“What really sold us were the Search UI Kits and JavaScript packages that made it so easy to plug Site Search into our website. We were able to go live in less than 2 months from the date of signing the contract.”
Josh Isaak
Associate Vice President of Web Development and Content Strategies
Grand Valley State University (GVSU) is a public university located in Allendale, Michigan with an undergraduate enrollment of just over 17,000 students. In addition, GVSU ranks #1 in the nation for retaining graduates in the State of Michigan and generates more than 6 graduates for every $100,000 spent in state appropriations.
GVSU’s website is critical for prospective and current students, faculty and staff — and receives more than 115,000 search requests per month. About 39% of their website visitors use the search feature on the website, which emphasizes the importance of search.
GVSU had been using Squiz Funnelback for the search function on their homegrown content management system. Because of the high cost of the Funnelback license and a lack of utilization of the product, the team started looking for alternatives when their contract was due for renewal this year.
After looking at some other alternatives that did not meet their needs, GVSU selected SearchStax Site Search.
Based on the team’s technical background as developers and with their previous experience with Solr, they were pleased to discover that Site Search underlying technology was based on Solr. GVSU also wanted a vendor who was focused on site search exclusively and did not want to migrate their website platform (which is loved by all internal teams) to a new digital experience platform (DXP).
Another plus for SearchStax was that the search results are contained on the GVSU website and not on a sub-domain that is outside of the university’s website.
Once it came time to implement SearchStax, the GVSU development team used the JavaScript packages and Search UI Kit to accelerate the implementation of site search on their website. From start to finish, the implementation took less than two months with SearchStax support and onboarding services contributing to a smooth implementation.
While GVSU is still adding more data sources (like courses and people) and implementing some additional Site Search features (additional facets), they have already noticed an improvement in their Click-Through Rates (CTR) on searches. The search CTR has increased from around 35% with their previous solution to over 52% in a short time which is due to improved search relevancy. To identify possible issues during the rollout, GVSU has added a Search Feedback form at the bottom of their search results and the team meets weekly to address and fix any issues raised.
Site Search is improving the agility of the Marketing team as they’re able to use the Promotions feature without involving developers to boost key content to the top of the search results for many of their popular search requests. With the promoted content at the top of the search results, users are able to more quickly find the content they’re seeking.
Since there are a lot of abbreviations are used in Higher Ed, GVSU is also leveraging the Synonyms feature to add abbreviations for all of their building names and other internally popular abbreviations, which is improving the relevancy of their search results.
Site Search
Custom
North America
Higher Education
Let’s talk about how you can drive better onsite search experiences and gain insights with SearchStax
Copyrights © SearchStax Inc.2014-2024. All Rights Reserved.
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.
close
SearchStax Managed Search service automates, manages and scales hosted Solr infrastructure in public or private clouds. Free up developers for value-added tasks and reduce costs with fewer incidents.
close
close