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Digital Experience

Your Website’s Search Bar: What Are People Searching For?

Welcome to CX Weekly, where Dan Gingiss shares customer experience tips! Watch the video by clicking above, or read the transcript below. Today Dan discusses how you can improve your website and, in turn, your customer’s experience!

Hey, everyone, today I want to talk to you about an aspect of your digital journey that I don’t think you’ve been paying enough attention to, and that is your internal search bar. 

When somebody comes to your website, have you ever looked into what it is they’re searching for? This can be incredibly valuable information. Let’s start with anybody that is not an e-commerce company. If somebody is searching for something on their website, that probably means they can’t find it!

If they can’t find it and it gets searched for a whole lot, perhaps we should make it more visible. Perhaps we should bring it into a more prominent spot in our top or side navigation. Perhaps we should add it as a link at the bottom of our page. Either way, we can take this data and understand that something that is searched for often is something that people generally can’t find.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Hey, some people just search because it’s the lazy way of finding what they’re looking for.” That is true, and you might want to test that. However, oftentimes we’re going to give it the old college try first to find what we’re looking for. And then when we can’t, we’re going to give up and go to the search bar. If you’re not looking at what people are searching for, you’re missing an opportunity to bring an important part of your website up front. 

Now, if you’re an e-commerce company, this is going to be quite different, right? I would say that the vast majority of Amazon visits start with a search, right? So in that case, it’s not so much that we can’t find it. But this will give you information perhaps on which products you might want to feature on your homepage, which products that you might want to recommend when people are shopping for other things. I think having a “most searched for” product list would be pretty interesting.

Use the internal search just as you use external search. When it’s a Google search, we’re paying a lot of attention to it. That’s why we have entire teams dedicated to SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing). We can do the same thing on our own website and identify places that we need to bring things forward. Also, perhaps we can identify places where we may want to put some internal marketing based on what people are looking for.

I hope this helps. I think it’s a great addition to any website or mobile app. I’m Dan Gingiss, customer experience speaker, coach, author and podcast.

If you’d like to learn more, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel, visit my website, order my new book, listen to my podcast, watch my weekly live show, or sign up for my newsletter!

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