The Swiftype Blog

A visitor lands on your site. Now what?

Congrats, you’ve succeeded in driving a prospective customer to your website. Although most first time visitors to your site are not ready to buy (approximately 96%), you have a huge opportunity to educate them and create a future buyer.

Now that you have someone on your website, you need to make sure they can quickly understand what your product does and whether it is relevant to them. As for navigating your website, this new visitor will likely take 1 of 3 actions:

• Click a link on your navigation bar
• Click a CTA on the page they landed on
• Go to your search bar and enter exactly what they’re looking for

As a marketer, you want to make sure you think through each of these customer journeys. According to Aberdeen Group, 39% of marketers say that promotion and discovery of content is a top challenge. No doubt, it can be difficult to show the right content at the right time to push a potential lead down the funnel so every bit of effort spent improving your conversion rate is worth it.

Website visitors who utilize site search

Here at Swiftype, we think a lot about search, so I’d like to really focus on the third customer pathway that I highlighted: when a customer decides to use your search bar. Over the past 15 years, Google’s powerful search engine has made searching second nature for many people and other leading tech companies like Amazon and Facebook are centering their products around search.

 

Search done well is an extremely flexible and intuitive way to navigate a product or website, and it’s also a huge source of valuable data that can, among other things, signal macro trends and help companies to improve user experience.

Site search for marketing websites

As for companies that do search well on their marketing websites, let’s take a look at HubSpot’s website. HubSpot is a B2B SaaS company that builds marketing and sales software primarily for SMBs. They are well known for their effective inbound marketing strategies, and they’ve done a great job with their marketing website, including the site search feature.

 

 

It’s clear that HubSpot has made sure that the experience for website visitors who want to utilize search is optimized. And for good reason.

Website visitors who perform a search are 216% more likely to convert than visitors who don’t.

Why is site search so important?

Website visitors who perform a search are 216% more likely to convert than visitors who don’t. When a visitor searches for anything on your website, it is a strong sign of intent. For one, you know they’re interested enough in your product to try and learn more and two, you know exactly what they are searching for.

When visitors utilize search on your website, you want to make sure they can easily find what they’re looking for. If they can’t, they will use Google to search your site at which point you will lose all control of your potential customer’s journey. If one of your competitors outranks you on Google for certain topics, it’s likely that your new website visitor will end up on your competitor’s website.

The benefits of great site search

Aside from helping your website visitors to find what they’re looking for, site search is also a great source of actionable data. You can use search analytics to determine:

• Volume of search queries
• Popular search queries
• Queries returning no results
• CTRs on search results

There is a LOT you can do with this information. At Swiftype, one big way we’ve seen our customers utilize search analytics is for data-driven content development. They look at what their website visitors are searching for that is returning no results, and then they create content to fill those voids.

By pinning their highest converting content to the top of the search results for relevant queries, companies can boost conversions and ultimately increase revenue.

Since the Swiftype Site Search Solution features a drag-and-drop interface for ranking results on a query-by-query basis, it’s easy for companies to make changes, and they have full control over their site search experience. The drag-and-drop interface also makes it easy for companies to optimize their search conversion rates for popular queries. By pinning their highest converting content to the top of the search results for relevant queries, companies can boost conversions and ultimately increase revenue.

 

Getting started with Swiftype Site Search

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.

Key takeaways:

• Customer support really, really matters
• Customers want to help themselves
• Search can help you drive down support ticket volume
• Search analytics help you identify gaps in your documentation
• Customize search results through a drag-and-drop interface

Great customer support creates loyal (and profitable) customers

We all know that customer support is incredibly important. In case you’re not fully convinced, consider these stats:

• 3 in 5 Americans would try a new brand or company for a better service experience (Source: American Express)
• News of bad customer service reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for a good service experience (Source: White House Office of Consumer Affairs)

Furthermore, it’s much easier to do business with existing customers than new ones. According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, it is 6-7 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one.

