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Tag: site search

  • Google Site Search Being Phased Out

    Google Site Search Being Phased Out

    Google Site Search is being discontinued according to multiple reports. Google emailed its Site Search customers saying that starting April 1, 2017, new purchased and renewals of GSS will not be available. The product will completely shut down on April 1, 2018.

    They noted that this move will not have any impact on a customers current use of Google Site Search or until your license expires. Customers will continue to receive customer and technical support for the duration of their license.

    The rest of the email from Google’s Enterprise Search Team provides some additional insights:

    “Search has always been core to Google and we know its essential to the way your customers find content and interact with your website,” wrote the Google’s Enterprise Search Team. “While Google Cloud will no longer support GSS, we’re continuing to invest in other technologies that make enterprise search a great experience for our customers. Recently, we introduced the general availability of Google Cloud Search, which searches across G Suite content, providing useful and actionable information and recommendations.”

    “When your GSS subscription expires or your quota is exhausted, your subscription will automatically convert to Custom Search Engine (CSE),” noted Google. “Custom Search Engine is an ad-supported product that provides similar capabilities to GSS, including the ability to build custom search engines for sites or pages, image search for your website, and customize the look and feel of search results.”

    The Google Enterprise Search Team noted that there are difference between differences between GSS and CSE.

  • Google Makes It Easier For People To Search For Your Content

    Google announced that it’s now showing a new and improved sitelinks search box within search results, which will make it easier to find specific content on third-party websites from Google itself.

    The box is more prominent, and supports autocomplete. Here’s what it looks like for YouTube:

    You can mark up your own site so that Google has the ability to display a similar functionality for your content. Google explains:

    You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, you can let us know by marking up your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of theschema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details on our developer site.

    If you implement the markup on your site, users will have the ability to jump directly from the sitelinks search box to your site’s search results page. If we don’t find any markup, we’ll show them a Google search results page for the corresponding site: query, as we’ve done until now.

    More on the markup can be found on Google’s Developers site.

    Image via Google

  • Ecommerce Sites Aren’t Utilizing Site Search Data Like They Should Be

    Ecommerce Sites Aren’t Utilizing Site Search Data Like They Should Be

    SLI Systems has put out a report finding that most eCommerce sites are missing out on a big opportunity to use data from their internal site search tool to improve the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

    The firm surveyed 160 global eCommerce professional, and found that 57% don’t use site search reports and data to enhance their marketing. 50% of them aren’t even using site search data or analytics to enhance any of their business offerings or processes.

    Site Search

    Still, site search, according to the survey, is one of their top priorities for next year (along with eCommerce platform, SEO and mobile).

    “These findings demonstrate a significant missed opportunity for retail marketers in improving brand visibility, customer engagement and ultimately sales,” SLI says in the report.

    Only 25% of those that actually do utilize site search data in their marketing campaigns are integrating that data into email marketing to customize offers for customers.

    On why they’re not doing more with site search data, half of those surveyed blamed limited resources, while about 30% said they don’t know how to use the data effectively, and 10% said their site search solution doesn’t allow for integration with marketing programs.

    Some other interesting stats:

    • 27% have created search engine-optimized landing pages populated with site search results and custom banners.
    • 13% are taking advantage of site search to power mobile search
    • 11% are integrating site search with social media channels to improve amplification of marketing programs

    You can find the full report here.

    [via MarketingCharts]

    Image: SLI Systems

  • Google Upgrades Custom Search Element

    Google announced today that it has a new version of the Custom Search element, the HTML markup that lets you add rich search functionality to various pages of your site via Google Custom Search Engine.

    “The Custom Search element renders a search experience (search boxes and results pages) on your site’s pages,” explains Google software engineer Ying Huang. “By controlling the placement of the Custom Search element on your pages and configuring your CSE settings, you can create customized layouts that are tuned for the look-and-feel of your website.”

    The search user interface with the new version renders based on the settings stored on the Google Custom Search Engine servers, and users will no longer have to copy and paste new element code into their sites when they modify their CSE from the control panel.

    The new version is supposed to reduce page load times, which could have a small affect on your page’s actual rankings in Google. All element code is loaded asynchronously.

    “Client-side customization allows you to overwrite global CSE settings on a per-page basis,” says Huang of the new version. “For example, you can enable search history, disable auto search on page load, configure different Google Analytics parameters, and more. Customization is done through an easy-to-use HTML syntax which does not require any Javascript knowledge.”

    Google says it will continue to support older versions of the Custom Search element, for now.

