The importance of site search

Why is site search important?

In today’s dynamic environment, the quality and consistency of your web presentation is of crucial importance. To achieve a flawless user experience – many content providers and e-commerce sites possess Site Search capability. In this article we will present why site search matters and how you can implement it within your website.

What is site search?

Site search is a feature that allows website visitors to search its products or content articles with ease and accuracy. The good site search implementations - index the website persistently to ensure the newest content is available, and guide the users how to explore the website’s content. Thus, the users could access information (product or article) they might not suppose they are interested in. The site search tools enable the users to quickly discover the topic they look for, and present clearly the relevant information on products and services the users browsed for.  

In addition to product and content search capabilities - a cool new category is audio/video  search. Audio/video search enables users to search for a keyword and instantly navigate to the exact places in the podcast where the keyword appears.

The benefits of site search

Today many websites provide an embedded search bar as part of their design, and the visitors are used to it. If the user uses the search tool to find a product or information - there’s a good chance s/he will convert into a lead.  Search is also an opportunity for you to get hints - what are the users looking for, so you can adjust the website to the visitor’s specific needs.

Improving Customer Experience

The goal of all site owners should be to enable the customers to find the information they need - when they need it. It’s rather simple - if your customers can’t navigate your website easily, or can’t find the answers they need, it is likely they’ll leave your site. Good search tools provide quick search results and great discovery experience that allows users to filter results, browse different categories of content, and even recommend the results they will find. A good search experience makes the users regular visitors of your website.

Increasing Conversions and Number of Orders

If the goal of your website redesign (or part of it) is to increase conversions and grow your business, it’s worth investing into the on-site search experience. According to Forrester research, up to 43% of visitors immediately use the search bar when they visit a site. By providing a user-friendly site search experience, you help customers find items they’re looking for in a flawless way. It will increase customer loyalty and make them more likely to convert and return to the site for more purchases.

Possibility to Analyze your Data

By searching information on your website - users are expressing their intents in their own words. Then you can perform site search analytics and plan for strategic moves.

• You will understand who your users are: their location, their age, their content (product) preferences. So you can improve your market segmentation.
• You can adjust product / content appearance based on popularity - to ensure the most relevant results appear first for site users.
• You can fill-in the topics that the users have searched for, but are still not present on your website.

Improving your SEO

The site search improves the overall usability of your website, which will bring you better SEO rank. Site search is based on content placement, which allows search engines to understand your main topics and products. The users that look for a word or phrase on your site, are also searching Google for that keyword. So, based on the highly-searched terms on your site, you can adjust the content to better suit the user intent.

Planning Website Growth

As you increase your portfolio with new products (or content topics) - the addition of daily content and/or new product lines, can actually harm UX. When a website grows significantly, finding an exact item may cause problems to the new and previous visitors. But with the right site search, the size of the pile won’t be a concern for visitors. They can easily find the exact topic they need, and get suggestions for other related content to continue their consumption.

Reducing your bounce rate

If the visitors can’t find the products (topics) they are looking for on your website visitors – they could leave and opt for a competitor’s site. You can prevent this by building  a flawless search experience. With this, your website can be the one visitors stop at, as they leave your competitor’s site for good.

Successful site search use cases

The embedded site search within your website will certainly enhance its usability. The visitors gain a more positive impression, they come more frequently, and you will strengthen your brand. Here we present typical industries that can largely benefit from an efficient site search:

Online Schools / Course creators

EdTech technology has taken its grip recently. In this pandemic era – many schools, universities and companies have moved their teaching and training curricula almost entirely online. Along with content presentation - online course creators can provide benefits by a whole site search option over video tutorials, wikis, and knowledge bases. Omnisearch can help with its tool that makes whole site content searchable. For the video lectures - our tool finds exact spots in the video (where a given keyword appears), so the students can quickly navigate to the exact sequence. Students and attendees can highly benefit if they have the possibility to perform keyword-based content searches.

Media Websites

The media websites are thriving today – from video news, to how-to tutorials – their content is ever-growing and changing. The visitors and video watchers can lose their path in a content-rich environment. Site search can help them to find the sub-topic they need, and also to recommend similar relevant topics. Thus – they will remain regular visitors of the website.

E-commerce portals

Online buyers usually know what they want to buy, but sometimes have problems locating the desired product in the entire website. You don’t want them to get lost and navigate to another portal, due to the search issues. Therefore, it is really important (especially in busy shopping seasons), to provide your visitors a smooth online shopping experience. By enabling them to search, find, and buy with ease, you will get increased revenues.

What does Omnisearch offer more than competition?

In this article we presented the importance of the site search for your success and growth. At Omnisearch, we offer a simple and effective SaaS product for complete site search of all types of content – audio, video and text (including PDFs).The current focus of the Omnisearch tools are educational and media portals. For video lectures - our tool finds exact spots in the video (where a given keyword appears), so the students can quickly navigate to the desired sequence. We transcribe the lessons automatically so there’s no hassle for course creators. Transcript downloads can also be enabled.

In addition to this, the Omnisearch tool performs site search analysis that can uncover the visitors search habits on your website. The habits include which keywords and phrases have been searched for, so you can rearrange the lectures properly.

For the media portals – our tool stores the transcriptions into a database, allowing the visitors to utilize this database to easily navigate and search the entire media library, and retrieve any topics they need with ease.

To give you another taste of our technology, check out our demo project, a podcast search engine that performs transcription of audio to text, and makes it searchable.

Omnisearch tools require very little effort from your developers, and our support team is there to help with all site search issues. Here you can check out Omnisearch in action, performing the whole site search over text, PDFs, audio and video content. To kick-off the implementation of your own site search, you can start by contacting us for a quick demo.