On-site search: help your customers “find what they’re looking for”

What do U2 singing in 1987 on their Joshua Tree album have in common with website users who abandon pages in 2023? They “still haven't found what they’re looking for”.

Finding an answer is not often as straightforward as it should be. Too often, your users must sift through products, articles, FAQs and general information to have a chance at finding what they need. Nobody wants a needle-in-a-haystack experience across a corporate web presence that only provides irrelevant content. The bad news? "55% of users will abandon your site if they can’t find what they’re looking for".

Search experiences: challenge or opportunity?

Surprise: it’s both. Consumers have extremely high expectations for on-site search features, as using Google, Bing and other search engines are second nature.

It’s worth keeping up with those expectations: search users are 2x to 3x more likely to convert and this is because they are not just visiting your page for browsing. They know what they want and are literally asking you for it in your search box. You don’t want to leave those questions unanswered.

On the other hand, according to Forrester, 68% of the websites have such a frustrating search experience that users abandon the site altogether. As two thirds of sites fail to provide good search functionality, this is like putting a barrier between their users and their costly, high-quality content : content that cannot be found cannot convert. This leaves the user to go and find the answer from other sources and potentially convert there instead, “with or without you”.

It’s no use blaming Google and Amazon for providing a superior search experience. Instead, you could see it as a chance to stand out from the majority and offer search bar excellence to your customers.

The fact is, it’s not that hard to be better than the 68% that provide a frustrating search experience. At Cognizant Netcentric, we can help.

In our experience, search functions are often below user expectations and neglected. Many tools and CMS systems, including Adobe Experience Manager, don’t offer state-of-the-art search capabilities and it requires a dedicated search solution to bring that functionality to your ecosystem. You will need one if you want to belong to the top third of providers who keep up with the user's expectations and remain competitive and, more importantly, truly useful and relevant to your customers.

The bad news first: There is no silver bullet for installing a good search. No matter how advanced the features and the technology behind it, every search solution needs some fine tuning to the content and context.

The good news is, all this means is you have to know your customer in order to predict the kind of thing they’re looking for and deliver relevant results.

How to improve your brand’s search experiences

With Cognizant Netcentric, you’re in safe hands. We have 10+ years of experience in designing and implementing on-site search solutions of every scale and can ensure successful search projects.

We have done it all:

This makes us the perfect independent partner to help you build an excellent search experience and make your customers’ “Beautiful Day”. Our experience allows us to find the ideal solution for our clients, fitting to their digital ecosystem, timeline and budget and consult on a technical as well as business level.

We’re global Adobe experts and have deep knowledge and expertise in the Adobe Experience Manager. All this in addition to years of experience in building search solutions for other content providers like PIM systems, databases, Twitter and many more. Our offering spans every content source and covers all of the market-leading search engine technologies.

Introducing Cognizant Netcentric’s AEM Connector

For projects around Adobe Experience Manager, we bring an accelerator to our projects: the Cognizant Netcentric AEM Connector. It allows connecting AEM to any search engine, micro-service or cloud service. Being aware of how crucial it is to keep the search results in sync with the website's actual content, Cognizant Netcentric has developed an AEM Connector that brings a huge time-to-market acceleration for our search projects – no matter if on AEM On-Prem or AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCs) environments. This will kick-start any AEM project and comes without costs for customers doing a search project with us.

Besides classic AEM, we also have a connector solution ready for the new AEM Sites feature called: AEM Edge Delivery Services (formerly known as Next-Gen Composability and AEM Franklin). In fact, you can discover it in the search box in the top navigation of our website since it runs on Next-Gen Composability. What’s more, this exact search solution recently won the Adobe AEM Rockstar award at Adobe Summit Las Vegas.

The sweetest thing: search platforms are recommendation engines.

For U2 fans it was clear that “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for” is actually not about searching. The song is about how some things simply should not be found. These things need to find you.

With a search solution for your brand’s website(s), you can ensure your top-drawer content finds the right customers. Relevance features and AI technology can be leveraged to make smart content recommendations so that your customers won’t even have to use the search box to get to relevant content. It will find them.

If you are interested and want to know more about our search capabilities and solutions, stay tuned for further blogs or simply reach out to us. We’d be happy to talk with you.

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