So we know that keeping our customers happy is important but how should we support them? According to the HBR, 81% of all customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a live representative. Customers want to be able to help themselves, but all too often, companies do not enable customers to find what they need on their own.

Customer support search

At Swiftype, we handle a wide variety of search use cases including customer support. Swiftype Customer Support Search helps companies to get the most out of their support documentation through advanced search technology.

Swiftype powers customer support search for Twilio, Lyft, SurveyMonkey, Asana, AppDynamics, Segment, PagerDuty and many others. After implementing Swiftype, support specialists from these companies spend less time answering support tickets and more time creating new documentation.

How Swiftype decreases support ticket volume

Swiftype actually helps you resolve support tickets before they happen by suggesting relevant help and documentation as your customers file support tickets. Customers are looking for immediate answers, so they’re happy to quickly find the answer they’re looking for.

If your customer doesn’t think that the suggested documentation answers their question, they will go ahead and submit their support ticket. Over time, you will recognize trends in the support tickets that are submitted and be able to improve your documentation. As your documentation improves, customers will be able to self-service more and more.

Some of Swiftype’s other powerful features:

• Search analytics
• Drag-and-drop results ranking
• Custom weighting

Data-driven customer support through search analytics

One of Swiftype’s most helpful features is search analytics. With search analytics, companies can see:

• Overall search volume
• Words and phrases that their customers search for most frequently
• Queries that are returning no results

After seeing this data, companies can create content to directly address their customers’ questions that are going unanswered.

For example, Twilio noticed lots of customers were searching about session initiation protocols (SIP), but had never had time to develop in-depth content about that subject. After seeing the data, they developed an FAQ for SIP questions, and they saw the support tickets about them fall significantly.

Furthermore, Swiftype makes it really easy for companies to access their analytics by sending a weekly email with key metrics.

Drag-and-drop results ranking

Swiftype enables companies to customize search results on a query-by-query basis through a drag-and-drop results ranking tool. Whether they want to re-rank content based on trends they see in the search data or pin a new piece of content to the top of the search results, companies have complete control over their help center’s search experience.

Custom weighting

Swiftype gives you granular control even if you’re not technical by enabling you to adjust the weights placed on each of the fields in your indexed data. With a simple slider, you can adjust the weight placed on a field and then immediately test the impact that your change has on your search engine. If you don’t like the effects of your change, you can restore the default setting with the click of a button.

Getting started with Swiftype

Swiftype Customer Support Search enables companies to quickly help their customers find what they’re looking for. After implementing Swiftype, SurveyMonkey noticed that over 90% of people that visit their help center find the information they’re looking for without contacting a support specialist.

Interested in implementing Swiftype for your help center. You can sign up for a free trial here.

Want more information? Learn how about “How Asana, Twilio, SurveyMonkey and Lyft optimized their customer support centers”.

Do you use Zendesk for customer service and support tickets? Check out Swiftype for Zendesk.

NOTE: This has been published anonymously to protect the author’s identity.

By day, I work as an administrative assistant for a hospital. By…the rest of the day…I’m what my friends fondly call an “online shopaholic.” But I’m so much more than just an online shopper—I’m a lifestyle curator. Don’t just take my word for it! My half a million Instagram followers would probably agree.

It’s about creating a lifestyle

I get a lot of new followers every day because I take my unofficial job pretty seriously. I don’t just go to the H&M website and buy the first thing I see on the homepage. Anyone can do that! I’m all about creating a cohesive and unique look out of pieces that no one else would even think could work together. That requires a lot of digging deeper into sites, and searching for some pretty specific items of clothing.

Some days, I’ll be looking for some new athletic gear, and I can go to a website like Beyond Yoga and find whatever I want super easily. Their search is just so user friendly, and seems to know me well enough to show me what it knows I want before I have to look for it. For example, one time I wanted a new pair of leggings, but I wasn’t sure what style. I started typing in “leg” but before I got any further the search box had automatically suggested 4 pairs of awesome-looking leggings. I saw a gorgeous pair that were white and adjustable that I just had to have.

