The real value of site search

December 17, 2018January 12, 2020

The actual value of an in site search can be hard to see and is often over looked. But it’s there, usually in crucial way.

Among the benefits found by large coorperations are:

In site Searchers are 87% more likely to respond to marketing goals than non-searchers
Site Searchers are 43% more likely to buy more (up to 600%) — then non-searchers
Effective site search retains visitors which increases SEO & SEM Yields

Site Searchers 87% more likely to achieve seo goals

We were recently looking at one of our client’s Google Analytics dashboards. One of the reports reported the marketing goal achievement of searchers vs non-searchers. While we’ve known for a long time the positive impact that site search has on transactional and commerce experiences (see next section) we were encouraged to see the data that showed that marketing goal achievement was 87% higher for searchers than for non-searchers. That’s almost double!

Now you can only get to these levels of performance if your search is really good. It has to do what we expect of most search engines do: Answer our questions accurately. This client has made the investment in understanding the sources of search failure and fixing many of those. Their search success rate is 44% and going higher. This is the type of experience that your visitors expect.

Site Searchers 43% more likely to buy

Higher conversion rates from site searchers is a well documented phenomenon. It’s intuitive that this is so. The person who is searching knows what they want and thinks you have that thing. All you have to do is point them to the thing that they want. Some studies of highly transactional businesses have indicated that searchers are up to six times more likely to buy.

Again, the table stakes for getting this value is to make sure that your search engine experience delivers highly relevant answers that allow the buyer to move forward with their journey.

Get them. Keep them. Grow.

Great search improves marketing goal achievement, improves commerce conversions and improves the yield on your SEO and SEM spend. What could be more valuable than that? Invest in better search. Site search is your hidden growth engine. What’s in your budget?