7 reasons why your website needs custom site search
On the hunt for a website search engine? Be careful what you choose. Get one that’s not up to the job, and it could show your visitors irrelevant results, or worse – no results at all. And one dud results page is all it takes for them to head back to Google to look elsewhere.
If you want your users to find your products quickly and easily, custom site search is the way to go. Here are seven reasons why:
1: It understands what you really want
Custom site search is smart. Using semantic search, it can look at not just what you’re searching, but also how and why. It factors in details like your history, location, the device you’re searching on, and uses this context to give you the most relevant results possible.
2: You get metrics to make your website better
How often do people use your search? Is it lightning-fast or super slow? What are they searching for the most? Custom site search gives you all the numbers you need to better understand your visitors – and learn what you can improve to keep them coming back.
3: You can talk to it like a person
You don’t have to engineer some awkward, robotic mix of keywords to get results. Thanks to natural language processing, you can ask custom site search engines conversational questions, like ‘where is the nearest hotel’, and it will give you an answer. A bit like if you were talking to a friend instead of a machine.
Speaking of which…
4: It supports voice search
Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa now have more people speaking to their devices instead of thumbing in queries. Custom site search supports voice functionality, so you can stay ahead of this trend.
5: It’s full of smart features
There’s more to custom site search than meets the eye. You can use it to add search functionality to 404 and FAQ pages, tweak how many crawlers index your site, support different languages, and more.
6: You can get rid of ads
When you’re searching for something, third-party ads are the worst. They get in the way and divert visitors away from your website. A good custom search engine will let you keep your results pages ad-free.
7: You don’t have to build it
Of course, if you’ve got the time and resources, you can build your custom search engine. But if you’d rather save yourself the hassle, getting it up and running is as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of code.
Get the full rundown on custom site search
Now you know why a custom search engine is essential for your website, it's time to explore the topic in more detail. Everything you need to know is available in our free guide to custom search engines for websites - check it out today.