How Site Search Can Make or Break Your Web Redesign

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

Welcome to how site search can make or break your web. Redesign.

Many of you here are from Higher Ed, but we also have a good cross section of other industries represented as well, including healthcare manufacturing and some others.

So this topic really is geared towards the project. Not necessarily the industry We will be sending the presentation and recording to everyone afterwards.

and we’ll leave some time at the end for questions. So just drop those in the Qa. But we won’t get to those till the end. So quick introductions.

Let’s start with Elliot.

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

00:43

Alright. Thanks, Jeff. I’m Elliot Mower. I’m managing director of Media Current. I like to call myself a product guy, but I’ve spent the last 10 years in various strategy and design capacities at different digital agencies.

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

01:00

And my name is JF Boisvert. I am the director of product design at SearchStax, and I’ve been in the industry for about 20 years. So my specialty has been in search, and for the last 5, 10 years. So let’s just get going, Jeff.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

01:19

Alright.

I’m really excited. We have Mediacurrent here with us. Actually, I’ll introduce myself. I’m a digital strategist here at SearchStax. I have a background in Higher Ed. I was senior web director to large public institutions for a total of 21 years where I led more than a few web redesigns, and I left Higher Ed a few years ago to create a crowdsource technology platform for Higher Ed. And that’s when I discovered SearchStax, which is a search experience company focused on helping organizations, deliver exceptional site search experiences for really content rich websites and enabling marketers to develop fast, relevant, engaging search experiences. And, Elliott, you want to do a shout out for Mediacurrent.

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

02:04

Yeah, so we are a full service digital product agency. We create, maintain and optimize web products. And we are very proud to be SearchStax, partner. We work across a variety of industries, a lot of which we’re going to be talking about today.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

02:20

Yeah, we have some mutual clients in Higher Ed and other industries.

And just to start this off, you know, site redesigns are often these huge projects that organizations every few years, you know, have to take these on. They need to update these outdated experiences between redesign cycles, especially with the rapid advancement of technology in this day and age. So, we’re going to dive into the redesign process as well as share some strategies to really set you up to be more successful.

Elliot, can you kick us off and tell us from what challenges you see from the agency’s perspective? When an organization university has to take on these projects

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

03:03

Sure there are 2 that I think about all the time. The 1st one is really stakeholder management. We often see in a lot of these projects way too many stakeholders there are, as they say, too many cooks in the kitchen, and that makes it really difficult for agency partners to understand when decisions are made, but it also makes it difficult for organizations that are sponsors of these redesigns to kind of get all their stakeholders pointed in the right direction.

I think the second thing that we see is just not using data to guide decisions. A lot of things are still based on gut instinct when they have many clients, have access to a ton of data that they could be using to make smart decisions to improve their experiences.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

03:48

And I’m gonna talk about these last 2. The meeting diverse audience needs managing, complex content. We’ve I’ve been talking to Elliot and these kind of ring true across all industries, and you know, with diverse audience needs, if you look at you know, just Higher Ed, to start with. Now, this can apply across different industries.

We really start with so many personas we’re trying to satisfy. So, think about students. There are all the all these types of students that we haven’t even

put on this slide. Parents, alumni donors, faculty administrators. If you’re in healthcare, it might be doctors, nurses, insurance providers, administrators, government and manufacturing that know they’ll have their own set. But really the key commonality is that we all have this diverse set of stakeholders. So the more complex industry, the more we kind of need to address these issues. Then there’s digital governance. And we have to layer that on top of

of these personas. We’re all dealing with compliance issues. We have content management systems that are really creating thousands of pages that are that are tough to manage, keeping people trained up to date. Even healthcare has, you know, patient records and billing and medical research. And it’s just so many things that have to be governed within Higher Ed, specifically, there’s a lot of different types of content.

And you know, they’re in different places. So, whether it’s even just web pages could be your public web pages, but you might have faculty web pages that are governed differently. We have silos of cap, course, catalogs over here. We have event management systems over here again; other industries have their own silos. Manufacturing might have product catalogs or performance data or safety protocols or things like that. But then it gets even more complicated because we have subdomains. So we have these technical, really silos of of data. So each college at a large University might have its own subdomain, you know, name dot school named libraries, athletics, you know the auxiliaries. They’re often split up technically on the back end, which makes it even more challenging. And again, other industries have their own silos.

I like to use highlight as an example, because it’s probably close to one of the most complex out there. But then, what we do is we layer navigation on top of all that and we expect that to work well, and we try really hard to make that work. And often it’s just such a challenge. And so

what we’re here to talk to you today is how search can really be that kind of that, that superpower. So, Elliot, does this ring true with the different types of organizations that you work with.

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

06:41

Definitely does. And one thing that we see regardless of industry type is, as you were talking about navigation, that so many organizations

organize their site navigation, the way that they’re organized. So, they’re expecting users to come to these websites and understand the differences between the program departments, or what’s the difference between alumni and community. Sometimes in universities. They’re the same kind of group and really expect that you’re going to walk into this space and understand how to orient yourself to the system, because the system is designed.

