Is on-site search important for a website?

There is one feature that many websites don't think about as a means to optimize the user experience: on-site search. This feature is a great way to help users find what they're looking for once they reach your website. An eConsultancy site search report in 2010 which found that 84% of businesses don't effectively optimize or even pay attention to on-site search functions. However, taking advantage of this resource could help users in several ways.

The same eConsultancy report discovered that 30% of visitors will perform on-site searches. They also found that users who performed on-site searches generated more revenue than visitors who didn't, because they're twice as likely to convert, more likely to return to the website to make a purchase, and have a higher overall conversion rate.

The best way to optimize your on-site search function is to quantify all of the data you receive to understand search quality. This could involve looking at all of the searches and their corresponding results on the site, along with which searches and pages wind up culminating in a lead most often. As the search results become more complex, you'll want to find new ways of looking at the metrics to gain a full understanding.

Once you've developed a good comprehension of your on-site search function, you'll be able to make full use of it by expanding your website based on what works and what doesn't. The more you allocate resources to on-site search, the more you can take advantage of this potentially valuable function.