What is a successful site search project
If you believe that everything is fine just because the new search engine has been launched, you are probably making a mistake. You now have the opportunity to start optimizing your content and its metadata, based on how your users are searching.
A successful site search project is according to us:
- …a sound structure and strategy for content and the metadata (Chapter 3)
- …a search-relevant algorithm which reflects structure and content
- …an editor organization that is competent in producing and optimizing content, metadata and the search result list based on user scrutiny
A successful site search project is all about establishing a structure and a process that will steadily and continuously improve the search performance. It will not be perfect after launch as many hope. But it will get better if these structures and processes are implemented. Otherwise it will get worse as user demand and content change over time.
What makes the search statistic significant?
Search sequence shows user intention in self-formulated, plain language
By analyzing site search statistics you are actually listening to the voice of your visitors. You can actually hear them talk about things they might find hard to find on your site and intranet. And this is very precious for optimizing your content. That is why it is very efficient for those that want to improve their content and site search to start analyzing search statistic.
It is easy to collect statistics, the true challenge is to make them actionable. There are two major obstacles for site search statistics being used effectively in many organizations:
The way it is presented doesn’t make it clear what actions are necessary
It is not possible to really act even when it is obvious what is not working
Simple, yet powerful workflow with Visitors Voice
This is our rationale in developing Visitors Voice, the market’s most advanced service for the analysis of search behavior. With Visitors Voice comes a simple, yet very efficient work flow.
- Schedule reports for editors responsible for different page categories of your website or intranet.
- Enable one click login for the editors to minimize the treshholds
- The editors can then based on real data customize the search result list or add content that is missing
The editors might have to create new content, change titles, text, metadata or just reorder the hits to make sure the content is easy to find.
This simple work flow has proven to be very efficient for public organizations like Uddevalla Municipality with more than 15 editors and 9 000 pages and for private corporations like Almi Företagspartner with only 1 editor responsible for less than 2 000 pages.