Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog
Dave Ingalls
Do you have a Site Search function on your Web site? If not, here’s what you’re missing!
In addition to publishing this Internet Marketing Course Blog and the accompanying Digital Marketing Tutorial, I oversee several technical products B2B Web sites for my company. Our main Web site highlights our major product line and a smaller “micro” Web site was created to highlight a companion product line.
I recently added Site Search to the main Web site and when I looked at what visitors were searching for on THAT site, I was completely floored!
Before we get into Site Search, let’s make sure you already have a Web analytics program on your Web site(s). I use Google Analytics – it’s free, it’s simple to install, it really works, and for the products we sell, our prospective Customers use Google almost exclusively as their general search engine. How do we know that? Our Google Analytics program shows us that over 50% of our total Web traffic comes to our main Web site from Google organic (natural) searches.
Specifically, you need BOTH an analytics program and a site search program to prove the value of Site Search to YOU.
Our Google Analytics program allows us to “drill down” into the data on visitor traffic, and when we took a detailed look at the keyword phrases Google searchers were using to get to the main site, we saw a number of iterations of our company name pulling in a lot of the traffic (mainly different spellings of the company name). Sounds reasonable.
After the first few days of having Site Search installed on the main Web site, we took a look at the keywords being used to search for information on that site. To my surprise, almost ALL of the site searches on the main site were for part numbers or phrases related to the products on the micro site! And even more unsettling, when I performed those same searches on the main site, the search returned no results! Yikes!