3 Ways to Improve Search on Your Site

Take ‘em to the right place and they’ll always come back for more.When it comes to “search” there is always a tendency to move the issue around from “I need the IT guys to fix it”, “I must hire that expert who says they know the right words” or “I read that there is a new IT tool that will do it for me”. Just plain excuses! The next 3 tips will drive customers to your site and make sure that they stick around.

Tip 1: Tuning
Having a flood of constant new content to your site may be wasting time and energy. Attention needs to be paid to the fine tuning of your old content – structuring, defining, tagging, filing and most importantly validating keywords, ensuring that they are customer centric and not corporate centric – use the words your customers use, not how you describe yourself.
Designing your site to cater for the unlimited variations of searchers is almost impossible and can end up making your site incoherent or non practical.

Tip 2: Re-visit the past
Investigate previous search activity to your site. By paying attention to the reporting of your site traffic you will begin to optimise the keywords will drive visitors your site.
Don’t let yourself get trapped in the past. Use the findings and in tandem keep a track on searches that are newsworthy, hot topics or seasonal. Spending time watching trends for search terms is always beneficial. Google Trends is one of the analytical tools I would suggest – and by the way it’s FREE!

Tip 3: Where are you taking me?

One of the worst practices of search strategy is having a bumpy customer journey. How many times have you been specific in your search only to be brought to the publisher’s home page? So many visitors to websites leave straight away or get lost because of poor navigation from search activity.
Taking time to map out the most optimal journey is crucial. Continual testing, targeting and measurement will put your search activity on a winning streak to having satisfied visitors who will have a tendency to come back.

Darren Moffett, Head of Digital & Direct Marketing, Banks Love