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Using “Site Search” to Improve Your Content
Web stats will tell you what pages your site visitors looked at, but they won’t tell you what content your visitors were looking for. A site search can help you learn more about what your visitors wanted to find on your site, but only if you look at the search reports. A site search is a great tool to put on any nonprofit website. It should appear on the home page and every major section page, in a consistent place, near the top of the page. It should be a simple box with the words “Search this site” or something similarly obvious, and a “search” or “go” button to initiate the search. We use Atomz’ site search for all of our sites. It’s free for under 500 pages and it reviews our pages once a week. We use their premium service (about $600 per year) for a client with over 1,500 pages. One of the handiest features of the site search is the ability to review the words or phrases that people searched. For example, we can tell that, in a recent week, 5 people searched one of our client’s sites for the phrase “social security.” When we repeated that search, we got 1,433 pages of results -- not too surprising for this client. But we were surprised to see that there were also 5 searches that week for “sushi” -- and even more surprised that we have three pages that talk about sushi! (If this interest in sushi continues, perhaps we should look at more content on sushi!) Another hot search item that week was the phrase “hr 848” which is a reference to “H.R. 848 - The Social Security Benefits Restoration Act of 2001.” Here’s where searching gets tricky, and where you, the site content manager, have to watch carefully. When we put “hr 848” in the site search (without the quotes) we got 21 results, but most of them related to other bills. That’s because Atomz treated the two sets of characters “hr” and “848” as separate phrases and returned every page that mentioned either of them. When we put “hr 848” in quotes, however, we got no results. It wasn’t until we put in “h.r. 848” (in quotes) that we found what we really wanted -- five pages that talk about this particular bill. The lower case didn’t matter -- Atomz found the articles even though “H.” and “R.” were capitalized in them. The punctuation mattered, however. While “hr 848” doesn’t appear anywhere on this site, “h.r. 848” does. We learned two lessons from this. First, we probably need to add some “search hints” to our site, perhaps as a special article linked from the area near the search box. The article can advise people that, for example, putting a phrase in quotes will search only for articles where those two words appear together, in that order. The second one is a lesson for our content. We need to understand how site visitors use the site search. If they enter “hr 848” and find nothing, is it their fault for not knowing the “proper” way to refer to a bill in Congress, or is it our fault that they’re not getting the help they want from our site? If we use “HR 848” even ONCE in the article, even in a footnote, then that article will appear when our visitors enter it that way in the site search. We invite you to use the site search at npadvisors.com, and to give us your tips on how a site search can improve your site’s content as well as your visitors' experiences. July 2002 | ||
