Business case for Site Search

This white paper explains how to calculate the expected return on an investment made in site search. It shows how to build a robust calculation from existing site performance metrics to help make an informed data-driven decision about the value that search can add to your online organisation.

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Introduction to Site Search Analytics

This paper is about the challenge of using analytics to drive your findability strategy and measure how well it's achieving on its objectives..

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Site Search Best Practice: Mobile Search

At Colbenson we like to share our expertise in e-commerce site search and this is the first in a series of Site Search Best Practice tips: Top Ten Tips for Mobile Commerce Search

The mobile channel has challenges that affect how we must design the search experience, but it also has advantages. Designing a great mobile search experience isn't just about dealing with the negative, it's about maximizing the potential of the positive side of mobile.

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Site Search Best Practice: Visual Results Pages

At Colbenson we like to share our expertise in e-commerce site search and have created a series of Site Search Best Practice tips. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but some pictures are worth more than others. A search engine results page with images usually converts more effectively than one without, but it's not just a matter of slapping a few pictures on and waiting for the numbers to go north.

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Banking & Insurance

Building trust and confidence is vital in online financial services such as banking and insurance. SearchBroker reinforces this objective through the functional and visual design and its ability to understand the context of customer queries.

Customers rarely have a deep understanding of complicated specialist fields such as banking and finance. This means that SearchBroker has to be able to interpret a wide range of different ways to ask questions in order to make the right connections and build the customer's confidence in the site and the organisation.

Banking & Insurance

Building trust and confidence is vital in online financial services such as banking and insurance. SearchBroker reinforces this objective through the functional and visual design and its ability to understand the context of customer queries.

Customers rarely have a deep understanding of complicated specialist fields such as banking and finance. This means that SearchBroker has to be able to interpret a wide range of different ways to ask questions in order to make the right connections and build the customer's confidence in the site and the organisation.

e-Commerce

71% of visitors use the search function on an online store, and 80% of users will abandon the site if the search function is poor.

E-commerce is all about conversion, and research has shown that keyword search is the single most important tool in driving up conversion rates. SearchBroker learns customer behaviour and predicts their requirements. It makes connections between search terms and products, relating products to each other, and including social feedback from other customers.

Multi-channel search is also vital for e-commerce as mobiles and tablets become increasingly important.

Public Administration

The challenge for the public sector is primarily about getting the right information in front of the right people at the right time. This can be public-facing (such as with the Basque Government's public website), or internal (such as with the Spanish Ministry of Justice).

SearchBroker is focussed on making the right connections between the customer and the data. This is about understanding what is the key part of a search query: it may refer to a particular document, or a very general appeal for help and advice. SearchBroker learns from customer behaviour and seeks to understand the context of queries to ensure that the right connections get made.

Online Media

Customers of online media will often search without really knowing what they'll find. Their searching is often speculative, they use keywords which are usually either too narrow or too broad. In many ways, this sector is the search engine's biggest challenge and the sector in which search is seen at its worst.

SearchBroker seeks to understand context of the query and the data, learning which connections work and which don't. Data management is key to making search work with online media, and SearchBroker makes this easy through the DataStation.

SearchBroker also handles multi-media: videos, photos, audio and other formats.

Tourism & Travel

The Travel and Tourism industry is the sector most hooked up to social networks. Recommendations count in any online sales environment, but nowhere more so than in travel and tourism.

Searching must also be easily filtered: by location, by accommodation type, by price etc. and results shown in a relevant visual display (e.g. a map for location) in an order that makes sense to the customer.

Search must be clever. It must understand the difference between a town and a restaurant, a hotel and an airport.

Others

SearchBroker is used in many different industry sectors because it is a flexible and complete search solution that can be applied to any search requirements.

It is also innovative. We are constantly innovating new ways to build connections between customers and data, and removing the obstacles that frustrate conversion. This is led by our customers. By engaging with them, we learn their challenges and so ensure that the development of SearchBroker is led by real-world customer challenges.