5 internal search tips that will improve your user experience.
People use search for different reasons and for many different motivations. Having a well structured set of search results, with good usability is going to improve the user experience. Here are 5 of our top tips to improve your internal search measurement and help you understand the results.
Does your content rule?
Content is king – but there’s no point having it if you don’t know what it’s doing for you. With just two metrics, your content performance insights will pop out at you, telling you the places to refocus your efforts.
Uncovering your content marketing opportunity.
Content is everywhere, but how do you stay ahead of the game and make sure your brand is noticed? Check out our top tips for creating an effective content marketing plan.
A yardstick for your digital content playbook.
The digital landscape is literally crawling in content, with creators constantly trying to attract our attention. But how do you work out what is worthy of your time?
Search & Promote the implementation, part 1
“I can’t find anything!”
This is the most common response we came across during the scoping and implementation of Search and Promote as the new internal search for Murdoch University.
Hardly surprising, given the issues with internal search that I covered in my previous post, but amazingly consistent!
In fact, one of the great truths we found during this project is that people truly don’t care where content is located, or whether it’s authenticated and/or accessible – they just wanted to type something in the search box, immediately find what they’re looking for, then carry on with their work.
We’ve now completed the implementation across our internal sites, and it’s working really well – so well that we’re now 2-3 weeks away from covering our external sites.
Search&Promote on steroids
When it comes to searching across the web, we all know that Google is king, but does this still hold true across your own internal network?
Over the past 12 months we have wrestled with this question, particularly in an environment with multiple search mechanisms, manually maintained indexes, and masses of sites that were created when metadata was primarily used to categorise instead of search.
Driving content relevance with Test&Target
In many cases homepages are either relatively static, or promotional driven. The problem is that homepages are often still the starting point of a users journey on the site and not every user should see the same content.
Enter Omniture Test and Target. A very powerful application that can dynamically change content based on previous user behaviors. Content relevance yields greater conversion, so it makes a lot of sense to include it in your overall online strategy.
People who liked this…part 2
In my previous post on People who liked this, also liked…, I put forward an idea how to generate “related” products of interest, based on what users were looking at, which could then be automated and re-published back to a site, based on Omniture data.
Having implemented this, we’ve made an interesting observation, which changes one our user assumptions, and I thought it was worthy of a quick posting.