

Cludo has created a helpful guide for marketers and webmasters shopping for a new website search product. This guide will help you ask the right questions and look for the right functionality when evaluating site search solutions to meet your specific needs & ensure you're making an informed site search purchase decision.

Introduction: Why Selecting The Right Site Search Platform Is Important

The search function is a vital part of a website’s usability. While you may think that your website’s navigation is easy to use, many visitors are seeking more direct pathways to reach their goals- these are especially high-value visitors who are more “objective focused” – they are looking for something specific and are more likely to convert. In these cases, your site search solution should ideally act as a quick and informative portal to guide the visitor to the information they are seeking. This is not just a “nice to have” function- it has a direct effect on the ROI of your website and content marketing efforts.

Deliver Relevant Results Faster


Access To Search Analytics & Deeper Insights

Equally important are the insights into your customer’s behavior, needs and desires that your search solution should be able to deliver. A search query is a direct communication from your customer about what they are seeking from your organization- a robust and intuitive analytics platform is essential to capture, distill and act upon this data. By installing a search and insights engine, marketers can get a clearer view into what content is making a difference to their bottom line, saving time for their staff, or answering their customer’s needs. The alternative is a much less targeted content marketing approach, which can result in significant time and resource waste.

Given the importance of this functionality, Cludo has created a helpful guide for marketers and IT professionals shopping for a new website search product. This guide will help you ask the right questions and look for the right functionality when evaluating site search solutions to meet your specific needs.

What to consider BEFORE selecting your website’s search solution

Amount of Content

Content heavy sites will logically require an intelligent site search that can execute more refined searches with more features built within the search. Smaller sites however, will not need a search as sophisticated and a simple solution will work fine in indexing the limited content. However, if your small site has plans for growth, you should include the implementation of a more powerful site search in your future plans.

Volume of Traffic

Sites that look to gain a lot of traffic will do well with employing a separate server to handle the load brought by visitors. Another more viable option is to implement a search from a third-party search solution which shifts your search to a separate server and provides you with the additional advantage of various features and elements that could help you optimize your search to cater to your traffic.

Control Over Search Results

Having control over your search results comes with the effort of reviewing, adjusting, and optimizing the search. Therefore, you should consider a solution that makes that level of control user-friendly and effortless. An actionable analytics dashboard can be extremely helpful, as well as an AI powered solution that can assist you by fine-tuning your results based on activity data.

Customizable Features


Manual Page Rankings

This is crucial for adjusting which pages rank first in the results. No matter how good your AI is at prioritizing pages effectively, having a tool like this is sometimes necessary to give you control over relevance and shape the results to your site goals. The page ranking tool can also act as another level in a marketing funnel as you can move certain pages to the top of the results, thus guiding the customer’s path throughout your site.

Banner Integration

An advanced site search feature is dynamic banners that change based on the search term. Your site will benefit from using banners to provide focused and visual direction- when tied to the search results, banners have the advantage of being a prominent, stylistically different way of promoting content based on the search query. Banners can be used as part of your site’s marketing strategy to promote content and products, or for various informational purposes such as displaying opening hours, rules & regulations, events etc.

Facets & Filters

In many cases, with multiple pages of results to trawl through, having a more focused search process will help your visitors find what they seek more efficiently. Guided search using facets and filters changes the search experience from time-consuming hunting to a process of exploration and discovery. By providing a more guided search experience, you can provide your visitors with an easy to sort overview of all your site’s relevant content, categorized in a logical manner. They can then drill down into sub-categories to create a more focused search.

Targeted Engines & Content Boosting

Find a site search product that allows you to adjust your results to follow your general content strategy, where the search can be adjusted to focus on certain areas of your site. For example, you may want the search for your web shop to be specific to products within the web shop, rather than pulling up results from all across your website. Your site search should also have the capability to boost certain areas of your site that you deem more relevant to your users based on specific attributes. Referring back to the example, consider the convenience of boosting the whole category of product pages within the focused web shop search, so that these pages appear higher in the web shop search results and drive more conversions.

Direct Links

A good time-saving tool to have is a quick-linking tool that sends your visitors directly to a page on your site based on their query. This tool provides speedy results, efficiently bypassing the extra step of reviewing the search results page in between. This increases the efficiency of the search, and moves the visitor along to the information they are looking for faster, improving engagement and their perception of your website.

