The benefits of onsite search

Offsite search engines like Google and Bing use robots to scan an enormous volume of websites (a search process known as “crawling”). These websites — or more accurately, the individual pages within these websites — are then indexed in a database, and recommended to searchers based on the words that they use in their query and complex algorithms.

Onsite search is fundamentally similar, yet with a key difference. Like offsite search, it uses robots to scan and index web pages. However — and this is the critical distinction — onsite search is only concerned with the web pages in a specific website vs. web pages across the broader (and much, much larger) web.

Without onsite search, website visitors would have to rely on a website’s overall menus and navigational structure to find what they need. And while this may not be a significant issue for very small websites with a few web pages, it is certainly a potential problem for larger websites such as those operated by e-commerce retailers, which can have dozens, hundreds, or in some cases thousands of web pages.

Onsite search makes it easy for customers to rapidly find the information they need — such as details about a specific product, FAQs, and so on — without having to browse and burrow through categories and sub-categories (and sometimes sub-sub categories!).

Moreover, onsite search enables businesses to gather valuable insights from user queries, helping them optimize content and refine their offerings in real time. By analyzing what users are searching for, companies can better understand their audience's needs and preferences, driving engagement and improving conversion rates and pageviews. For example, AI-powered onsite search tools can deliver hyper-relevant results by analyzing user queries and understanding search intent.

Customer experience has emerged as the most influential factor in the business-customer relationship. It helps businesses deliver better user experience and usability for three key reasons: it reduces friction, it delivers personalization, and it boosts relevance. Let us take a closer look at each factor:

Reducing friction

While so much has changed in the digital world over the last few years, one truth remains unshakeable: poor navigation and all-around bad user experience (UX) is the number one website transgression that irks and irritates potential customers, and sends them to the competition (sometimes leaving a nasty review along the way).

Onsite search empowers customers to simply and easily find precisely what they have in mind, or to browse more generally if they prefer. Consider that 43% of customers head directly to the search bar on a website, and 68% of customers say that they will not return to a website with a flawed or unimpressive onsite search option.

While high churn and bounce rates are costly for all types of business, it is especially damaging for e-commerce retailers. Research has found that “search abandonment” — which is the term used to describe customers who perform at least one search query, but do not add any items to their cart — currently costs U.S. retailers $234 billion each year in lost sales, and globally the annual price tag is a staggering $2 trillion.

Granted, fast and effective onsite search alone cannot 100% eliminate search abandonment. However, it can certainly help reduce the frequency and value of lost sales, as more customers easily and quickly find what they need. They could also be introduced through onsite search to new and compelling purchase options (we discuss this later on when we look at onsite search and content discoverability).

Enhancing personalization

The heart of today’s customer experience dynamic is not rooted in products or even pricing — it is driven by personalization.

Onsite search introduces meaningful and memorable personalization into relationship by suggesting content to customers based on their browsing history (through cookies) and purchase history (if they are logged in). In addition, businesses can enhance personalization by adding messaging such as “We thought you might be interested in…” and “Many customers like you who performed a similar search found this page useful…”.

Boosting relevance

A growing number of businesses are using AI-powered onsite search to boost relevance and further improve customer experience. AI-powered onsite search rapidly delivers hyper-relevant results based on user queries that are too unstructured and complex for basic search algorithms to handle. This is achieved by leveraging a suite of integrated tools and technologies, including:

• Natural language processing (NLP) capabilities that understand and query content from multiple data sources, and dive deep within complex sources to learn about and identify linguistic elements including synonyms, nuances, and relations between words and phrases.
• Machine learning and deep learning to continuously improves search result relevance, and predict what content will deliver the most value to customers.
• Faceting and filtering tools that are built to find precise information in vast data collections.
• Entity extraction tools that find and classify text data elements into pre-set categories (e.g. object type, names, products, etc.).

Just as onsite search elevates customer experience, it unleashes several business advantages including: increasing sales, improving content discoverability, generating customer insights, enhancing search engine optimization (SEO), and providing on-demand support. We explore these benefits below.