As that organization is designed. So we really try to encourage our clients to think along that 1st line of personas rather than thinking from the perspective of themselves as the end audience

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

07:31

Yeah, that’s a great point. We gotta put ourselves in their shoes.

So, there are these essential activities we have to undertake. And there’s dozens, if not hundreds, of activities. I just pulled out a few that I’m very familiar with that are used quite often, but no matter how well, you conduct these user experience activities in your redesign. People often struggle when a new site is launched. And I want to ask Jf, at this point. What activities do you find helpful and efficient when we’re you’re doing a redesign?

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

08:02

So definitely, right? So, in order to be able to manage this like. Cacophony of difference. You know, people that think differently and culturally. And all of that, you’ve got to separate the people and then say, okay, now, we’re going to talk to real users, or who are going to be using your site right?

And we’re going to ask them the questions so that we could actually get this information from them, not from the stakeholders.

And so, the 1st thing that you would do is you would set up your usability interviews, and then you would go into activities such as card sorting. You could do some focus groups also, just to like, bring the information together. And then you’re communicating this information with your stakeholders as you go, because, you know, then they get informed into the process of getting this information right?

And then at the end, this is going to give you some kind of a summary or information architecture as to how this content should be organized on your website. And last, but not least, if you do have site analytics and search trends. This will inform your decision, making as well where you’re going to be able to make better and lighted decisions. On what type of a navigation and what type of information architecture you would like to build for your site

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

09:32

Right. And Elliot, what data do you think schools should be using to really nail that website redesign

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

09:40

We like to look. I mean, even if folks don’t have a a super, you know, customized analytics platform, or they’re just using free version of Google analytics. Looking at what pages users actually go to.

You know, we’re all focused on these redesign projects on the homepage, the homepage. But we’re seeing more often that

users are not always landing on the homepage. They’re landing 1, 2, 3 levels deep into a site. And so understanding how you’re going to pick up any user across that journey and get them to where they want to go, if they’re not always coming in through your front door. So we’re always looking at landing pages, time on site, you know, where people drop off in the experience and how we can improve those flows in a new site

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

10:27

So Forrester did some research and found that 43% of users go right to your search bar and this was across industries. This is what wasn’t higher, Ed, specific or anything. So I would even say that if you’re talking about academia, it’s even higher, because we have we skew to a younger demographic. And this was a few years ago, too. So this is why we’re really recommending to really look at your search in these projects.

And another piece that supports this is that Gen. Z Is even more inclined to go to search. They’ve grown up with smartphones. Search on demand. And it’s going to be 27% of our workforce by the end of this year. 

So, this transformation is coming faster than a lot of people realize and search is one of the only places where users tell us exactly what they want. So, it’s this incredible 1st party data and search page results tend to have higher conversion rates because we know we know what people are looking for.

So, we want to go over some different ways to approach these different, these digital transformation projects. And I’m gonna tell you my little

kind of nightmarish story here about a web design I went through. And we all know they’re painful. We got many of you probably gone through these. It really is a project, and it can be a year or longer. Ours was longer than a year. But here’s it wasn’t a snapshot, and it was driven by a couple of things, you know. 1st there was a Complaint, an accessibility complaint, but we just had too much content.

It was incorrect, stale, content. We had about 12,000 pages. We had 800 Content publishers, and we hired an agency to help create the new site. 

We had a team of 30 campus stakeholders support from 2 Vice Presidents, and we’re doing. I think we were doing everything right. I was shocked how much support we had, but it wasn’t 1 of these. Let’s do one department at a time. Right? Have our agency give us the template. We launch one at a time. It was a complete wholesale redesign where we’re going to flip the switch overnight, a burn and build. We wanted to

really reduce the amount of content on our site because we knew it was. It was so much. And that’s when we found our Blind Spot was searched because it wasn’t scoped in, we thought, oh, yeah, we have Google free product.

But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t updated. We didn’t look at it. We’re like, okay, we will. We know we’re going to have to re-index when this happens. When this new site goes live, we’ll put in a priority request to Google to re-index our site. But guess what? That took almost a week. We thought it would take a day or 2.

It was not good, even though we only had a couple of 1,000 pages, it still was caught wreaking havoc on our service desk calls. We can’t find what we’re looking for. Our search is not working, so the critical part of a redesign is, you have to control your index. And so this is an extreme example. When you’re doing a redesign that so many pages are going to be renamed, or maybe disappear. 

But even in the case of Hey, a high-level person just reported incorrect content, I need to get that down or change that right away. That happens all the time, and if you can’t control your index, how often you’re crawling your content for search, it can be very challenging. And so, the ironic part was that part of the objective of this project was to really surface our majors and programs. Students needed to find out what the core offerings of the university were. So, we built this really nice page to showcase all the colleges and programs.

