Internal Site Search Optimization – Part One, the Checkup

Internal site search is incredibly important to converting visits. Shay Digital quoted a Google report showing 90% of companies reporting internal site search as their visitors’ No. 1 means of navigating their sites. And fully 82% of visitors use site search to find the information they need. Visitors who use internal site search convert more than those who don’t, according to an article by Multi-channel Merchant. And quality matters. An article from Internet Marketing Ninjas states that well-performing e-commerce site search has been known to dramatically increase conversion rates.

So it’s understandable that you’d want to make sure your internal site search performs well for you.

To take the pulse of your internal site search, first look up your ten most searched keywords for the past month.

For each of those ten keywords, record how many times each keyword was searched. Then look at bounce rates, exit rates, orders and conversion rates by keyword. Lastly, you’ll want to know where people are searching from, and what pages they’re hitting directly after seeing your search results.

This tells you how well your internal site search is performing. If your site search works well, your bounce rates will be low, your conversion rates high and your visitors will hit the pages you think they were looking for right after they see the results page.

If all that’s the case, great, you’re done.

But if anything seems amiss, you’ll want to go on to the next step.

Take a look at what your results pages look like for your top three search terms.

Are the results what you’d expect? Are they the most helpful results? Are you confused by what’s ranking and why? In the next post, I’ll go over what to do to improve your internal site search experience and results.