Why should I care about search?
It’s frustrating when you know your website has thousands of pages of really good, useful content, but doesn’t offer a good way for users to find what they are looking for. Think how frustrating it must be for your users.
The search feature in a website can often be an afterthought. And while Google does search really well, you don’t want your users to rely on it to find content deep in your website because Google has its own agenda.
All searches are not equal
Every website is different, and we’ve found ways to tailor the search experience to specific needs. We have a toolkit that allows us to cover all aspects of search, from basic to increasingly complex, depending on the nature of your content.
Lots of websites have a search feature, but not many get it right. The ones that do will take an idea expressed in a few keywords and offer a handful of pages that are most relevant with a clear title and a summary of what the page has to offer. But what happens when the keywords aren’t specific enough to narrow- down that far? Who has the time to click through 60 pages of search returns?
Here’s where we can introduce filters that will help users to refine what they’re looking for. Most websites structure and group content in sensible ways that will naturally translate into filter options. They might be by content type – an article, podcast, event or service, etc. Or they might be grouped by theme, department, or audience type. Sometimes by author. Sometimes location. Or we might infer ways of grouping content, for example by the year of publishing.
As a rule of thumb, it’s better to:
- Narrow, don’t expand – the goal is to return pages that match keywords AND other criteria so the matches are refined down with every click.
- Reduce dead clicks – only let the user pick filter options that deliver results. Otherwise, what’s the point?
- Provide the numbers… show the user how many articles match the available filter options by providing the number of results as a whole and across facets.
Then we’ll put ourselves into the shoes of our target user and consider the following:
- Custom sorting – sort by relevance by default, but offer a sort function in case they want to see the latest content at the top.
- Pagination – no one wants to see all the search results as a single page, it’s slow and cumbersome. Adding pagination solves this. We used to favour the ‘lazy loading’ approach for listings, but it has it's downsides in terms of SEO.
- Rich results – offer compelling reasons to click – good information on the cards: Title, summary at as a minimum. But additional context such as theme tags, the author’s name, publication date and the type of content (video, event, article) can help.
- Make it snappy – we want our results to be quick and accurate, so choose the right backend for the search requirements. PostgreSQL is a great choice for most situations or Elasticsearch/AWS OpenSearch if you need more heavy lifting.
- Autocomplete – return results in real time where applicable and load content asynchronously to avoid full page refreshes.
Take control
We often hear from clients that they see search as a bit of a black box. That’s totally understandable, it sometimes seems mysterious why certain results appear at the top of a listing for a particular search query, whilst expected content is omitted or appears further down the listing.
“A black box is defined as a system that produces results without the user being able to see or understand how it works”
Search can be complex, and the algorithms that determine the relevance of results are based on many factors including frequency of keywords or phrases with respect to content length or boost parameters applied at index time.
Unfortunately, sometimes the best page you can offer for a keyword isn’t the one search engine picks. Maybe the algorithm wants to prioritise the technical specification page above the product landing page.
Fortunately, there’s a solution via promoted search functionality. For any given keyword combo, it’s possible to pick and prioritise which pages are returned, putting you back in control. Sometimes humans know better than machines.
Gain insights
Having search front and centre means users and traffic will be directed through it. This gives us the opportunity of gaining insights into how users use the website, what sort of content they are looking for and what the popular search terms are. Popular search terms can be a useful source of data analytics and can be tracked over time and reported on. They can also be fed back into the website, as suggested search terms, to help others find popular content.
Global ‘vs’ local
So far we’ve talked about site wide search, returning content from all sections of a website across all the different content types:, article, podcast, event or service, etc. However, there are often benefits in providing more localised search functionality. These generally follow the same rules, but are specific to a subset of content types and usually require more specific categorisation, filtering and sorting methodologies.
For example, a couple of our sites have a publications library that contains both internal and external articles. They would probably be searchable across title and abstract, sortable alphabetically, as well as by date and relevance. Internal documents may require different visual treatment to external documents. It’s important to understand that search is an important tool at the section level, especially when dealing with large datasets.
Conclusion
It’s essential for large websites with a lot of pages to have a good search feature if users are to find the content they want easily – but often search is an afterthought. To deliver a truly useful search experience, we need to think carefully about the content, how much of it there is and how users might think about searching. Putting extra thought into search will enable us to help users get what they want AND provide value for the website’s stakeholders.
If you’re considering upgrading your website, we recommend building your navigation and user journeys around a solid search feature. With our many years of experience, and several case studies to draw on, we can help deliver a search feature users will love.