So, Beyond Yoga also has this section at the bottom called “complete the look,” which basically means they suggest other clothes that can, well, complete the look. But on the leggings I was looking at, that section was EMPTY! They had no idea what to use to complete that look.

Time to complete the look

Good thing I’m a lifestyle curator huh? Kicking into action, I jumped over to one of my go-to shops, Teespring, because they tend to have a lot of quirky and unique designs that I like to use in my casual looks. I typed in “tank,” but there’s no autocomplete function, it’s just auto suggestions, and for some reason “tank tops” is all the way at the bottom of the list. It’s okay, not everything in life is going to come easy, right? (I think I read that on a bumper sticker.)

After scrolling down to the end of the list and clicking on the “tank top” suggestion, I was horrified to find that I had to look through all of their tank tops. That’s over 24,000 results I got back! And two of the top three weren’t even tank tops! One was a t-shirt, and one was a mug! Who knows how many of those 24,000 results were actually tank tops? I tried to filter the results a little more by adding “yoga” to my search, and it helped a little, but there were still almost 2,000 results I had to sort through. Many of the results were off-topic and had nothing to do with yoga, so after clicking a few more filter checkboxes (“tank top” – but really, why would I have to filter by “tank top” when I was obviously looking for tank tops?—and “american apparel”) I ended up with seven results to choose from. None of them really fit the look I was going for, so I tried again with a different brand. There were about 50 results for Gildan, and I found a couple of designs that might have worked, but I kind of felt like I was trying too hard to force one of those tank tops to fit the leggings at this point. So I gave up on Teespring.

No time for bad search

I decided to try another one of my go-to shops: Azalea Boutique. They usually have a lot of great styles and are pretty good about organizing their looks by “moods.” I do like to browse their moods for inspo sometimes, but their “sporty” looks were just not hitting what I wanted to do with mine. It’s getting a little cooler, so I thought it would be cute to add a nice long sweater to my look. So I typed “sweater” in the search box and all these beautiful options showed up before I even hit enter. The first one looked really good: a beautiful white and black striped knit sweater, so I clicked on that. But on closer inspection it didn’t really go with the look I was curating, but they had some great suggestions right below it and one of them, the Longline Hoodie, was perfect! They basically did the work for me.

Last item: shoes. I used to love Quicksilver’s shoes, but after too many frustrating searches, I decided I needed better. My new go-to is FYFO. They’re from England, so they have different words for things. Good thing I’m a citizen of the world, so I know I’m looking for “trainers” instead of “sneakers.” Before I even finished typing the word, I found THE ones: Pineapple Mara Hi Tops. They were gorgeous, and they fit my look perfectly.

Some days are more frustrating than others, but that usually depends on how easy it is to search and use the filters for the online shops I like. If a store’s search sucks, I’m definitely not going to waste my time scrolling through thousands of items of clothes. I’m a pretty patient person, but ain’t nobody got time for that.

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Don’t risk your customers giving up on your products. Try Swiftype today.

Over the past two decades, Salesforce has become an undeniable stronghold in the Bay Area tech scene. But if there were any clear indicators of its widespread influence and fandom, it would absolutely be the behemoth of trade shows fondly know as Dreamforce.

A massive gathering of Salesforce’s customers, partners, and enthusiasts, Dreamforce is an annual culmination of thought leadership, innovation, and community all celebrating the world’s largest cloud ecosystem. It’s always the must-attend event of the year.

Still not convinced?

• Sessions: Touting 2700+ sessions spread across all roles and industries, attendees have access to cutting-edge, up-close, information and exposure to the latest products and solutions.
• Speakers: Not only are world-renowned leaders and Salesforce experts poised to speak on how to transform your business, hands-on training from the same experts is available to ensure user success.
• Solutions: Finally, hundreds of Salesforce partners are showcased in the Customer Success Expo. who’ve built solutions that easily integrate with Salesforce and amplify its efficiency, productivity, and power.

