Enterprise Search
Search is often underestimated as one of the critical factors for increasing customer satisfaction, raising online retention and creating a positive experience of your company. A well-configured search with good reporting on your site will give immediate results and clear ROI
Search provides a personal menu - Enhance your ‘traditional taxonomy’
When you structure your website, you’ll probably lay it out in ‘layers’ with what you consider to be the most important elements in the first level (e.g. Products, Services About us, etc) each with their respective second and perhaps third level menus below. This taxonomy or navigation describes your organisation according to you. It rarely takes into account how your visitors are thinking. Implementing search allows your visitors to enter a few words that describe what they are looking for. Configured correctly, the results should represent their ‘personal’ navigation or menu – with all the content that is relevent to them.
Speaking the language of your visitor
The language you use on your site belongs to your organisation. It may use terms and phrases that are commonplace in your industry or sector. Your visitor however may not be fluent in this language making navigating your taxonomy difficult. Search allows you to build in synonyms to present content that is related to the terms that your visitor is using, after all, a Roentgenographic examination to you is just an X-ray to others.
Search improves your content
If you have a statistical tool incorporated in your site, you’re probably fairly well aware of the pages that are most popular on your site, so you know what people have to look at. You’re not seeing with these statistics what people want to look at. This is where a search tool with good reporting becomes invaluable, allowing you to tune your content to lead your visitors to a meaningful outcome.
No dead-ends - a result every time
If your visitor ends up on a blank results page from a search, the likelihood is that you’ll lose him/her from your site. Knowing what these visitors have tried to look for will help you to take steps to improve your content, enhance your synonyms database or simply add common misspellings to the search configuration so that in the future you can present significant to similar searches. This iterative tuning process will continually improve the visitor’s experience.
The right results, first
If your search is pushing obscure pdf files from 2005 to the top of your results and leaving your important customer call-to-action pages at the bottom, then you are unlikely to be achieving the results your site deserves. You search should of course be indexing all the content on your site, including pdf’s and other media where appropriate, but a good search engine will allow you to promote the most important content to the top of the list every time.
Deep integration with Sitecore - Structured content and faceted search
One of the strong features of Sitecore, with respect to Search is the ability to enhance basic content with additional structured data. This allows the creation of Metadata to enhance the search results. Furthermore this structured data can be used to create faceted or filtered search – a more focussed way for the visitor to discover the information they require.