Does your website have a search engine?
If it doesn't:
- How many products or services do you advertise on your website? Are you sure visitors can find them all?
- How many links are there on your homepage? Academic research indicates that the more there is to do on your website, the more inclined visitors will be to search for information rather than clicking on links to try and find it.
If you do have a search function on your website, do you know how well it is working? Can your visitors find what they are looking for with it? Or are they giving up half-way through searches for your information without finding it?
Also - does your search engine simply show visitors the one or two specific things they are looking for? Or does it help you sell more or keep people on your site by flagging-up related information?
Search is important, but hard to get right.
Search is a complicated topic and setting up a search engine never used to be easy. Aspects of search such as presenting the most relevant topic first and searching across a large index quickly have taxed the finest minds in computing for the last thirty years at least.
There's also a reasonable amount of work involved in maintaining a search engine. This work often gets overlooked - which is strange; website owners often put a lot of effort into getting their pictures and copy correct, but the search engine then gets 'bolted on' almost as an afterthought.
When most research indicates that as many people search as browse for information, why is this? Your search engine could improve your traffic and sales if you made it better...
What can be achieved with good site search?
With a sophisticated modern search engine based on the latest technology:
- Visitors can be shown the most relevant information from your site, quickly, which means they can find the content you have laboured long and hard to put online.
- You can analyse what visitors are searching for and ensure that their queries map onto your site's best content.
- You can suggest related content to visitors who search for certain topics. This could keep them at your site for longer and make them buy more.
- You could group results from various parts of your site together to make it easier to find. For example, visitors could search "within products" or "within the FAQs".
- You could even suggest the terms which will return the best content while visitors are typing in their queries.
All the above substantially increase the chances of users finding the information that's already there on your site.
Good search is now within your reach.
In the last couple of years, all of the major web search companies (such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo) have released products that can be used to set up a powerful, quick and relevant search for your website or sites easily and cheaply.
Trovo have developed a range of Website Search services based on these search products, and we have several years experience configuring and customising them to customers specific needs, and helping maintain them.
This means we can help you:
- Sell to more visitors.
- Increase the average basket value for a visitor.
- Reduce calls made to customer support.
- Provide a better experience for site visitors.
- Help your organisation make a more favourable impression.
Let us help improve your site search engine.
If you already have a search engine on your website that you want to improve upon, the Trovo Website Search service starts with us analysing how well it is performing and the types of searches visitors make with it. We need to know this information to be sure that the work we do is improving your website search.
Once we know what improvements are possible we can:
- Set up a search engine based on technology from one of the main Internet Search companies (Google or Microsoft).
- Configure the search engine to work best with the content and structure of your site.
- Fully-integrate it with the design of your website so it looks like your search engine, not Google's.
- Add extra features to suggest terms for visitors to search with and related searches for them to make.
- Roll the search engine out across multiple websites if necessary.
- Support searches in more than one language if required.
- Create a plan for maintaining your search engine and ensuring it picks up new content quickly and easily.
With our help, you could increase the sales on your website, and improve your site visitors' experience. And, depending upon the complexity of your site, this could cost you as little as £500.
If you would like to discuss how a better website search could improve your bottom line in more detail, please call us on 0116 232 5147. Or contact us to let us know a convenient time and we will call you.