What you’re looking at here is not the actual sites as an example out in the wild that I’ve redacted here. But if you look, if you search, this is a search term for communications. So, I was pretending. Well, what if I’m a student for communications?

How? How would a student really know? Is that the right result? Right? The 3rd one down is the program. The rest is like, that’s the office communications. So, we didn’t address the core search.

We put a nice fancy navigate user interface on the homepage people could navigate. But they were still using search. And it was really interesting so it we were successful, I’d say, but we just missed that one little point. We put up a fancy 404 page. It wasn’t, you know, if they see a broken page, let’s give them more information, but it wasn’t quite enough, so it’s a great time to scope in your search.

This is where I want Elliot to talk a little bit about a different approach, an iterative approach that you can take

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

15:16

Yes. So, as Jeff was saying, you know, the average website, redesign project can take years or at least feel like years. Apparently according to some data, the average website redesign project takes 9 months, which is a significant amount of time, and the general waterfall timeline for these projects looks a little bit like this, you know. We start with our discovery phase, and we define what we’re going to do. And then we do some design and prototyping and hopefully, some user testing. And then we spend this good chunk of time actually building the site and testing it and doing user acceptance, testing and finessing the content and all of those things to launch it somewhere around month 9. And so, this means that your kind of placing these bets in the early phase of a project. Things you think users are going to do, or ways that they’re going to behave, that you don’t see pay off until way past the end of the project. And now you’re trying to figure out how you know these bets pay off, or if they do, or if they don’t.

So of course, there has to be a better way.

And so, at Mediacurrent, we’ve been working on building an iterative approach which essentially, you know, we’re still looking at that 9-month time span here. But rather than thinking about that waterfall timeline where we have some ideas in month one. We don’t see that they pay off until month 10.

We work in these more iterative sorts of sprint-based cadences identifying a problem going through that whole design process, defining what the problem is, designing a solution, prototyping and testing, developing it and launching it in an iterative phase. So rather than having that. You know the website looks like this. On day one, the website, we flip a switch. We hit that big red button. And the website looks completely different in month 10. We’re looking at iterative improvements throughout this entire process. And the beauty of this is not just that you get these, you know, sort of less arduous timelines. You’re delivering things faster, but you’re also being able to measure and learn and continuously optimize throughout the process. So rather than placing that bet in month one, and maybe you’re wrong. In month 10. You’re placing smaller bets and getting that payoff much faster, and you’re able to see, hey, we were wrong about this. Let’s refine it in the next phase of the project, and, you know, improve our mistakes as we go along, because you will always make mistakes, but in this process, you can fix those mistakes much faster

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

17:46

So, Elliot, do you have an example of where this cycle is uncovered? Unexpected insights that led to some major improvement

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

17:55

I do. It may or may not be a true story

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

17:59

Yeah.

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

18:00

I’m not a liberty to say but you know we had a client where funny this happens in in stakeholder management that we often see that projects are often precipitated by leadership changes. And I think this is the case. You know, across industries that you get a new CMO. They want to redo everything. You get a new university president. They want to redo everything. But in this case we had a client who was a hospital system, and they had a new President and President was searching, using their site search to search for themselves, and the President was dismayed that they did not show up as the 1st result on their search results page so many other things showed up ahead of that person. And I mean, that’s kind of funny. But this bringing this to our attention as the agency partner, we started to think about what is actually causing this. So it’s not just that this President doesn’t rank high enough in search. It’s that this organization had a lot of content sprawl, that that content was being prioritized over newer content, that they had events from 15 years ago that were still being indexed and still showing up on the site. And so, having this experience of the President searching for themselves or CEO searching for themselves, not finding themselves on the top of the page.

Started this whole process of okay, let’s look at search. Let’s look at the content. Let’s look at the information architecture. Let’s look at the navigation, and then we’re able to make these. You know, they’re very large pieces of how you redesign a site but doing them in chunks. Kind of helped us not only move through the project faster, but also learn from, you know, consistent optimization of that content from putting in a new navigation and seeing how well it performs versus the previous navigation. So, it’s that kind of way of thinking, you know, even though this started from kind of a funny point of view and then ended up delivering really high value for our clients.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

20:05

I have to add on to the contents for all stories like with this Higher Ed example. It just reminded me of when I was the Web director and the president of the University got a call from his niece or someone he knew that she was saying, I can’t find the GE requirement. The GE Requirements are wrong on your side. There’s conflicting information. And we were. I was embarrassed. I’m like, I don’t. I got my CMO told me like we got to fix this. It was a day or 2 of just wrangling up the 6 different GE requirements pages that we had published out there. So, as you got to attack, all the sprawl search can help because it can pluck the right information to the search results. So, you got to kind of tackle it from both ways. But yeah, it’s kind of similar story

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

20:48

That is true.

It’s 1 of the things that you know. This is not a brand-new idea.

