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On-Site Search Best Practices For SEO & User Experience

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No matter how easy your website is to navigate or how clean the user experience (UX) is, an on-site search function is vital.

Your site visitors want a direct way to find exactly what they want.

On-site search is more than a search box; it’s an essential aspect of how visitors engage with your website.

Google has set the bar pretty high, and nowadays, users expect search to perform flawlessly. It means your on-site search must return relevant results, or visitors may leave, and you lose out on potential business.

So, how can you make sure your on-site search helps convert site visitors into customers?

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We’ve gathered a list of on-site search best practices, how the data can inform your SEO efforts and a solution for the SEO risks involved.

On-Site Search Best Practices

Is it enough to plop a search widget on your site?

Uh, not quite.

If the search feature doesn’t meet customers’ expectations, it becomes more of a hindrance than a help.

It means you just put a barrier between users and the product they want to buy from you.

Below are seven best practices to follow when adding an on-site search to your website.

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1. Search Box Placement

Your search bar should be easy to find.

No one will scroll to the footer of your website looking for it.

When someone views your website on a desktop, it should be in a prominent spot, preferably near the top right corner.

A mobile device should have its own line at the top of the screen.

Be careful not to place the search box too close to other boxes, like a newsletter sign-up, as that may confuse users.

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2. Search Box Design

search bar call to action

Similarly, it should be immediately apparent what the search box does.

There are three design elements: a search box, a search button, and a magnifying glass.

The search box is where users type queries.

If the input field is too short, people can’t see all of their text, making it hard to edit their query easily.

A good rule of thumb is to have a 27-character text input, which accommodates the majority of user search queries.

Adding a search button to your design helps users understand there’s an additional step to trigger the search action.

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The magnifying glass is essential to include because it is a widely recognized symbol for “search.”

The icon should be large enough to provide a clear signal to the consumer, even on a mobile device.

3. Add Placeholder Text

It is a good idea to include placeholder text in the search box to give users an example of what they can search.

on-site search box example_SEJ screenshotScreenshot from SearchEngineJournal.com, June 2022

4. Auto-Complete

categories within on-site search

Auto-complete predicts what the on-site search user is searching based on popular or suggested search queries.

The search box will recommend an item or category the user may be interested in by anticipating the search query, saving them the time and effort of typing.

This feature is not about making the search process faster; it is to help users ask better search queries.

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Be careful not to overwhelm users with excessive suggestions; up to 10 results is best practice.

5. Custom Ranking Option

faceted on-site search filtersComposite image created by Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal, July 2022; images sourced from yelp.com

Now, let’s talk about what happens after the search.

Your user finds the search box easily, enters text, hits the search button, and lands on the search results page.

As the website owner, you want to control (or prioritize) which pages rank at the top of your on-site search results.

The ability to manually rank pages provides the control necessary for promoting seasonal products or specials.

6. No Results Page

zero results page optimisationComposite image created by Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal, July 2022; images sourced from kohls.com

What you don’t want to happen is a “no results” page.

A “no results” page feels like a dead end.

When visitors see “no results,” they may think your site doesn’t have what they’re looking for – and leave.

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Providing visitors with a path forward is the best practice.

Under the “zero results” message, try adding a few related products or categories that may pique visitors’ interest.

7. Simplify Results

An on-site search aims to find what you’re looking for quickly.

It means that on-site search results need to be simplified.

Filters allow customers to refine their searches to find what they’re searching.

Amazing ecom landing page exampleScreenshot from asos.com, July 2022

For example, someone searching for “wedding guest plus size dresses” is likely to want to narrow the results down by size in stock, color, price, etc.

How On-Site Search Is Good For SEO

As marketers, we are piecing together first-party data and third-party data, trying this tool and that tool, all to understand how to improve communication with our audience.

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The beauty of on-site search is that you don’t have to wonder what a user is up to when they visit your website.

Users will type into your on-site search box exactly what they are searching.

And according to Forrester Research, online visitors who use the search box are two to three times more likely to convert than non-searchers.

Now, the intel on what people, who are three times more likely to convert, are doing on your site is something to notice.

Regularly monitoring data from your on-site search will allow you to support your SEO efforts in the following ways:

  • Site UX.
  • Keyword Research.
  • Gaps in content.
  • SERP Feature: Sitelinks Search Box.