Swiftype Joins the Ranks!

Swiftype is excited to sponsor Dreamforce for the first time this year. Our team will be joining the Customer Success Expo to show you first-hand how you and your team can connect your Salesforce universe and super-charge your productivity with Swiftype Enterprise Search and Site Search. Deliver AI-powered, highly-relevant results in a single search experience all without leaving your Salesforce environment.

• Find us at booth 1928 in the Customer Success Expo
• Stop by one of our Partner Theater Sessions
• Set a Meeting in advance with our team

Come join us and 170,000 of your closest friends for four days of career transformation, innovation, giving back, and community connection at the largest software conference in the world. It’s definitely going to sell out, so make sure you register now to secure your spot!

Looking to save a little $$ on your conference pass? We’ve got you! Use code D7EMSWFT when registering for your Full Conference Pass and you’ll save a quick $100!

When it comes to solving issues, customers prefer self-service

Studies have shown that a majority of a company’s customers prefer to solve problems themselves rather than reaching out to a representative. For this reason, customer support search is incredibly important to help those individuals find the information they’re looking for.

Better customer support through search

Asana, Twilio, and SurveyMonkey have all invested heavily in creating high-quality support content. To ensure this content is easily accessible, these companies leverage advanced search technology that provides relevant results to their customers and actionable analytics for them.

Asana, Twilio, and SurveyMonkey have been successful with focusing their help centers around search. To highlight some of the key strategies they’ve used, we created this Customer Support Search infographic.

 

Get Started with Swiftype

Want to try Swiftype Customer Support Search for yourself? You can learn more on our website or sign up for a free trial.

Located in Melbourne, Florida, National Drug Screening (NDS) helps employers reduce liability, improve safety, and attract and retain better employees by providing a broad range of drug testing services and training. The company’s leadership built NDS into one of the leading sources on drug testing information, and much of that knowledge forms the basis of their extensive and information-filled website.

But after years of using Google Site Search to help their customers tap into this knowledge, they saw its demise as a potential roadblock to their continued online success. After struggling through a short-lived customized site search, they knew they needed a packaged solution that would not only outshine Google Site Search, but would be easy to buy, implement, and manage.

Here, Joe Riley, President of National Drug Screening, shares his experience of how site search is critical to his business, and how Swiftype turned a potential sales nightmare into an opportunity to elevate NDS’s already stellar reputation.

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

When we heard that Google Site Search was being discontinued, and that the replacement, Google Custom Search Engine, would force us to show advertisements, we knew we needed to find something else. For a potential customer to search our site and see ads, well we didn’t want that at all.

Our web development vendor took a shot at building a custom site search replacement, but it just wasn’t robust enough for our needs. Our value is in our expertise and our knowledge, so we need visitors to find what they’re searching for. A good site search is a requirement for us.

So we looked around for another Google Site Search alternative. Our “must haves” were that it was as good as or better than what we had with Google, that the price was reasonable, and that it was easy for our developers to implement. We had the same criteria we had for Google Site Search.

What made Swiftype stand out as the obvious choice?

Once we found Swiftype and looked at how it worked on some [of their] customers’ websites, we didn’t look any further. It did everything we needed, Swiftype is a reputable company, and the sales team was very professional. We decided that, if we’re going to do this, this is the company we’re going to do it with.

What I was really excited about was when I went to a Swiftype customer site. I searched for something, and results came up. I searched again, but maybe this time with the terms spelled incorrectly, or words out of order, and the results came up as expected. That’s what sold me on it, and I was very happy to see how great it worked on a real site, not just in a demo.

How long was the Swiftype implementation?

Not very long. Once our web developers got started, Swiftype implementation took just a couple of days.

