4.01 - Internal search engine

1 - Findings & Impacts

Internal searches on your website can be tracked thanks to the transmission of parameters in the url: https://www.mysite.fr/?q=my-search. This source of information is a gold mine for SEO experts to find out the terms that users are searching for within your site.

It's also an opportunity to use internal search result pages as landing pages to enrich the SEO strategy.

Finally, it is also a prerequisite to set up an internal redirection of searches made via the Google Sitelinks Searchbox

2 - Recommendations

• Have a clear call to action

Enter "what are you looking for" in the box in light grey and make the magnifying glass bigger of replace it with a "search" button that seems obvious to click

• Inspire input with predictive search by showing result suggestions

If you have an existing URL that satisfies the search query, redirect the user to the static page

• Improve imperfect output
  • Understand misspelling and typos
  • Accommodate synonyms, acronyms or stemming variants (especially for the video game names)
  • Recognize American and British English
  • Handle numbers and special characters (especially for the French version)
  • Master stop words (the, an, and etc)

• Set up an internal search engine with transmission of parameters in the URL (GET method) in order to allow tracking by the teams managing your Analytics. Ensure all search terms are tracked in lower case. Else you will find “Term X” and “term x” splitting data within your reports

• Handle empty searches

it’s best practice to set up a Google Analytics event to track when the ‘no result’ page is triggered. Example values could be:

• Event category as ‘search’
• Event action as ‘no results’
• Event label as the search query

Use this data to identify high volume problem queries and improve searcher experience

• By default, never link the URLs from your internal search within your site, unless your SEO team requests it

• All pages generated by the internal search must be blocked via robots.txt in order to avoid ranking for keywords that might be completely unrelated to your core business (but typed by the user). Place the following in your robots.txt file: