It's time to talk about your website relaunch—and the crucial misstep too many marketers make.
Marketing teams feel the pressure every year to deliver a better website than the year before—from UX best-practices, to appealing design, to customer-centric content that converts.
Too often, though, marketing leaders develop an entire plan for a website and get started on development without considering arguably the most crucial part of the digital customer journey: the search experience. And even if the search experience does find its way into the conversation, it's more of an afterthought and less of a results-driven conversation.
To ensure they're offering the best possible customer experience, marketers (and the organization as a whole) need to have the search conversation early in the website relaunch process. Not doing so is based on outdated beliefs about site search—that it's a commodity. It's something that comes out of the box with the CMS, after all. Why invest in anything more?
Because it matters to your customers.
If your organization is like most businesses today, you may well have a relevance problem. And even if you are extremely relevant to your audience, perhaps there's more you can be doing to let customers know. After all, they are overwhelmed with messages, as many as 3,500 per day. What they need is relevance: the right information at the right time.
And when they go to your search box, they are telling you what is relevant to them and how you can meet their needs—but you have to be aware.
Customers are up to 60% through their research before engaging with a salesperson, and 84% of B2B buyers admit that this research is done on the given business's website.
To capitalize on this behavior for the latest edition of your site, you need to have the conversation about site search earlier in your website relaunch project and focus on it as a strategic vehicle for customer engagement, satisfaction, and ultimately—your bottom line.
Questions to Consider for Your Website Relaunch
Before writing a single line of code for your new website, ask the following seven questions.
1. What are our customer expectations when they search the site?
This question is huge. Outline exactly what your customers expect when they submit a query. The expectations should fall along the lines of relevant content that understands the user's intent, and a back-end that learns from your users what content is most relevant, and maximizes the existing data from your visitors to deliver an optimal experience.
2. What are the features that meet those expectations?
Too often, website leaders view the search as a detour in the customer journey rather than an atlas that can point customers to relevant content. The only catch? Those users need to know how to use your "atlas" or search experience. Without the clues to assist them, they are more likely to get frustrated and head right over to your nearest competitor.
Accordingly, the following features are must-haves:
- Facets. Facets allow you to search by content type, date, source, and so much more. They allow your user to categorize their results and simplify their search.
- Auto-fill query suggestions. Let's face it, thanks to the proactive nature of external search engines (rhymes with "poogle"), Web users have grown used to an intelligent search experience that guides them every step of the way. When they start typing, they expect you to fill in the rest. Machine-learning makes this possible by learning the behavior of similar users.
- Content recommendations. Your customer journey is not a linear path; it's a meandering exploration, with their content needs as the guide. Don't wait for their exact query to prompt them down the path; use predictive intelligence to create the experience.
- Mobile-optimized. Think of the context of your mobile visitor: They are on the go, using a small screen, and they have a job that they need to get done—quickly. Site search can serve as the core of the mobile experience. Even if it's not the core of the mobile experience, your search box, results pages, and search-driven content pages need to—at a bare minimum—not frustrate your mobile visitors.