That short timeframe was pretty amazing, considering our website is totally custom. It’s not a WordPress site. We have our own content management system for blogs and frequently asked questions (FAQs), and we have our developers do everything custom. But once we told them we wanted Swiftype, they really had no issues at all.

Now, when a visitor clicks on our search icon, it looks just like it did before. The color scheme, the search box. Everything matches. It looks like it’s always looked, and that’s great.

Do you have plans to use Swiftype’s analytics?

We definitely do have plans to dig into Swiftype analytics, and we’re sure it’ll bring more value to our search.

Our web traffic comes from both organic search and paid ads, but our organic search results really overpower all of our competitors because our content is so strong. Our content is relevant and unique, and we want to leverage that. We want people to be able to find it. If they found our site, but the search was weak and the couldn’t sift through the great content that we have, then we’re missing a huge opportunity.

Swiftype can give us the insights to know more about what’s bringing visitors to our site, what they’re looking for, what they’re finding and reading.

Why is good site search so important for you and your customers?

We want National Drug Screening to continue to be recognized as one of the leading experts on drug testing in the United States. So when visitors come to our website, they find the information they need. We want to be their source for expert information, and obviously that then translates into sales opportunities.

Just as importantly, we also want more of our own employees to be seen as experts. We take inbound phone calls all day long, hundreds of phone calls, so our staff gets all kinds of questions. They’re well trained, but they can’t recall everything. They can, however, utilize the expertise on our website as a primary resource rather than doing a web search and maybe getting a good answer or not. Then they can talk to that prospect or customer very intelligently, and be confident that they’re sharing the most reliable information.

Using site search internally is critical, since those inbound calls are usually either an existing customer or someone looking to buy. It gives our staff a huge library of expertise right at their fingertips, and it helps turn them each individually into experts on our particular market.

What’s the primary value you’re realizing with Swiftype?

Our goal is to be able to assist customers, to be able to assist people who are looking for information, or people that are potentially new customers. We want people to know that we have great information on all things drug testing. Getting them the right answers quickly, whether on our website or on the phone, helps us grow our business, and that’s obviously very important.

Want to learn more? Our customers have great stories about how Swiftype helped them accomplish great things with more sophisticated site search. Check it out now!

NOTE: This has been published anonymously to protect the author’s identity.

I’m currently a high school junior and applying to and attending a top college is a really big deal to me. As for what I want to study, I’m really interested in a few fields including Economics and Applied Math. Not to brag, but I’m currently second in my class and I recently scored a 34 on my ACT, so I’m in a pretty good position to be admitted to most schools I’m interested in.

Eyes on the prize

Some universities must agree because it seems like everyday I get an email or postcard from a college with a picture of a pristine building and happy students in front of it. Mail is great and everything, but I hardly ever follow up with these schools that send me hard copies of information. I already know where I want to go; it’s really just a matter of comparing the pros and cons of those schools.

Since I know what I want, research is key. I’m already considering a few state universities with over 30K students as well as some smaller, private schools with less than 10K. While I’m trying to get advice from friends, family, and mentors on how these college experiences vary, I’m also doing a lot of research on my own. Only problem is, I keep running into this one issue: finding information on these university websites is a nightmare.

In fact, it’s so difficult that I actually sometimes use Google to search the website by using the Google site command like this: site:college.edu school mascot.

The nagging content discovery problem: aka why I can’t find anything

So, I’m relatively sure it’s not that these schools don’t have the information I’m looking for on their website. It seems like they actually have more than enough content and if I kept digging, I’m sure I’d eventually be able to find what I was looking for. It just seems to take FOREVER. For example, if I want to navigate to find information about student clubs or freshman living options on a college’s website, I almost always have to click around 3-4 times, on multiple pages before I find even remotely the right answers.

When I opt to use the in-site search bar instead, it just typically returns a slew of random results and I have to scroll down and sift through to even begin to find what I’m looking for. I feel like I should be able to search for what I’m looking for and find it at the top of the results. Just like that.