Increasing sales

Retailers with superior onsite search tools enjoy 50% higher sales rates vs. retailers with inferior onsite search functionality (i.e., broken, slow, buggy, etc.). In addition, the conversion rate for customers who use onsite search is nearly 2x higher vs. customers who do not use onsite search.

It is also important to mention that while onsite search is a crucial marketing strategy for ecommerce retailers, it is not limited to the online shopping space. All businesses can and should use onsite search to enhance customer experience, foster engagement, establish and deepen competitive advantage, and shorten the sales cycle.

For example, businesses in the roofing, HVAC, home improvement, and auto repair space — all of which typically do not use their e-commerce site for taking orders and processing payments — can nevertheless use internal site search to provide customers with valuable information about services, procedures, and warranty, tips, and so on.

Similarly, businesses in the B2B space that provide a roster of software or technology-led solutions, or that offer professional services, can use onsite search to help customers with targeted content that answers their questions, addresses their goals, alleviates their concerns, and helps usher them through all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Improving content discoverability

Onsite search makes it fast and easy for customers to discover content. Consider this example: A customer is shopping for a blender, and wants to know if they can use an extension cord with the appliance. The customer types “use extension cord with blender” into the onsite search box, and in the results page is immediately pointed to a FAQ that provides the exact information they are looking for: Yes, using a properly-rated extension cord is acceptable.

Now, consider the same scenario, but without onsite search. The customer tries to learn whether they can use an extension cord with the blender, but does not find the aforementioned FAQ. Consequently, the customer heads to a competitor who uses online search to provide this information.

What’s more, we can extend the initial example to showcase another way that onsite search helps customers find content that they otherwise would have overlooked. After the customer learns through the FAQ that they can use an extension cord, they return to the search results page and see another recommended destination: A product page for a cordless blender. The customer is delighted to discover this option, as it eliminates their concerns about cord length. They ultimately end up purchasing this item. This sale and win-win outcome would not have happened without onsite search.

Generating customer insights

Each onsite search query is a window into what customers are thinking and feeling in-the-moment. Businesses can capture and analyze this data to make faster and better decisions that increase engagement, shorten sales cycles, and drive higher conversions and sales.

Let us return to our blender business to illustrate this benefit. The business analyzes onsite search queries over the last two weeks, and discovers that a significant volume of customers have used the search query “blender overheating” (and variations). The business conducts research and learns that a competitor’s product is being criticized by several customers on social media for alleged overheating incidents.

Based on this information — which was only discovered by analyzing onsite search queries — the business rapidly creates a banner, web page, and FAQ highlighting that its blender meets all prevailing safety standards, and that each blender undergoes a rigorous 30-point quality assurance inspection. The business also updates its onsite search indexing to ensure that customers who search for “blender overheating” (and variations) are pointed to this new content, so they can put their mind at ease and ideally make a purchase.

This is just one example of how onsite search can be used to generate customer insights, which can be used to boost competitive advantage and drive sales.

Enhancing SEO

Good SEO remains an immensely important and profitable digital marketing objective. Consider that:

• 68% of all online experiences start with a search engine
• 39% of customers are influenced by a search with relevant information

As noted by Search Engine Journal, businesses that regularly monitor search data from onsite search can support their SEO efforts in multiple ways. Specifically, they can glean insights to improve site UX (and therefore make their overall website easier for search engines like Google to index), refine keyword research, and close gaps in content.

Providing on-demand support

Onsite search can deliver the support-related answers, advice, and information that existing and future customers want, when they want it. This is particularly important and beneficial considering that 81% of customers want more self-serve options.

At the same time, using onsite search to provide on-demand support frees staff to spend more time dealing with escalated issues, and less time providing standard information that does not change from customer to customer, or situation to situation (e.g., shipping and return policies, product details, etc.).

Onsite search is a powerful and proven way to deliver exceptional customer experience, and generate benefits that include more sales and stronger competitive advantage. And the emergence of AI-powered onsite search is taking these wins and gains to the next level — which is great news for delighted customers and growing business alike.