  • Now, Google’s Search As You Type Is A Standalone Product

    Now, Google’s Search As You Type Is A Standalone Product

    Google announced that it is now offering the Search As You Type feature from Google Commerce Search as a standalone product. AdWords advertisers now have access to a free pilot.

    The feature uses Google’s search suggestions and instant product results for merchants’ site search features.

    “Great search is all about turning intentions into actions in the blink of an eye,” says Google Shopping Product Management Director Jennifer Dulski. “And in online retail, having a quick and user-friendly website can make a world of difference when it comes to engaging shoppers and driving sales.”

    “It’s easy to implement and helps increase sales and conversion rates on merchant websites,” says Dulski of the feature.

    Search As You Type

    The pilot is available to AdWords advertisers in the US, for free for up to 25 million searches a year. Beyond that, you have to pay.

  • Google Makes Site Search Analytics Easier

    Google is making it easier for site owners who use Google Custom Search to add Google Analytics Site Search tracking from their custom search engine.

    “Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it.  You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation.  In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging,” says Google software engineer Zhong Wang.

    “If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu,” explains Wang. “We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.”

    Site Search Analytics

    When changes are saved, Google generates a new code snippet that you can copy and paste into your site. Then, you can access Site Search reports from the content section in Google Analytics.

    In other Google Analytics news, sites in German got the go ahead to start using it, as Google announced in a German blog post. More on that here.

  • Test Site Search and Navigation Pages to Optimize Conversions

    If you’ve invested time and energy in effective, relevant, results-oriented site search and navigation, you’ve likely seen an impact on your web site – higher conversions, larger orders, more page views, less complaints and even lower abandonment rates for people who use the search box. Chances are that even if your site search is delivering good results, you can do more to optimize results pages to add even more to your bottom line and provide a better experience to your site visitors. And unless you’re testing properly, you’re probably just doing a lot of guesswork and crossing your fingers that things work out okay.

    The best way to determine how and if your site search and navigation can be improved is through A/B and multivariate testing – which allows you to measure the impact of changes to these pages. It can be difficult to know exactly what to test, how to set up the tests and how to interpret the results. However when done right it can be very rewarding because the benefits are measurable and clear. Warning: it’s a little addictive; once you start, you won’t want to stop.

    Following is a guide intended to help you determine some aspects of site search and navigation to test, and how best to go about it with as little time investment as possible.

    First off, there are some tools on the market that make A/B and multivariate testing of site search, navigation, promotions and page layouts fairly painless. The best place to start is with your site search provider. They might have a tool you can use, and you can also ask them if they offer a team of experts that will handle the tests for you.

    As far as what to test, the options are wide-ranging, and there are many factors you should consider.

    1. Number of Results per Page – What is the optimal number of results you should have on a page? If you have more, then it means your visitors don’t have to go through as many pages if they want to browse a large number of products, they just have to scroll. However a large number of products increases the page load time. Test different numbers of results to find out determine how many results appear on a page.

    2. Usability Features – Many sites now have enhanced features like video, social network sharing (e.g. “like”) buttons and user ratings and reviews. These are popular features and can be even more impactful when the content is included in search results. How you include them and even IF you should include them are questions that will be best answered through testing.

    3. Ajax Search – Some search providers offer Ajax technology, which speeds up delivery of search results pages, particularly as visitors click on refinement options, because it only resubmits any new information to be loaded to the web server. The difference can be fractions of a second, which any site owner knows can have an impact on the user experience. Whether Ajax makes a difference on your site is something worth discovering through testing.

    4. Merchandising Banners – It’s a good idea for retailers and other types of websites to usebanners on ‘no results’ pages to drive people towards popular items. Banners on site search pages (and elsewhere) are also good for highlighting special offers, like discounts on shipping, brands on sale or other items you want to promote. Where you show the banners, how big you make them and what content you include are all variables you should test.

    5. Refinement options – What refinement options you offer, how you present them (e.g. pull- down menu vs. clickable links), and what order you present them in is another worthy test. This is true for site search and navigation pages, where you need to display filtering or category options to help people more easily get to a select group of products. Another feature you can test is whether including a specific item “finder” – a box where people can input the brand, style and type of item they’re most interested in, like Cruiser Customizing’s Tire Finder – will also generate higher conversions.

    There are many more options you can test in search and navigation, but the areas outlined above are a good place to start and focus on the more critical features you should be looking at.

