When people talk about content marketing and website optimization, the focus is often on search engine optimization (SEO) and how you can attract people to your site.

This is all important, but so is understanding the power of searches once an audience has arrived on your site. If you’re thinking of updating or improving your blog or e-store, a good website tip is to allow your visitors to conduct internal searches (which sounds more clinical / dirty than it really is. We assure you, no rubber gloves are needed for this!). An internal search is when people are able to type in a word or phrase in a field on your website and search only your website’s content for hits.

There’s two big reasons why you want to create a search field within your website:

1. Make things easier for your audience. After all, your content marketing is about them. While I’m sure all your content is just fabulous, not everyone wants to read through everything (in fact, no one does). Blog tags and categories can be helpful, but when people arrive on your site looking for something specific, they sometimes need more than that. A search field on your website allows them to do this easily.

2. Find out what your audience is thinking. A search field on a website is the next best thing to a mind-reading device. Analytic programs that track how visitors arrived at your website are really important – but so is understanding what they’re doing while they’re in your virtual space. In fact, if you own an e-store, gathering information from internal search queries is golden. Customers use searches to type in products they hope you’re carrying, giving you a pretty good clue toward what your market wants and how they’re phrasing it. Don’t have an e-store? If you’re blogging, understanding the internal searches made by readers can give you ideas for new content topics, key focuses and marketing strategies (such as potential hot keywords for your SEO strategy).

Many basic blogs like WordPress and Blogger allow you to add an internal search function easily through a simple patch or widget. If you have a fully customized site, e-store or blog, your programmer shouldn’t have any trouble adding this valuable feature – just make sure there’s a way for you, as the site’s admin or marketing manager, to easily see what’s been entered in searches.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.