Instant Content Updates

Your search crawlers will automatically re-index your content at regular intervals. However, there may be instances where you add, update, or delete pages on your site and need these updates to be reflected in the site search results immediately. Your site search solution should offer you an easy way to instantly index and update content so the necessary pages will appear/ disappear from the results instantly without having to wait for the your crawler to re-index your site on a standard schedule.

Deep Site Search Analytics & Insights Capabilities

Site search reveals what your users are seeking from your business, and with every query of theirs comes a treasure trove of internal data. A good site search should be able to provide an overview of your users’ activity to offer you a general idea into how it is performing. A great site search should be able to sort through that data and categorize it into detailed analytical sections for you, delivering deeper insights into what your customers are looking for and how their behavior is trending. In your quest for the perfect site search solution, consider one that provides you with sufficient data on search activity and your user queries to help you optimize your search effectively. Having powerful analytics that can update in real-time is also a great benefit that can help you keep track of your search performance and provide highly targeted content to your visitors.

Analytics Background

Your site search solution should possess the analytical capabilities to:

Track queries that reveal no results


Identify trending search words

The volume of searches for certain keywords may increase based on a specific period of time, such as during a particular season or an event. Discovering what these keyword trends are, can help you shape your content strategy and assist in driving marketing efforts as they provide a valuable resource for marketers to learn what visitors are seeking at particular points in time.

Identify popular search words

Unlike the trending search words, popular search words are based on the overall searches conducted by visitors across time. These show what visitors search for most frequently on your site and indicates what kinds of content they seek out most. This analytical tool provides insight into the evergreen content that you can take advantage of by updating or expanding upon it for further site optimization.

Pinpoint ineffective searches

An ineffective search is a search where the visitor does not click on any of the results that are delivered to them- the results have little to no relevance to the user. These searches with a zero-to-none click-through rate from results, mean that either your search engine is not performing well, or your site lacks pertinent content in a given area. This is therefore a valuable alert to examine your search engine settings or optimize certain content areas within your site to remedy this issue.

Identify search origination pages

A “search origination page” is the page a visitor was on when they initiated a search. Comparing the search terms used to the content on the origination page is critical, because it’s a key indicator of whether the visitor was satisfied with the content on the page and is continuing forward along a path, or if they did not find the information they were expecting to discover and are stuck. In the latter case, you’ll want to examine the content on the page, as well as the navigation paths on your site.

Integrate with other analytics tools


Predictive Search Capabilities

Reducing friction and speeding up a your visitors search journey is the best way to increase website stickiness and customer engagement. There may be times where your visitors may search with words that differ from those within your website’s vocabulary. The best way to resolve this is to ensure that you have predictive technology built into your search platform. Ideally, you should have the following features available, in order to create a more intuitive search experience.

Predictive Search

The act of searching requires a significant amount of interaction cost. Nevertheless, this interaction cost can be significantly lowered with the addition of an intelligent autocomplete tool. Ensure that the site search you invest in has the power to predict queries and suggest relevant ones based on preliminary typing, so that the search process is sped-up and your users exert less effort.



Intelligent Autocorrect

Visitors often make mistakes when typing, or don't know the proper spelling of a word. This is especially true when dealing with long technical terms. Having a search solution with a built-in dictionary to detect and correct the words is vital- it will help your users find the answers they need without having to spend more of their time searching.

“Did you mean…?” Prompts

For vague search terms where your search engine cannot detect the query, having a “did you mean… ?” function can help pose suggestions from a similar theme based on your website’s content. This helps retain visitors on your site, and encourages them to explore alternatives, rather than have them leave because their search turned up no results.

Other Considerations

Here are some other important elements you should take into account when selecting your site search solution. These items are the key to selecting a search platform that will serve the needs of both your IT and marketing teams.

Your website’s search solution is an extraordinarily important asset for both customer engagement and customer insights.

Your product selection should be a carefully considered task. You will find that a site search solution that is intuitive to use and equipped with the right functionality will not just make your website more user-friendly, but will make your role in optimizing it much easier too. A robust search and insights engine can result in less time spent on the phone with customers, higher conversion rates, and a host of behavioral insights that can help you optimize and plan for the future of your organization.