5 Ways to Improve Search on Your Site

by Levy Cohen

Let's admit that site search is important and is sometimes uncomfortable to discuss: "I should get to it. I should get our tech team to help me. I should find some experts. I should get a database. I should find the right software or service."

Whether you've already spent a lot of money on site search or are just getting started, I believe there are more technology improvements and advertising opportunities on the horizon. Consider these top five areas and rest assured that your visitors will start taking advantage of what you really have to offer-- across your whole site.

Area 1: No more taxonomy work
You spend all this time and energy creating a constant stream of new content for your site. The misperception is that you need to keep working on your old content -- categorizing, defining, storing, tagging -- if there's any hope for it to be resurfaced and occasionally accessed in the future. Consider whether all the work in this area will really pay off.

There's no way to design your site to accommodate the infinite number of motivations driving the sea of searchers on your site. This is no reflection on your site, subject or service expertise. If your goal is to improve site search, stop working here.

Area 2: Help from your users
Next, determine how you will leverage feedback from your site visitors to improve your site search. Take advantage of what your visitors have searched for in the past. Even sites that don't have passionate repeat visitors can benefit and create improved results from paying attention to this data.

Start by influencing what will get searched on your site. Display the most popularly searched terms, which is feasible to do even in real-time. You can also display the related keywords surrounding specific content, to encourage additional searching and browsing activity for the benefit of your users.

Although all the keywords that visitors used to find your site (or search while there) are important clues, don't get bogged down. Do you notice any patterns, like searches that are newsworthy, seasonal or evergreen? Do searches match your site content in general? Do you see "clusters" of interest areas forming on your site?

Area 3: Help for your users
Site search is now much more than finding pages that contain a certain set of keywords. New technology allows you to better infer user intent and generate a better response. This ranges from customized behavioral modeling to simple hosted services that display community-based interests while searching.

Site search isn't a one-size-fits-all proposition anymore. You've probably seen collaborative filtering recommendations when searching on shopping sites; "Users that bought XYZ, also bought ABC." Site search results can now differ based on a user's prior search history or extrapolated behavior predictions based on community affiliation.

In other words, results from your site search would differ by person, based on their behavior and interests. For example, a "digital camera" searcher may see "underwater camera" search results peppered in if they have browsed scuba subjects in the past. Another person might be aligned with a "travel" community and receive more suggestions for cameras that easily fit in your pocket.

Area 4: One-to-one targeting possibilities
The main goal of any successful search should be to deliver the best page recommendations for each visitor based on their specific preferences and interests. Targeting content or ads based on some sort of generalized site demographic will never be as effective. Since your audience is dynamic and changing, your site search should be too.

As a publisher, you become aware of the shifting "hot topics" that ebb and flow on your site. This seems like an ideal situation, as site search provides dynamic results that can attract more targeted advertising opportunities.

Area 5: Combine targeted content and advertising-- a win/win
Improved site search creates a great advertising opportunity for you. When you understand your audience better, you can generate better content recommendations, and serve more useful advertising. What you need is a way to start targeting your ads based on the granular interests of your audience. Show "underwater cameras" to the appropriate users (scuba divers) and you are on a win/win path; both the user and you benefit from the ad.

You may think systems like this are too complicated or too expensive, or you may think that you don't have enough traffic to warrant the investment. Just like many other technologies, there are now simple, affordable, hosted solutions delivering these capabilities that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a few years ago.

What's the saying? If you provide community-based results, "they" will come.

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© Feb 07 2007 iMediaConnection.com Levy Cohen is CEO of Collarity, Inc.