This bad search stuff is annoying and in general, I usually don’t mind digging around. But there is some information that I can’t take a chance on. Some details I need to find quickly and just needs to be absolutely accurate.

Paying for college is why this matters

Although I’ve done well in high school and should (hopefully) be eligible for some substantial scholarships, I have to cover the bulk of my college expenses. I’m one of four in a middle-class family and college has become so expensive that my parents can’t cover tuition for me and all my siblings. Given my circumstances, I need to know the complete and accurate ins and outs of need-based financial aid packages as well as merit-based scholarships.

Although I can mostly piece together the information by browsing a college’s website, it would be much easier if I could enter “need-based financial aid” or “scholarship types” into the search box and know that I’ll get uber-relevant results returned. I know that schools give out nice packets with this information when you visit the campus but:

(a) these packets typically have a lot of fluff and you can’t search over physical documents

(b) I can’t visit all the schools I’m interested in

This is information is crucial for me. When I do find a seemingly relevant scholarship page on a school’s website, I need to make sure it’s the right one for my academic and financial qualifications.

To sum it up: In an age when basically all prospective college students are going to use their own research on university websites to potentially decide wether to apply, enroll, and attend, it seems like schools would make the investment to make it as easy as possible for students to find exactly what they need. But what do I know. I’m just the future.

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 Upgrade your website search

Want to upgrade your website’s search and help people like Spencer find what they’re looking for? Join the University of Washington, Texas A&M, Duke, NYU and others in utilizing Swiftype Search to help their website visitors quickly find what they’re looking for.

We all know how tough job hunting is, especially for recent college graduates. We’ve ALL been there. Fortunately, there are ways for students to prepare for the “working-world” while they are still in college to help make themselves stand out amongst other job applicants.

In this episode, we’re joined by two of Swiftype’s most recent grads: Sam Reid, Growth Marketing Manager, and Kara Chen, Marketing Coordinator. They’re here today to share some insights on how they got hired at Swiftype and their thoughts about working at a startup. Both Sam and Kara were rockstars in college; from holding executive positions in their clubs, to personally reaching out to professionals, to studying abroad, their hard work has definitely paid off and we’re so glad to have them on the team.

You don’t want to miss this episode

Listen along as Sam and Kara take us through their journey from college grads to startup marketers!

If you’re longing to learn more about Sam and Kara, make sure to check out both of their blog posts.

Sam: Why I joined Swiftype: Great people and endless opportunity

Kara: Swiftype Through the Eyes of an Intern 👀

Enjoy and stay tuned for our next episode of the Swiftype Podcast!

NOTE: This has been published anonymously to protect the author’s identity.

First and foremost, I’m an engineer. I want to spend my time developing products and working on relevant projects. I might also be tasked with developing our website, which is fine, but literally the last thing I want to do is spin my wheels building or configuring custom website search. That seems pretty obvious. Totally agree that site search needs to work and work well, but it shouldn’t be a painful time-suck. I have better things to do.

Let’s say I did build it from scratch—the worst part by far would be the constant misconception that custom search is something that can be modified and optimized in a few minutes, (ahem, looking at you, Marketing.) This is a huge reason why I’ve personally avoided going custom. With the number of requests and the drain on back-end resources, it just doesn’t make sense for our team.

Historically, I’ve leaned on Google Site Search to fill that search gap. It’s been a long 11 years, and for much of that time I figured there wasn’t anything better out there. Honestly, I never even looked around that much. I was content. It met my needs. But lately, Google’s made some changes. Little changes. A lot of self-serving, little changes. And over time, those little changes have added up to a whole lot of frustration… and annoyance… and irritation. So, I’m pretty sure I’m done.

