Optimizing On-Site Search for B2B Websites

Improving the outcomes of your on-site search users doesn't have to be difficult or especially time-consuming. Particularly since Google shut down Google Site Search back in 2017, there has been a rise in the use of search appliances like Cludo and Algolia. There must be dozens of vendors solving the same core problem: How to serve the best results possible to your on-site searchers with minimal maintenance required by the Web Strategy Team (or whatever team is responsible for your strategy, optimization, content and user outcomes).

In this article I'll cover some of the basics for improving your on-site search experience.

The Basic Goals for B2B On-Site Search

This isn't hard to define. The goal for most B2B websites' on-site search is to surface the most relevant, helpful content so users can easily complete whatever task they're trying to accomplish (their Job-To-Be-Done). This includes marketing content, support content, partners, legal - all of these are critical for different users.

Because the website is typically owned internally by the Marketing organization, many companies judge success based on marketing outcomes like leads generated, form fills/conversions, micro-conversions like video views, and similar marketing metrics. Its less common to see an on-site search program judged by the success of folks looking for the privacy policy - in part because its hard to tie that type of user behavior to revenue.

So we want to:

• Figure out what search queries are used the most on-site
• Figure out what search queries are absolutely critical to get right - even if they're not searched for all that often
• Decide what type of content we want to surface at the top of results for specific queries, and for queries in general

Remember: Your website is a library of content. Your job with on-site search is like that of a librarian - to help guide your visitors to the most helpful and relevant content, while guiding them away from less helpful, outdated, broken experiences.

The Basic Tools

• Analytics: We'll use analytics tools to find the popular and important search queries. This can include: (1) Normal web analytics systems like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics; (2) Search-specific analytics accessed through the search vendor; (3) Log file analysis using a tool like Splunk; (4) SEO tools like Google Search Console or AHREFs focusing on branded phrases.
• Synonyms: This is the type of thing Google just gets right so often, it can be easy to overlook when you aren't relying on the search leader. When you are diving into the analytics, you'll almost certainly notice that there are a variety of ways people describe the same thing in search. You might start with a list of 100 top on-site keywords to optimize around, but after doing a synonym analysis you've grouped these 100 terms into 25 distinct topics. You'll want to choose an analytics tool that is capable of associating terms together into synonymous topical groups - which you can then optimize for.
• Pins/Sticky Results: You need to be able to manually curate the top few results for the critically important distinct topics. Google doesn't let SEOs do this - but its your website, your on-site search, and up to you to manipulate the results to give the best results for your users. Probably you want to slightly tilt the results towards the outcomes you want...like conversions. Consider the search for [Product Name]. The best results, pinned to the top few spots, should be something like:

1. Product Page
2. Product Brief/Datasheet (ideally this is a PDF embedded into an HTML page, not a raw PDF)
3. Product Demo
4. Product Free Trial
5. Product Support/Documentation
6. ....everything else

• Weights: While you've pinned the best results for your Product Names and other critical queries, you need to set weightings for other site sections and filetypes - which will impact the results after the pins, but also be critical for the long-tail of queries you haven't synonymed/pinned. Your weighting system should make certain website sections or filetypes more likely to appear, and others less likely to appear. This might partially depend on the current state of your website content...if you've got tons of old outdated content in some part of your site (like your Resources, Forms, Newsroom, or Blogs - for example), you might do well to suppress those site sections until you get around to cleaning up your content. Your weighting might look something like this, with 1 being the most likely to appear:

1. Product/Solution pages
2. Product Briefs/Data Sheets
3. Free Trials and Demos
4. Product Support Pages (these are often a one-stop shop for helping existing users find support/documentation/training/communities links)
5. Other Form Pages (not Trials/Demos)
6. Blogs
7. Press Releases
8. Raw .pdf files
9. Everything else

Measuring Success

If the team managing the website and on-site search are hyper-focused on Marketing and lead capture, the measure of success might be something like:

• Are we generating more form fills from users who interacted with on-site search after the optimization activities than we were before the activities?
• Or more granular: For searchers looking for "Product X" information, are we generating more conversions/form fills from these users after the changes?

You might also consider goals like:

• Were users less likely to search again? (searching multiple times likely suggests the user didn't find what they were looking for the first time)
• Were users more likely to have a micro-conversion - or take actions suggesting buying activity, like viewing a product page, viewing a product brief, viewing a video, etc.

I'd like to suggest an even more basic way of measuring success: simply taking a screenshot of the search results before, and the search results after, for the most important queries and just seeing if they make more sense for the goals of the website. If the before-optimization results for your critical product name search are...a 5 year old press release, a 6 year old blog post, a broken form page, your product page and brief don't appear in the top results....and after optimization you've got your favorite picks at the top of results. This is a win! Analytics data can be inaccurate and misleading for a variety of reasons, simply seeing the improvements across the critical phrases can be a great way to measure success. Trust your instincts as to what will help users in their journey.

A Few Closing Comments

• If users are using your on-site search a whole lot...that usually indicates some other problems with your website - such as poor navigation, poorly structured pages, missing critical resources in easy-to-find spots on your pages. Users typically shouldn't need on-site search except as a last resort.
• If you see an increase in users turning to on-site search, this might suggest a recent problem. Unless of course you've redesigned your site with a goal of trying to increase usage. Without some recent redesign, generally you don't want to see an increase in users turning to on-site search to find answers.
• Use Analytics to see if there are there certain pages where users are using on-site search the most. These are trouble spots to look closely at. If you see, for instance, that lots of folks are searching for "Data Sheet" from your Products and Solutions pages, this might indicate that users on those pages can't find what they're looking for on the page - and you should make this content more easy to find on the page.
• You shouldn't have to review/refresh/improve on-site search results weekly or monthly. Having a single empowered person spend a day on this once a quarter, or once a half, is probably more than sufficient to keep most B2B website's on-site search working well after the initial setup. Of course this might not be true for massive websites! Figure out a reasonable cadence and block your calendar for the semi-annual review/updates.
• Popular on-site search queries can be a great opportunity for Content Strategy & SEO improvements. Are there queries for which you have no good page yet? Create the page! Identify gaps and help users find what they're looking for both on Google and On-Site search.