As a website developer, I am regularly talking with B2B clients about the various bells and whistles available for their websites. One particular whistle, adding a search function, can be a very powerful tool for a website, but it often gets left on the cutting room floor when budgets are tight.
I do my best to explain the benefits of site search to clients, but in the heat of the moment, I inevitably forget to mention a few key selling points. Here’s a more thorough explanation with examples that should help you see that having a site search is really a no brainer.
The 6 Reasons Why Your Website Needs a Search Function
- Without a search function, some people might just leave – Countless usability studies have found that more than half of all website visitors are “search dominant”, so you run the risk of losing visitors right away if they can’t search.
- People are lazy – Search engines have taught us to search. If visitors see a search box on your site, most will go straight to it rather than having to use their brain and traverse your navigation bar.
- People are in a hurry – As more and more websites offer site search, we have learned that doing a search is typically the quickest way to find your desired content.
- Site search shows you (the website owner) customer intent – Most analytics packages are great at tracking and reporting on user behavior, conversion rates and such, but they really only tell you what the visitor did, not necessarily what they wanted to do. Giving users a search mechanism provides you with that insight of what a user actually wants “in their words”.
- A wealth of information for future marketing strategy – Integrating your site search with your analytics package then gives you all kinds of powerful information that you can use to improve your business and online marketing efforts. For instance…When they searched, did they find what they were looking for? What happened after that? Were they looking for something that you aren’t offering, but you should be?
- Integrating a search application is dirt cheap – When you consider the wealth of information that you will glean from your new search data, the cost to set up your search app and/or your service fee (hosted apps) is a drop in the bucket.
Solid, Inexpensive Site Search Options
When a client is ready to integrate a search function, we have to make sure we pick the right tool. There are many great search applications at various price points and feature sets, but like anything, you get what you pay for. So here are some that I’ve implemented successfully and are priced right for small to medium-sized B2B websites.
- Google.com/SiteSearch – Leverage Google’s industry-leading search technology on your website. After a simple four-step setup process, you’ll have on demand indexing, input synonym options, international languages supported and customizable search box and results. Cost: Pricing based on search queries and website URLs
- Up to 1,000 pages – $100/annually
- 1,001 – 5,000 pages – $250
- 5,001 – 25,000 pages – $750
- 25,001 – 100,000 pages – $2,000
- 100,000 + pages – contact sales
- Lijit.com – Lijit search is a very unique engine designed to search not only your site’s content, but also content that you publish across the blogosphere and social web. Connect your Lijit search engine to your website, blog, social networking profiles, social bookmarking sites and your photo and video sharing sites. Lijit’s search results page then displays everything related to a search term, from your Flickr photos and YouTube videos to blog posts and tweets. Cost: FREE trial edition
- Bravenet.com – More than just a search tool, Bravenet.com offers a plethora of tools designed to give your website visitors a better experience with add-ons like discussion forums, blogs, photo galleries, guest books, e-mail forms, hit counters and web polls. The search tool can be integrated within your site’s design and tracks your customer’s search keywords. Cost: FREE with registration
- Zoom Search (Wrensoft.com)- Downloadable software that integrates well with Dreamweaver. Easily integrates within your site design and fully customizable with search results sorted by relevance or date, wildcard searching, exact phrase matching, highlighting, spelling suggestions, synonyms, graphical statistic reports, international language support, incremental indexing, images and thumbnails, content filtering, and others. Cost: FREE for small sites (up to 50 pages)
- Standard – $49
- Professional – $99
- Enterprise – $299
- FusionBot.com – FusionBot is a hosted search application that can be setup within minutes. Five packages are available and most include analytics in graphic report formats for automated feedback mechanism, capturing valuable market intelligence into what visitors are looking for and what they can and cannot find. Cost: FREE (ad supported) and Variable paid packages
- FreeFind.com – Enter your URL and email and codes get sent to you. Has no fixed page limit, with daily re-indexing, complete customization, on-page results, reports track visitors’ searches and simple or Boolean searching. Cost: FREE (ad supported) and Paid professional edition
No Brainer
In the grand scheme of a website, a site search application is an inexpensive, powerful little tool that can really improve site usability and overall sales. If your website doesn’t currently have site search, we’d love to help you make it happen. Visit our contact us page to get our digits or complete our contact form.
Brody, this is a great post and often bloggers overlook the importance of search. I agree with you, especially around the intent behind a readers search query. This helps with marketing strategy and understanding readers better which are two key points for any publisher.
Thanks for including Lijit in the mix of web search tools! You forgot to mention that as part of our services, we also provide stats that uncover reader intent around search behavior, traffic, exposure, etc. often revealing information specific to your site and search that many searches don’t offer. In addition, we are ad supported as well through a revenue share with targeted ads in your search results and we have an advertising network.
Thanks again for the shout out and writing the interesting post. Very valuable for readers and bloggers, alike!
Nice post… I think the huge selling point to clients is the analytics that can be captured from an integrated site search tool. Not only can you find out what products your customers want, but you can also use these search terms in your Search Engine Marketing campaigns as well.
There is something to be said for having a custom site search built for your clients web site that can do things like “smart search” which after some text is typed into the search form, the application drops down the page recommendations(like google does). But since you control the engine, you can give priority to the pages that you want to drive your customers to.
I am working on a Flash tool like that right now.
rascalpants
aka Casey Hill
http://www.rascalpants.com
I’m not sure if “they will leave” should be number one reason in your list, but the user certainly will if they can’t find what they are looking for. Search fills in where your site navigation fails. Visitors don’t want to search, they prefer to easily navigate.
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
[...] through the stories on the Internet marketing news and discussion forum Sphinn, I came across an article from Brody Dorland, who gives the following six reasons for why your site needs a search [...]