This is actually how many of them like Internet superpowers. This is how they work. When you open up Instagram every day. You don’t often see a wholesale change of the interface. If they did a wholesale change in the interface, people wouldn’t know how to use it, but they would identify things that they want to improve. They want to improve engagement. They want to improve user sign up. They want to improve communication. And they by identifying those metrics. They’re making incremental changes to the product that actually boost those metrics. So what we encourage our clients to do is really understand. Why are you embarking on any kind of redesign project? Are you trying to boost enrollment? Are you trying to increase sales? Are you trying to increase brand recognizability? Are you trying to do any of those core things? And then how can we identify parts of the experience that we can optimize to move the needle on those specific areas rather than like, let’s just rip it all down to the studs and start over

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

21:52

Right? Right? Yeah, that makes sense.

So, analytics plays this huge role in all this search, analytics are a window. We talked about Google analytics. That’s how many people have gone to your pages and visited your pages. But search analytics are different because they’ll surface things like no results searches. We’ll talk about it in a second. But they’re a window into what your users actually want from your website. So before redesign, analyzing that data helps you identify content gaps and user intent and navigation issues and help you build your site around real user needs not just assumptions. So this is where I want JF, to take us through the SearchStax analytics dashboard. That’s what you’re like.

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

22:36

So, what you’re looking at here is the dashboard from Site Search, our core product at SearchStax. So, if you were in a, you know, a redesign project like Elliot mentioned. And then you had Site search installed. You would get analytics from your search. And there are metrics that people are not really used to, because this is not something that is like universal right when you’re going to Google analytics, these concepts may not be all available. And so, this is very specific to search right?

 So, you would like to know how many searches are conducted on your site right? You would want to know how many of these searches are getting clicks and then extract some click through rate out of that. Now, if your search is slow, that would be another very big problem, right? So, you would want to know that the queries that you’re submitting, or the searches that your users are submitting are returning fast results, right? So that you could like, have a very nice user experience and let them find what they need super quickly. Another metric that matters is the position of the cards inside of the results. Right? So, if someone has to paginate 3 pages before finding what they are supposed to find. I think that search just failed right there, right? So, by measuring the average click position as to where the clicks happen? Is it in a #1 position? #2 or position 3.

Which would be ideal? Then you would, then you would get into a dimension where you could understand. If your search is working or not

click through rate. This is pretty familiar to many people, especially in marketing. But this is search, click through rate, right? So, you want to know if these search results are getting clicked and over time build a trend over that.

And then last, but not least. And after that I’m going to give it back to Jeff. No result searches. This is a specific metric that gives a lot of good information. And with that I’m going to let Jeff tell you all about it.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

24:54

So, this dashboard. I’d like to just say that a lot of people just don’t have enough time to do all this. So, we see a lot of our clients that they appreciate this starting point because they can get a real snapshot of what I need to look at our click. The rates go in the right direction. So, you see it over time. But also, I’ve seen other data sets or no data where you, just you have to spend too much time getting it. So, we really put an effort into making

you’re just goanna see the surface today. But that’s all the data is interactive. And it’s real easy to use like that. Yeah, talking about no results searches. So we’re just showing a few snapshots of what’s available. But this is one of the most popular data points that we have. And it’s really important for so many reasons. It’s a goldmine of information that you don’t get from Google analytics. This is search data. And these are real examples. What you’re looking at here, these are. This is data from different university sites that at some point in time you could change that timeframe. People were not getting the answer in the search. so, it can be used to fill content gaps, connect searches to similar pages. I even have a story about a school that saw dental hygiene being searched so often that they are investigating, adding that program to their offerings. So, you know, you’ll see, like cyber technology, this school didn’t offer cyber technology. So, like, let’s make sure people go get to our computer science degree and our cyber cyber security degrees. The course catalog is an interesting story.

Because I was almost like, why is that happening? You’re talking to the school. That’s not good, right? And they like, Oh, yeah, yeah, they. They just replaced their course catalog. They didn’t even tell us, so we found that out. And it’s a way they could kind of get a tap of like what’s happening

on this large campus where kind of. There’s this miscommunication that you know the day that it went live. You know, I wasn’t there anymore. So they really get some deep insights. But this is used to create synonyms like, we have all this jargon in Higher Ed, so it really helps connect the dots there. And I want to ask Ellie at this point. I feel like many schools don’t have this data have access to it, or even other organizations. Are you seeing that is this data being used out there enough

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

27:26

Not often enough. We have some people who are, you know, they have some basic instrumentation on their sites to capture it.

Some people aren’t even looking at the search terms that are coming from search products like Google that are bringing folks to their site. So I think it’s a real missed opportunity. And I think one thing that’s key about this is when you think about a lot of the journeys whether it’s somebody in Higher Ed, or whether it’s somebody. I see this a lot with our government clients that the same thing is called something completely different, depending on what state you’re in, or what state agency you’re working for or working with. We do some, you know, interviews with students, prospective students, and universities.

