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10.02.08 Making Your Own Site Search Better  By
Stoney deGeyter Back in August of this year, while at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose, I sat in a session where one of the speakers talked about site search. He said something that I fundamentally disagree with but it got me thinking about why you should or should not implement a search feature on your own site. I believe that implementing site search is smart for large sites, but only if you can be sure it works nearly perfectly. On the other hand, the speaker in this session (and I completely forget who it is) said that, for analytical purposes, every site should implement site search, even if it doesn't do a good job. This is what I fundamentally disagree with. I'll agree that there is a wealth of information you can get from analyzing your site search usage, but I don't think it's wise to trade usability for data. Data is wonderful--and necessary--to help improve site usability, but data has to be more than just data, it has to be used to improve what's wrong with your site, not just get information. According to this presenter, site search provides good keyword data, and it does. But if your site search blows you're doing yourself more harm than good, unless you're using your site search data specifically to help you improve your site search function.
When do you need site search and when should you forget about it? The problem with site search on a lot of sites is that they often don't really work all that well. They'll produce good results for some searches but not for others. I've been on a number of sites testing their search only to find that there are "no matches" for exact searches on products they clearly sell. This is a problem. When site search is available on large sites, people tend to use them. That's good. But if they search for something you have but the search doesn't find it, they'll assume you don't carry it. What do they do from there? They'll move on to the next site. That's bad. If a site search can't produce the correct results, you're better off just removing it so your visitors will find it the old fashioned way--through navigation. At least this way you know they'll find what they want. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a search engine optimization / marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance (www.eMarketingPerformance.com) marketing blog. |
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