Good Search For Your Site Is Essential
One of the best things that you can do for your site is to have a good site search that can be accessed from every page.
According to the results of a November survey by Zoomerang that I found on the DMNews site, 73% of respondents said they would leave an e-commerce site within one to two minutes if they could not find what they were looking for. One of the quotes that caught my eye was “it was surprising to learn how intolerant people were of poor search”.
I don’t think it matters if you offer e-commerce or not. Many new visitors to your site are looking for some specific information and if they find it quickly and easily they will stay and if not it’s much too simple to just click and go somewhere else.
I use Google site search for my site. It’s free and easy to install, besides who’s recognized or trusted more for search?
One of the things that I like best about the site search is that I’m adding new content almost every day. When you are constantly adding and changing content on your site the Google bot comes more often to visit and catalog your pages. That means that you don’t have to worry about people clicking on old pages or not finding the newest ones. You don’t have to do the work of keeping your search results current. You also can make money from these searches if you have a Google AdSense account which will pay you when people click on the ads on your search results.
The only bad thing that I can think of is that you can lose visitors if they click on an ad and leave your site, even possibly finding something that they like better. You do have the option of having the results open in a new window which helps them get back to your site by keeping your window open, but I feel that it’s probably well worth the risk for all of the other benefits that you get.
More…
.