When they’re doing their college search, they’ve got, you know, 50 tabs open, and they’re going from school to school to school trying to compare and contrast information. And if you call it cyber technology and the other school calls it cyber security and neither one is showing up in search results. You’re going to lose that prospective student.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

28:31

I heard it said, this way, I think what you’re just saying. From one of our schools, we work with. This is where we learn our prospective student’s language, and I love that. Yes. good.

So whenever we talk about no results, I always get this question, well, why can’t AI just do this. We’re an AI world. Right? So, we’ve been using AI for years at search text building with machine learning in the background from the start. And we have a very practical view on AI, and it really comes down to being relevant. And we believe in a hybrid approach that is staying focused on the core search principles enhanced by LLMs and human intelligence. And because really, the stakes are so high, you know, you’ll see a lot of experimentation with your personal searches and things like that. But it’s really a strategic way to integrate it. And I do want to ask you this to Elliot, what are you seeing organizations coming to you? With what questions are they having? What are they trying to do with AI?

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

29:37

Well, it’s always funny to me, because, you know, we’ve been in this kind of publicly generative AI world, for you know, almost 2 years now with with Chat GPT kind of taking over the universe.

And we’re still in that space of I want to use AI. But I don’t know exactly how I want to make it. I want to. AI it, you know. I want it to be something magical, and we’re having the same kind of conversations with folks about like.

What is your core purpose here? What do you? What problem are you trying to solve?

And is AI or and any AI tool, the right kind of tool for that problem. If you are trying to solve it. You know certain things, like, we want our prospective students to connect better with like. You know, the admissions team putting an AI Chatbot that doesn’t understand your content. And bouncing those students out very quickly is not gonna help you. But thinking about how you, what opportunities do you want to to pursue with AI,

then, you know, have a problem to solve, and also think about not only what the end user likes, your end kind of your buyers or your students, or whoever they are. But think about how AI can help you organizationally, because that’s a huge part of this. And that’s also a huge part of, I think what SearchStax provides is that, you know, lift from the administrative capacity that you don’t want to have to sift through all these results all the time, and SearchStax. And these AI products can really help you internally optimize your workflow.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

31:12

Yeah, yeah, that’s none of that really surprised me. It was good to hear, like the same struggles and questions coming in from your way. So, I’m going to show a little example of what we mean by this approach. And it’s this features we’ve built in. So, AI can suggest terms to fill those, no results searches that I showed earlier. So you can see the term on the left, the recommended term right next to it, and if the recommendation makes sense. The

the user can then accept it, and then that will be remembered for future searches.

So the fact that not every recommendation is accepted is really proof that we need this human in the loop, because we could just build this right into the algorithm, right? But this is proving like we’re seeing most. You know schools. This is a fairly new feature. Not all of our schools are using this right now, or you know, even organizations, you know, but the ones that are really appreciative of saying, I heard one web director say, I want to be able to connect the dots.

So, you know, you’ll see there’s a misspelling here. We wouldn’t want that to connect all the time, or calandra for calendars. So it’s a real this is the approach we mean when we’re adding that human intelligence and skipping on here. This is where I’m gonna have JF our product lead walk us through some practical tips for success when you’re tackling your digital redesign project.

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

32:54

So, maybe some of you have seen this image before. This is from Donald a Norman, from a book called The Design of everyday things

as you can see. It’s kind of like there, but not completely there, right at the end. All and the spout are in the same direction which makes it very difficult, or even dangerous, to use.

So, this is similar to this is to introduce you to some of the frustrations and pain points that we hear our users have when they’re using. Search right? Slow response time queries that don’t resolve quickly are just the death of a site or a search. Irrelevant results. Same thing if you don’t. If you don’t give them what they need, they’re going to leave. You’re going to have churn.

You’re no results. So that’s mean. That means that you have. You have lost opportunities. There. People came in. They asked for stuff. You didn’t have it. So there’s no content strategy behind it, or you’re not, you know, responding to their needs. They’re going to leave context, ignorant, right? So you’re getting results. But they are not really relevant to what you’re trying to like. Achieve right? An example of this could be that you’re looking for a coffee pot. But you get it, you know you. I don’t know you get you get something different that has nothing to do with it. Right?

0 recall. So that means that they, you know, like you’re coming back next, you know. I don’t know. An hour later, and it, you know, the the search doesn’t remember you. and then you have no recovery mechanism. You’re making a mistake. You’re getting a no results, page, and there’s no way to recover at that point.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

34:46

So, JF?

Which of these frustrations do you think organizations struggle with the most

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

34:53

I would say, from a user perspective. The things that I’ve seen are the most important to solve are the slow response. Time for irrelevant results, and no results would come right after that, and then relevance, of course.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

35:07

Yeah, I was thinking, irrelevant is right up at the top, especially when we’re talking about these complex industries.

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

35:14

Yep.

And so, in order to fix your teapot. So, what are you or a coffee pot?

