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The demise of the keyword

keyword data is now obsolete

Google killed the keyword. They’ve finally put the nail in the keyword coffin, rendering both your Natural and Paid Search reports (keywords and engines) largely useless.

5 internal search tips that will improve your user experience.

shelves and people inside a shop, blurred to show movement

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.

Keyword unavailable in SiteCatalyst: 100 percent

Don’t be disheartened by the increasing appearance of keyword unavailable in natural search, you just need to change your approach. Here’s a couple of articles that will help you change your thinking.

Finding another string for your bow.

Wooden arrows for Bow and Arrow

Google dropped by and whipped the string off your bow. Now what do you do? There’s plenty of other ways to understand content performance and user intent. You just have to dust off some old basics.

Has Google shot themselves in the foot?

Google’s recent tightening of privacy by ‘hiding’ traffic data from websites is driving marketers crazy. Could this act eventually be detrimental to Google?

If you’re ignoring internal search, slap yourself silly

While Jerome is busy posting about the in’s and out’s of implementing Search&Promote, I thought I’d wade in with a post on why businesses should consider their search as a missed opportunity.

I’ve previously posted on what I think is a hidden gold mine of information called internal search. It’s an area of the site that many companies, quite frankly, ignore.

“Not too sure how to do anything with it, we assume it’s working just fine serving up results to random queries, so we’ll leave it alone and focus on our core purpose, driving people into our conversion funnel.”

Or something along those lines.

If that’s you, go stand in front of a mirror and slap yourself a few times! Wake up and smell the coffee…there’s much more to search than that!

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.

5 simple steps to make it count.

I’m still generally stunned that companies find thinking about measurement so difficult, and tend to either leave it to the last minute, or have nothing in place to effectively determine the success of something, and as a consequence have no method to improve on the ROI.

As marketers in a digital age, we’re far more fortunate than our offline counterparts in that we have, at our disposal, a multitude of tools, that allow us to measure success and further optimize the user experience.

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.

Deeper internal search insights that’ll help with content needs

Internal search is one of the best goldfields available to you. Not only does it help you understand what your users can’t find in general, but it can also helps you understand what they expect to see on certain pages – and aren’t seeing.

Beyond just the basic keyword measurement, there’s also other things you can do to further enhance your internal search metrics.

Back to basics – props, eVars and events

wooden building blocks

One of the fundamental things you need to understand about Omniture SiteCatalyst is the difference between an s.prop and an eVar, and just what events are and when to set them. They are at the heart of the product and provide the ability to customise it to suit your business needs.

If you don’t understand the difference, you’re going to be in a world of pain, and left dazed and confused.

This is, understandably, the most confusing thing to new SiteCatalyst users, and they take a bit of getting used to, especially when you start to combine them all together, but once you understand them, you’ll be on your way to generating custom ones that can really provide insight. Hopefully this post will help out in some small way.

Measuring SEO efforts

We’re all involved in SEO – jostling for position, trying to improve our domain authority, vying for backlinks, looking at page rank. We’re all getting reports from our SEO vendors. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to include those core measures in our SiteCatalyst Dashboards sometimes.

Did you know you can?

It’s a bit of a hack – but it works.

More internal search insights

Improving internal search should be one of your primary goals. It’s probably used by an extraordinary amount of people, searching for all sorts of things. In this post, I show how to capture the number of times people search, a breakdown of keywords and search attempts, and also demonstrate how much search is costing your organisation.

Page success events and eVars

So, still want to know certain things like what pages were viewed from visitors conducting a search, or which campaigns are driving most page views – and you don’t have Discover. Well, there’s two parts to this post and a bunch of answers…so read on.

Searching for gold

Search is a veritable gold mine that is frequently ignored.

I’m not talking about Search Engines and Keywords, I’m talking about your internal search. Providing you track internal keyword searches, you can gain a wealth of understanding.

Internal search is generally used as a quick wayfinding method, highlighting areas of content that are well used, but are not readily available. And more often than not, it’s seasonal as well.

Martech Talks: The Four Stages Of Attribution Excellence

This webinar was recorded in October 2023.

Note that the information contained in this presentation should not be taken as legal advice. Digital Balance and its partners recommend that you undertake your own legal investigation.

Martech Talks: Privacy and Data Governance

This webinar was recorded in August 2023.

Note that the information contained in this presentation should not be taken as legal advice. Digital Balance and its partners recommend that you undertake your own legal investigation.

Martech Talks: Privacy Changes and Data Security

This webinar was recorded in July 2023.

 

Note that the information contained in this presentation should not be taken as legal advice. Digital Balance and its partners recommend that you undertake your own legal investigation.