  • Site Search: Too Many Results and Not Enough

    I’ve been working with several clients recently in an area that gets very little love, yet is critical for your Web site: Your own site’s search function. We love to talk about Google and search engine optimization, but most of us spend almost no time optimizing our own site search. So few companies work on this capability that we are in danger of teaching visitors not to even bother using our site search. That’s bad, because their alternative is to go back to Google and find someone else’s site. One of the things that kills us over Web site search is that if we ask our customers what is wrong, they are likely to give us answers that don’t help us. We must dig deeper than that, because if you really expect to optimize your marketing results, you can’t ignore something this important.

    One of the things that searchers will tell you if you ask them about why they hate your Web site search is that there are “too many results.” You probably can guess that this isn’t the real problem, if for no other reason than Google provides millions of results for every search keyword and no one ever makes this complaint. I wrote a post a few years ago to explain what searchers mean when they say too many results.

    But a real problem that searchers never bring to your attention is not enough results. If you’ve spent no time optimizing your site search, try this little test. Go through your top one hundred searches and see what your search engine returns. You might be surprised at the results. In many cases, you won’t see anything that seems like the right answer. That could mean that your search engine has a problem, but just as frequently, it is your content that is either missing from the site completely or so bollixed up that no search engine could ever find it for that keyword.

    I wish that fixing these problems were as easy as it is to find them, but it’s unfortunately rather complex, especially for larger sites. (That’s why these clients have hired me to help.) But in Chapter 18 of the second edition of Search Engine Marketing, Inc., Bill Hunt and I walk you through how to diagnose what is wrong and what you can do to correct it.

    There are three major steps in the process:

    1. Determine the value of correcting the problem. You first must assess your situation and convince yourself that there is something wrong, that it’s important to fix it, and that you are willing to spend the time and money to fix it because of the return you’ll get on that investment.
    2. Optimize your most popular search keywords. When I asked you to check the results of your most popular keywords above, admit it: you didn’t even know how to find them. Don’t be too upset with yourself—most people don’t. So figure that out and then set out to create and optimize the right content for each keyword. Work your way as far down the list as you think makes sense, based on the level of effort and the return you expect. It might be the top 100 or the top 1000, but at some point you reach diminishing returns.
    3. Tweak your technology and process to improve the remaining keywords. When I managed site search at IBM, we found that the top 1000 keywords accounted for only 27 percent of all search volume. Clearly we needed to do something less manual for the rest of the keywords. The approach for your “long tail” keywords has to be about technology and process. You must focus on tweaking your search engine, your content management system, your e-Commerce system and other technology so that it does a better job. And you must address your content creation and update processes so that the content is search optimized from day one.

    Again, this isn’t simple, but it is critically important for most businesses. Some companies have increased their conversion rates by 25% just by addressing the simplest measures in Web site search optimization. Or you can keep doing what you are doing, which is subtly requesting that customers go away.

    Originally published at Biznology

  • Adobe Launches Site Search Tool to Keep Visitors from Leaving Your Site

    Adobe has introduced a new tool for site search powered by Omniture, aimed at helping marketers anticipate visitor search intent and promote relevant products and content. It’s called Search&Promote. The real goal of the tool is to cut down bounce rates. 

    "Since search is the primary form of navigation on many websites, it is often the first step a potential customer takes toward meeting his or her online goals – especially on mobile-optimized websites," says Adobe. "When visitors cannot easily find what they are looking for early into their website visit, they may leave to search elsewhere for what they need. As a result, key metrics such as online engagement, conversion, average order value (AOV) and visitor retention can be negatively impacted."

    "Every onsite search query is an opportunity," explains Brad Rencher, VP and general manager of Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit. "Each search is a customer telling you what they want, what they are interested in, or what they want to purchase or download. With Adobe Search&Promote, our customers can use search and navigation as a way to dynamically deliver the right content, products and offers to the right visitors. Each search becomes an opportunity to optimize how visitors browse, find, compare and select relevant products and content across screens and devices – driving visitors to convert at a higher rate and leave much more satisfied."

    Adob Search&Promote

    Search&Promote integrates with other products from Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite, such as Test&Target, Recommendations, and Scene7. With Test&Target, Search&Promote users can test search experiences, marketing, or results pages against each other. Recommendations can be integrated into search results, and Scene 7 lets users enhance search results visually. 

    Around this time last year, Google launched Commerce Search, also aimed at improving bounce rates for product search on sites. "Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too," the company said. "Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers."

    For more helpful information on dealing with bounce rates, watch our interivew with Avinash Kaushik and Brett Crosby from Google from search engine strategies a couple years ago. 

    Adobe offers a lot more information about Search&Promote here, with a product overview, success story, white paper, etc.