Honestly, one of the final nails in the coffin is that now that Google has made plans to actually kill off Site Search, their replacement, Google Custom Search Engine (CSE),  is being dangled out there as a “safety net” of sorts. A fall-back plan that just doesn’t seem to offer much more that what it’s replacing. In fact, it offers less. Yes, that’s right. Less. (Are you kidding me? What a joke.)

I want relevant results

Is it so much to ask that a site search tool be modern? One that’s built on a premise of helping my visitors search my site, not on serving ads or generating revenue for another company?

Google, like any company, is in the business of making (a lot of) money. And that’s great—When I want to find the highest-rated down pillow for my bed, the best day hike in Yosemite, or a lip-synced cat video, sure, I search Google. For every search, they give me uber-relevant advertisements from companies who pay them, (Companies who pay THEM.) They also happen to suck me in with convenient, free services (email, photo storage, access to a billion videos, etc.).

That’s all well and good for my personal interests and time, but at work, where my decisions impact the growth of my company and inevitably the future of my career (and my salary), I’m less interested in “free” and more interested in flexibility, control, and results.

I want my own branding

It’s completely insane that Google Custom Search Engine is going to allow ads from other companies to appear in search results on my website. Seriously, WTF? When visitors search on my website, I don’t want them to be bombarded by results from ANOTHER website, especially from any of our competitors. Yes, I know, that’s how Google makes money, and that’s what pays the bills for the cat videos I might be watching at my desk, but there’s no way that’s going to fly for our website.

On top of all that, it hilariously seems like Google completely forgot about the fact that search is, in fact, a tool. The ultimate goal is to control how to display/rank/promote the best content for visitors, right? This often puts Marketing and I at odds because that content changes rapidly and updates are requested frequently. Whether it’s ordering certain results by one attribute or promoting a specific piece of content for a particular search term, I need the flexibility to make these changes on the fly. I should be able to run our website the way I see fit, not the way Google does.

Without question, search should also fit in with the rest of our company’s brand and website design. A lot is invested in the overall branding, colors, logos, and web templates we use, so why would I want to slap a big Google logo on my search? Because I want more flack from Marketing? No. No one wants different formatting treatments on their search results. It just looks dumb.

I want the best visitor experience possible

In the end, we’re responsible for keeping our website visitors happy and engaged. Making sure they quickly and easily find what they’re looking for is obviously part of that. We want the best flexibility and control to make it our search. We want search to be an extension of our brand, another tool for us to guide visitors to what they want and how we want to provide it to them. But most of all, I want it to be simple, functional, and just work.

So, later, Google. Your site search options just aren’t enough anymore.

 

Looking for a better alternative that will allow you to customize your site search to be exactly what you’re looking for? Get a demo from the Swiftype team today and see what’s possible.

With a world of information constantly at our fingertips, it’s easy to feel like we have it all: Instant answers, immediate feedback, easy instructions. The world is our knowledge oyster. But what if you didn’t know where or how to find the information you’re looking for? That content essentially becomes useless and sits distantly alone in the dark corners of the internet unread and unused.

But really…

What? That would never happen, you say? I can just search for it via a website search bar and find exactly what I’m looking for? Easy! No problem!

We all definitely take the ability to search for granted. We’re even quick to claim we can find what we’re looking for whenever we want. But we’ve all, without a doubt, had countless, frustrating, roundabout, dead-end search experiences that only lead us to stress-eating cartons of ice cream instead of to the actual info we needed.

Ok, let’s talk real life

Ever wondered what kind of impact a search bar can have on specific people’s lives? So have we. Join us in this 6-part series as we dive deep into the lives of everyday people who will share their unique struggles when it comes to finding information, the problems it caused, and ultimately how they overcame. From prospective college students, celebrity gossip readers, online shopaholics, to irate customers and even helicopter parents. To quote the infinite wisdom of R.E.M.—“Everybody hurts.”

Search that doesn’t work hits where it hurts for many people in many ways. Let’s walk in someone else’s shoes, shall we?

Stay tuned to the Swiftype blog to catch each installment over the next few weeks!