So what you’re going to want to focus on is speed. You really want to have this thing streaming fast so that you get your results quickly. Your accuracy. You want to focus on your content making sure that you know it’s accurate. From what the user is expecting.

You want to be predictive. You want to be able to help the user find what they need by providing recommendations.

Obviously, you don’t want to see them wasting their time on your page. You know their time is valuable, so if your time is valuable, their time is valuable. So, you really don’t want your system to be seen as something that is wasting your time or their time.

Help me recover. So, this is the, you know, a good, no results, Page, and then remember me

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

36:14

Well, why don’t you take us through some examples in the wild of some search experiences

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

36:22

Sure thing. So one of the things that we discovered that is pretty common is, people don’t make their search bar big enough. So it’s kind of like this little puny thing that is at the same level than other navigation items. I think one way to fix this is to. Really, you know, and especially in the age of like asking questions inside of a search interface. You really want to have a big search bar, and in order to be able to accommodate like a lot of words and making sure also that people understand that this is a feature that is really important in your site.

Another big one has to do with predictive and predictive making predictive suggestions. So, using auto suggestions, things like that inside of your search interface to help people find exactly what they need will solve that problem

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

37:26

Yeah, this one’s almost becoming table stakes. Now, if you don’t have autocomplete, I feel like it’s pretty common out there, but not not enough. Institutions and organizations are kind of using it

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

37:37 

Yep, and then using filtering, right? So, like, this is a site from TCU or Texas Christian University. So, TCU discovered from their analytics that like programs, they were the most important things. And so they, you know, they really took this innovative approach of just bringing this into a tab like right away. So that means that when people are searching for engineering, they just have to click on the Programs tabs, and then they get access to all the information they need from that tab, and then they could further filter down to the specific college that they’re interested into. And then they get you know the classes that are available there.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

38:18

I want to talk about this one just a little bit, because what we’re seeing is this tab layout. You see the tabs at the top and there’s the filters on the left, the college school undergraduate. This is becoming more common because it’s kind of a very elegant way to handle the complexity. Those tabs can be whatever you need them to be. Often there’s events up there tying right to an event calendar, or a direct

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

38:41

Of it as your categories. Right? So you have to identify just like in the you know, the old days when you were doing an information architecture, you would try to identify which categories are the most important. This is kind of the same thing. So you’re using your search to inform on what people are like looking for the most. And then you could you, you could infer that there’s some categories that are more important than others, and you display them in a tab and that looks very similar to a navigation

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

39:08

And the other thing I want to point out is the results. The layout changes based on the content. If you, if you have a program. You can see the programs have this card layout. So once you do the these tabs and facets, it gives you the flexibility to to be more design, different design schemas, basically

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

39:28

Yeah, it’s a great example of and don’t waste my time. Bring me exactly where I need to go. And yeah.

So cards. When we’re talking about cards, we’re talking about the display of the results, right? So they could be just textual like Google.

But there’s so much more you can do with them like in that case, instead of displaying these results that are just textural, they’re using a map, I think that, you know, like people are used to maps nowadays. They’re using it everywhere. Why not in the search results you could display like? In that case it’s for doctors or facilities. And then you could actually look at the 2 facilities that are there. Another type of card has to do with

if you could do that in the next slide, please. Yeah. So, this. So, this one is for doctors. So, you could see here that instead of just like saying, oh, this is just like Christopher Hudson. And then they’re really, they spruced it up right? So, they introduced reviews. And there, there’s some information about his focus and all of his like his appointment, his phone number. What kind of physician? What kind of plan or network? Is he part of the right? And then a picture of the person?

So all of that stuff brings to life the card. And instead of just presenting something that is very static and not interesting. And obviously here, what they’re trying to solve is conversion. Right? They’re trying to bring people to the, to the doctor to fill up this calendar and his calendar, and then to make sure that that the hospital as a, as a, as an entity which is a business right is actually benefiting from that

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

41:27

I like this example. My Higher Ed equivalent is that I saw the site where, when you search for nursing, it’s 1 of our clients, you would see the nursing programs. But next to it all the faculty. And so it builds this credibility like, wow, they have 50 nursing faculty here they all are. So, you’re also doing things like that, building some credibility and trust

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

41:48

Yep. And this is just like an example of how you would like to help people recover. It’s very low, low frills. You don’t need to invest a lot of money there. The only thing that you want to do is if somebody’s not able to find something, or they wrote something silly. You just want to give them some actions to be able to recover and redo another search.

And last, but not least, right. So, everybody’s interested in AI answers. So, what’s the place of AI answers inside of your search results at SearchStax? We’ve been experimenting with this for a while now, and we find it very useful. We think that this is something that’s going to be changing, how people are interacting with their search results and search experiences at the website level similar to what they’re experiencing with their chat gpt right now.

