Adding a Search Box to Your Website

Help your users find what they are looking for on your website with a quality search engine

If visitors to your webpage can't find the information they are looking for, they will commonly look for a search box. If they don't find one they will leave the site and search for an alternate source and end up frustrated. A search function on your site can help prevent this.

Adding Search Functionality to Your Website

Depending on the type of website a high-quality search box available on every page can produce:

• More sales
• Fewer customer support calls
• Better website engagement
• More satisfied customers

What Makes Website Search Unique?

Even though most internet users are familiar with searching, there are unique challenges the webmaster should consider when implementing search on their website:

• Experience level of visitor — are visitors familiar with your website and content, or are they new to it? Most likely a combination of both.
• Multiple data sources — many websites have content from multiple different sources, such as a website content management system, a product database, and documentation. In addition there may be content from external websites that is helpful to provide to users.
• Customizable search results — your website is not the same as every other website. Your search results need to reflect that, both in terms of the type, ordering and structure of the search results as well as how they look.

What's the Best Way to Add a Website Search Bar Feature?

To guide users to the right place, you need to understand what people are searching for and how they interact with the results. From there you can customize the search by prioritizing results, choosing content to add or exclude, and providing synonyms if people use different terminology than your content.

Since releasing the first commercially available webcrawler in 1995, we have worked with thousands of clients. We've developed search tools that make it easy to deploy search and have the flexibility to be tailored to custom situations, from simple tuning of the results to complex logic for permission-based results with guided navigation.

While customized solutions do require some effort our search solutions provide the tools to make these easier to do. If you would prefer our team of search experts has years of experience with different industries and types of search and can provide the assistance you need, all the way up to a hands-off managed solution.

Contact us online or call us at +1 216-820-2200 to find out how we can help you improve the search on your website.