With so many of your visitors expecting a site search, it is important to have this functionality and to ensure the quality of your search results is as high as it can be. A good search will significantly increase the effectiveness of your site.

Implementing Site Search

A lot of effort goes into building an effective site search. There are many options and many tools at your disposal. For an excellent overview see the SearchTools site. Fortunately, a lot of the work you do to make your site easy to index for the major search engines will also make it easier for you to build your own site search. One way to make this process a lot easier is to outsource the entire process to someone like S.L.I. Systems.

Not only is search an important means of helping your visitors, it is also a source of extremely valuable information. Your visitors are telling you something when they search.

Search Logs Contain Practical, Valuable Information

You can collect a lot of valuable information by looking at the queries that people type into your search box. The search box is like a survey form. Every time someone types something into that box they are saying, "This is what I expect to find on your site". This useful information is often ignored.

Source of Keywords

For starters, by looking at the queries your visitors are using you begin to build an understanding of the language your customers use. You'll find that the search terms used are as varied as the individuals who visit your sites. For example, one of our customers sells a writable DVD drive. Here are some of the search terms that are used to find this product:

• drx500ul
• 32644
• drx
• drx 500ul
• 500ul
• sony drx500ul
• sony dvd burner
• drx-500
• sony dvd
• drx500
• drx-500ul
• sony drx500ul dvd rw -rw
• sony drx
• and many more

You'll notice the model numbers may contain spaces, hyphens, be closed up or they may be just a partial number. Some of our customers have hundreds of thousands of unique search terms every month.

This list of search terms is a great source of keywords for your search engine optimization efforts. If your visitors are using these search terms on your site they will be using similar search terms on the Internet search engines and you should try to make sure your pages rank well for those terms.

Look at the Clicks Too

Don't just look at the search terms. Look also at the search results people are clicking on and identify which are the most popular. This information can be used to improve your navigation. If a page is a popular search result you should make it easy to navigate to.

Searches with Poor Results

By analyzing clicks on search results you can identify the search terms that your site has poor results for. If a search term receives a lot of queries which are not followed by clicks on results then it has poor results. The list of poor search results is extremely valuable. It shows you where your site is not meeting your visitors' expectations.

You may have relevant content for some of these search terms. In that case, all you need to do is include the search terms that people are using on the relevant pages. Those pages should come up in the search results.

Marketing Information

The search terms with poor results are also an excellent source of marketing information. These terms may indicate products that you should consider stocking. Or they may indicate content that you should include on your site. For example you may see people searching for your "returns policy". This indicates you should put your returns policy on your site.

Improving Search Quality

There are a number of ways to measure the overall relevance of your search results by analyzing your search logs. If you measure and track these metrics you can see the effect of any changes you make to your search. An example of one of the metrics we use at S.L.I. Systems is the Average Rank, which measures how far on average people go down the search results. If your search results are good then the top results will satisfy most of the queries and the Average Rank will be low.

The first site to use our search technology, Snap.com saw their Average Rank improve from 12 to 4 over two years.

How Do I Analyze my Search Logs?

Most good search software comes with some limited reporting that will at least give you a report on the top search queries and top search results. So you should begin by finding out what you already have.

For more comprehensive reports you could analyze your search logs yourself. You will probably need to change your search logging to log all the necessary information. Or you can subscribe to a service such as S.L.I. Systems' Learning Search. This service includes a hosted site search that learns from user behavior and continuously improves the relevance of the search results. You also receive daily reports containing your key search statistics and you have access to expert search analysts. Ask about the month's free trial that lets you see the benefits before you make any commitment.

In any case be aware of the valuable information that is contained in your search logs. It can help you improve your business.