And so, with this example that we’re like showing here. This is just a UX pattern that actually embeds the AI answer inside of the search results. But what it aims at doing here is to quickly bring the user to value right by saying, okay, I’m going to answer that question really quickly for you, and then give you a link to be able to act upon it right? And then and then you’re on your way, and you’ve solved your water bill problem and 2 seconds, instead of reading through cards trying to find them. You’re just going through it 

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

43:26

Right. Thank you JF, I, that’s kind of the 1st time we’ve shown this. And it’s on the search text website, too. So, we’re testing it on our own website right now. So, let’s start to wrap it up with some best practices. JF?

JF Boisvert – SearchStax

43:39

Well, just to recap right? So, you, you want to leverage your search analytics. So, this is really important. Once you understand this terminology and what it does and the benefits that it provides. Then it equips you to be able to make changes right from the front-end perspective. Make sure that you’ve got your confidence. Search bar with predictive typing and your filters.

And then you want to optimize your results so that they’re not just like little text things that are equal with one another. You want specific content to make them rich and actionable, especially the ones that are very valuable to your enterprise or company, or organization.

Then you want to help people to recover quickly and then experiment with AI answers to improve engagement in the long run

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

44:28

Thank you. So, search isn’t just a functional feature. It’s a strategic part of your website’s success. It’s a well-designed search, really will help improve engagement, support, enrollment, or your other goals and keep users coming back.

But there isn’t. Oh, it’s not really a 1, and done processes. I think a successful redesign is iterative meaning. You make these data adjustments over time, not just a single overhaul and analytics play a key role. You track these search queries. You know, user behavior and engagement patterns. You can identify these friction points. What’s working, what’s missing? Where users get stuck so it can guide these redesign efforts. And if there’s 1 thing to take away, I would just say, prioritize your search experience as a core part of your website strategy. Even the best redesign is going to be new to people, so they’ll lean on your search bar even more than they have in the past.

So, we’re going to close it out. Leave some time for questions here.

I’m going to put up our contact information. So if you have to, if you have to jump, go ahead. But we are happy to meet with you, no matter what stage you are in your process. So feel free to reach out to us. And I’m going to look, look at the questions here.

Okay.

So this one is, how long does it take to get up and running? Is it largely an IT project. It’s really as fast as you as the client can move. It can be weeks. It can be 4 to 6 weeks is pretty common, but we’re not talking months, but really as fast as our client can move. It can be out of the box, or it can be customizations. It’s a pretty painless process. 

If you take an iterative on this one for you, Elliot, if you take an iterative approach to redesign. How do you figure out where to start?

Should it always be? Search

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

46:26

It can be Search.

I think so. It really is a matter of prioritizing your challenges. So if you search where you’re running into the most challenges. And, you know, related content is where you’re running into the most challenge. Then start there. If navigation is where you’re running into the most challenges, start there. If you know, just fundamentally like you’re on a a platform that doesn’t serve you, start there. But it’s really about the different challenges that you’re experiencing in your day-to-day existence of managing the site and making it run optimally. What are the most taxing to you

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

47:07

I like this question that came in. And it’s for you Elliot, what considerations should buyers have when it comes to building a new search, experience themselves versus using a product like SearchStax.

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

47:19

That is a good question.

I think my philosophy, when it comes to this particular question, but many questions is, don’t do stuff that you’re bad at.

So many people try to take on too much, and search is a place that we see this in particular with a lot of clients, and organizations. And you know, because there are a lot of products out there that you can kind of just plug in that. Come often with your CMS. Or come with your hosting, or whatever it is, and they’re mostly fine but they require that fine tuning, and they really require somebody to be in there

a lot, you know, understanding the trends, understanding the synonyms, understanding the misspellings like the human, has to be really behind the scenes, pulling all the strings and making sure that things are tuned consistently. 

And if that’s not how you want to be spending your time, or that’s not how you want your Dev team to be spending their time. Then, if you can figure out how much that time costs you a product like SearchStax starts to look really really economical so that you don’t have to take that burden on yourself. And so, you know, if search is not what you do, or what you are excited to get up every day and and work on. Then I think that’s when you bring in the best partners to to take on the job

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

48:40

Yeah, love that. Thank you for that good answer.

No, Ophelia, what’s the difference in the budget for traditional redesign versus iterative

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

48:52

That is an excellent question that we get all the tim you know. I think the primary difference at least in my mind is, you know, you’re not thinking about this sort of lump sum investment. I mean, you’re not thinking about a 6-figure outlay in year one. You can be thinking about these things in much smaller increments, and ultimately it might be the same amount of money. But the way that you’ve structured it.

Because of the timing of the projects, you can maximize your fiscal year. You can maximize like a lot of the folks that we work with in Higher Ed or in nonprofits. You can maximize, grant money. You can maximize, you know, telling that story of this is what we’re going to do. And this is how we’re going to measure its success is something that grant makers love to get because you have that trackable, you know, proof of impact. So you know, it’s really about how you structure the things that you want to do. It can also be much cheaper. Ultimately it can be a much more thoughtful, economical investment. It really just depends on what all you’re trying to tackle and the order. You’re trying to tackle it in

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

50:04

Thank you.

