March 03, 2021
Tom Humbarger
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Are you or your customers satisfied with the site search experience on your website? Can your customers quickly and easily find the information they are seeking? More importantly, are they finding the information you want them to find?
What if you could curate the site search experience on your website and present visitors with the information you want them to see? With SearchStax Site Search, the power to shape the search experience is now available to everyone.
Editor’s Note: Site Search is now SearchStax Site Search. It is the same great product that empowers marketers and developers with website search that is easy.
As a marketing professional, the Site Search feature that I am most excited about using is Promotions — and it’s the one feature that I will be using on a regular basis. I am currently using the feature to set up new promotions and modify existing promotions allowing me to continuously improve the search experience on SearchStax.com.
In this blog post, I’ll show examples of what search results look like before and after setting up a promotion, and how we are using the Promotions feature to curate the site search experience on the SearchStax website. There is a short video below that demonstrates how easy it is to use this feature.
Let’s look at how we’re using the Site Search Promotions functionality on the SearchStax website.
Our Managed Solr and Site Search solutions have a strong relationship with Sitecore, one of the leading content management solutions in the market. If you do a search for “Sitecore” on our website today, you will receive 113 results broken into these content types: 50 references to our product documentation, 43 blog posts, 9 case studies, 8 webpages and 2 videos.
To view all of this content, someone would have to scroll through 13 pages of results.
When you look at the search results below, 7 out of the top 9 results returned relate to our product documentation. While this may be the most relevant information for some users, this is not the order I would present the information as a marketer.
There are several options for users to make their search more efficient. A visitor could use the search page facets to filter the content or they could use the Relevance or Most Recent options to change the sort order of the information. When selecting the most relevant content, the results that tilted towards content with lots of references to Sitecore like our product documentation page. If a user selects the most recent content, they will mostly see blog posts.
Our preferred user experience for the SearchStax.com website is to offer up a cross section of content that answers most of a user’s key questions by providing links to the main product pages, recent blog posts, pricing, the latest case studies and product documentation for the newest release.
Using the Promotions feature, we can easily curate the site search experience by promoting specific content to the top of the search results page for whatever search term we choose. This ensures that website visitors are seeing the content that is most relevant for them and keeps them from having to view pages and pages of search results.
The first page of our search results for Sitecore now display the content we identified as promoted items. There is a star in the upper right corner of the results card to identify the content as promoted.
Site Search was designed to give business users and marketers like me the power to configure, analyze and manage site search on websites. Once Site Search is set up on a website, marketers are in control of their destiny and can update search parameters without coding or developer support.
Marketers can create multiple Promotions on their own with our easy-to-use interface which means there is no behind the scenes coding or need to use scarce developer resources to configure search on the backend. We currently have more than 20 Promotions set up on our website that cover the most frequently searched phrases.
Watch this short Site Search in 60 Seconds video to see how easy it is to set up and use promotions to improve the site search experience.
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SearchStax Site Search solution is engineered to give marketers the agility they need to optimize site search outcomes. Get full visibility into search analytics and make real-time changes with one click.
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