners to personally curate search results, giving marketers and site owners yet another way to promote content and ultimately drive their lead generation efforts. For help with this process, or to get in touch with a member of the Swiftype team, email [email protected].

As you’re getting started with Swiftype, you may be wondering how to index thumbnails from your website and serve them to users in your search results. The answer to this question lies in using Swiftype’s custom <meta> tags, which allow site owners to pass detailed web page information directly to Swiftbot, our web crawler, as it moves across your site. As Swiftbot encounters these custom Swiftype <meta> tags, it indexes their content and incorporates that information in your search engine index schema.

To index thumbnails from your website, all you need to do is add a Swiftype image <meta> tag to the <head> section of your website template that indicates where images are located on your various page types. For illustration purposes, the Swiftype image <meta> tag is formatted like this:

Swiftype recommends placing these <meta> tags at the template level of your website to ensure that image files are dynamically populated within the tags, rather than being added manually for every page on site.

NOTE: the value of the “content” attribute must be HTML encoded. For more information see this guide.

Alternatively, you can wrap images with a body-embedded Swiftype image <meta> tag to avoid changing your website <head>. For example, Swiftbot will index example.jpg into the image field from the HTML below:

<body>

Hello world

 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed ut risus sed ante dignissim pharetra aliquet a orci. Maecenas varius.

 

In in augue molestie, bibendum velit vel, luctus erat. Curabitur cursus, tellus at feugiat lacinia, tellus est suscipit lectus, non commodo diam elit sit amet justo.

http://fullurl.com/example.jpg </body>

It is important to note that in both the <head> and <body> embedded <meta> tags, you need to specify the data-type attribute as enum. For images, this will always be the case. For any other custom meta tags you choose to define, each attribute must be a valid, Swiftype-supported field type, which you may read about here.

Once you index thumbnails from your website, you can easily customize your search results and autocomplete to feature thumbnails in a range of shapes and sizes with the Swiftype Result Designer.

To learn more about using custom Swiftype <meta> tags to refine your search engine index, check out our tutorial. As always, if you need help or have any questions, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].

This post was initially published by Internet Retailer—a leading source of ecommerce news and publications.

One of my favorite tools for online research is the Internet Archive—a 501(c)(3) non-profit devoted to the digital preservation of the web as it evolves, crawling the web and capturing how various web pages have looked at different points in time. As someone who spends time researching and writing about web design, I’ve relied on this tool to trace the evolution of numerous websites—Amazon.com being one of the most fascinating websites to study in light of its ever increasing power and influence over the web, particularly the realm of ecommerce.

While Amazon’s homepage design has evolved in response to a wide range of influences and company goals, one of the most striking changes has been the increasingly prominent role that the search bar plays in the user experience. Viewed in the context of the internet’s larger history, this evolution makes logical sense: Google and Amazon were both founded around the same time (1994 and 1998, respectively), and while Google has made more of a name for itself as the innovator in search technologies, search technology at Amazon has had to evolve alongside Google because of the tremendously important role it plays in ecommerce.

Considering the tremendous strides that Google has made in search technology over the last fifteen years, it should come as no surprise that Amazon has had to work equally as hard to keep pace (today still, Amazon has an entire section of its job site devoted to Search and Discovery Technologies positions). As Amazon’s search has bar has become more useful and more powerful, it has become increasingly valuable to users. And the more valuable it has become, the more devoted real estate it has received across the homepage and website.

Let’s trace this evolution with a series of screenshots from Amazon’s homepage over the last fifteen years, focusing on the changing size and position of the search bar.

May 10, 2000: Search begins somewhat obscurely tucked in the top left corner. Amazon provides the option to filter searches to a specific subsection of the site and a suggested query to inspire users, but the sidebar below the search bar remains a primary navigation tool. This design remains largely unchanged for the next six years.

June 2, 2007: Search occupies a much more prominent space in the header of the page, but the sidebar remains equally prominent as a critical navigation tool.

June 15, 2012: Amazon eliminates the sidebar, offering instead a single search bar to serve as the primary portal for users entering the site.

June 9, 2015: Not only does search remain the most prominent feature in the header of Amazon’s homepage, but the search bar now sticks to the top of the page as shoppers scroll.

The trend across these images is clear. As search technology has improved on Amazon, the search bar has become a more valuable asset in the user experience and has accordingly taken a more prominent position the homepage. At the same time, with the dominance that Google exercises across the web, user expectations for search have steadily risen as well—a development which undoubtedly contributed to Amazon’s shift towards such a search-centric user experience.

Another major takeaway from this evolution is the massive amount of data that Amazon is able to collect as a result of their massive search volume. On site search queries are arguably the clearest expression of user intent available to site owners, and Amazon continually leverages this information to intelligently promote products across their website—a subject and design evolution that merits its own post entirely.

To learn more about best practices for site search design and see example implementations, read our post on Swiftype’s favorite implementations from 2014.