I’ll take this one here as I, as I took on my redesign to reduce 12,000 pages to 1,500, I’m reducing the number of content publishers. What was my process with stakeholders? What data did I show them to convince everyone that we need a leaner site? I’ll give a short answer to this one. We did look at our data. Of our web pages. We did the card sorting — we probably didn’t look at enough data. It was mostly Google analytics. The data we showed but it was more about the OCR complaint, the accessibility complaint that drove that project. We had to get rid of all the bad data. So, I’ll answer that one more thoroughly in an email, too. I like this one. I want you to start with this Elliot and I have some comments on it. But the question is, can you discuss how marketing or advertising is integrated into search results.

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

51:01

Yeah, you know, it’s really, it’s interesting. Because I think a lot of what we see in commercial search like Google Search.

Obviously, that has sort of been somewhat overrun with paid advertising. But a smart thing that you can do with a product like Smart Search or sorry. Excuse me, SearchStax. It really creates a search program and a marketing and advertising strategy that works for you on your site that you’re not, you know. Rowing away money to larger corporations. You have folks who are entrenched, engaged audiences on your site. You can search, you can serve them relevant contextual content even if it’s an advertising or marketing form. So, it’s a really great opportunity, you know. If you have folks, you’re selling ads on your site, you have so much more data. Rich owned information because it is coming from you that you can somehow sometimes command a higher price for those advertisers than you can with other products. So it’s a really interesting opportunity to kind of look at it from that way. Not just looking purely, you know. Here’s the content. I want to serve it to my end users, because they’re looking for this specific thing. But what other things can I serve them that are also relevant to what they’re looking for, and not a distraction

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

52:30

Thank you for the broad perspective. I’m going to drill down a little bit depending on your industry.

First, you need a tool that supports it.

So a lot of I would say, schools have Google free search. And some of them are even still seeing ads like Google is putting ads in their search. That’s not too common. You can turn that off, and they just haven’t figured out how. So number one is to get the tool that can support you, controlling what we call them as promotion. So 1st make sure you can. You can actually, you know, support that if you’re looking for like, Hey, we need to push this result to the top. For whatever reason, there could be a lot of different reasons.

Depending on the industry. You’re in Higher Ed. We often don’t call it advertising, but we’re promoting this thing we’re doing. You know. Advertising is often not part of it, but it’s kind of industry specific. That’s a great question. How do we justify the cost for something we haven’t paid for before.

you wanna I it’s always good to couple it with the redesign. Why don’t you start with that one? I have the comments on this one, too.

Elliot

Elliott Mower – Mediacurrent

53:30

Yeah, I mean, I think it is a good opportunity if you’re no one likes to go and ask for money twice. So when you can come to your financial stakeholders and come with a strong value proposition for this is the projects or projects that we want to do. And this is, you know, search and and this investment is a part of it.

Come in with that, even if you’ve never worked with a search partner before. If you’ve never integrated a 3rd party product before, it can be a little scary. It can be a little strange to have that additional line item in your budget. But really being able to lean on the roi that you’re going to get is like.

Come in, come in strong, and you can really make a case that that it should be part of the budget for the project

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax

54:19

Yeah, if you can couple it with the redesign I found, like, even, there’s a comment that said we scoped it into our redesign. That’s how we did it. Show the show what you’re not getting. So we go to your web director, or whoever has control and say, Hey, we need access to this data, and if they can’t give it to you, we need no result searches. We need to know what people are not finding, and we can help you, too. With this. We’ve dealt with schools that have done the benchmarking to say, Hey, what is an application for a mission or an orientation sign up, or a welcome packet like what are what are the values to those? And then we. I even know a school to track that, and they put a multi-million dollar value to just enhancing their search. On those 3 on those 3 metrics. So it’s not often easy to get the money. But if you can show what you’re missing and what you’re not getting and what you need to make decisions that’s largely as a marketer often can help.

Okay, I’m going to take this last one, I think, which is kind of an easy one. What is the difference between Site Search and Manages Search>

Can you incorporate both? So this person’s on our website. So that’s good. Managed Search is really how the Comp. How SearchStax was built off of. There’s a core search technology out there, called Solr. And we’re built on. Managed Search to really take Solr to the cloud and then Site Search is really the analytics on top of that and making it a more robust solution for marketers. So often clients get both. There is also often not a need for the manager. Search part. If you’re already on solar, you probably want to. Might want to consider managed and site search. But we can. We can talk to you more about that. But site search is really kind of the newer product, and if you’re already on Solr, you might be looking at Managed Search.

all right. I think we’re good. Any more last questions.

That was really fun. Elliot. JF. We’re going to close it out. We’ll follow up, and everybody was on the call with the recording and the presentation. Thank you.