Site UX

If you notice a trend in searches beginning from a particular page, something is missing from a navigational standpoint.

Take a look at that page and experiment with making the trending search query a more prominent focus on the page.

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For example, if the majority of on-search search begins from your homepage and the majority of search is for the query “login,” you will want to test ways of making the login button more prominent on the homepage.

Keyword Research

Alright, I’m going to share a quick SEO analyst’s secret.

Users will input what they’re looking for into your on-site search box.

These on-site search queries are most likely similar to what they originally typed into Google search.

The people who search these queries are more likely to convert into paying customers.

These are your “grand slam keywords,” bringing in three times the heat.

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Use on-site search to your advantage in keyword research.

Gaps In Content

If you see terms with unique high searches and high exit rates, people are looking for this information but can’t find it.

At least not easily.

This data tells you where to develop new content your audience came to find.

Sitelink Search Box

If your website homepage appears as a search result, Google Search may show a scoped search box to your website.

However, this doesn’t guarantee that a sitelinks search box will be shown in search results.

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Indexing Site Search Pages: The Risks

I’m hoping, at this point, you are onboard with on-site search!

Before you implement this on your website, there is an SEO risk that you need to be aware of.

Some consequences can impact your site’s performance if you allow internal site search URLs to be indexed.

Webmaster guidelines clearly explain Google’s stance on this topic:

Robots.txt for search result pages_screenshot of Google webmaster guidelinesScreenshot from Google Webmaster Guidelines, July 2022

The image reads, “Use the robots.txt file on your web server to manage your crawling budget by preventing crawling of infinite spaces such as search result pages.”

There’s a whole lot of internet out there!

So, Google sets aside a certain amount of time to crawl each site (known as the “crawl budget“) to keep things moving.

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How much time (crawl budget) your site gets depends on the size and health of your website.

And, having many internal site search URLs to crawl is not optimal.

Mark your internal search results pages as no-index.

Final Thoughts

Make sure the search box is easy to find and how to use it is clear on desktop and mobile.

Look for an on-site search widget that allows you to customize results.

Don’t slack on the “no results” page; use it as an opportunity to communicate related categories of interest.

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Remember to no-index your search result pages to preserve your crawl budget.

And last but not least, use this treasure trove of data to your advantage.

High-quality data tip: Add a GA filter to ensure all search terms are tracked in lower case. This way, it doesn’t matter if a user types “TERM X” or “term x”; your reporting data will not split.

More Resources:


Featured Image: vectorfusionart/Shutterstock

In-post Images created by Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

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Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

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Measuring Content Impact Across The Customer Journey

Understanding the impact of your content at every touchpoint of the customer journey is essential – but that’s easier said than done. From attracting potential leads to nurturing them into loyal customers, there are many touchpoints to look into.

So how do you identify and take advantage of these opportunities for growth?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn a comprehensive approach for measuring the value of your content initiatives, so you can optimize resource allocation for maximum impact.

You’ll learn:

  • Fresh methods for measuring your content’s impact.
  • Fascinating insights using first-touch attribution, and how it differs from the usual last-touch perspective.
  • Ways to persuade decision-makers to invest in more content by showcasing its value convincingly.

With Bill Franklin and Oliver Tani of DAC Group, we unravel the nuances of attribution modeling, emphasizing the significance of layering first-touch and last-touch attribution within your measurement strategy. 

Check out these insights to help you craft compelling content tailored to each stage, using an approach rooted in first-hand experience to ensure your content resonates.

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Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to content measurement, this webinar promises valuable insights and actionable tactics to elevate your SEO game and optimize your content initiatives for success. 

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

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How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords

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How to Find and Use Competitor Keywords

Competitor keywords are the keywords your rivals rank for in Google’s search results. They may rank organically or pay for Google Ads to rank in the paid results.

Knowing your competitors’ keywords is the easiest form of keyword research. If your competitors rank for or target particular keywords, it might be worth it for you to target them, too.

There is no way to see your competitors’ keywords without a tool like Ahrefs, which has a database of keywords and the sites that rank for them. As far as we know, Ahrefs has the biggest database of these keywords.

How to find all the keywords your competitor ranks for

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
  2. Enter your competitor’s domain
  3. Go to the Organic keywords report

The report is sorted by traffic to show you the keywords sending your competitor the most visits. For example, Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword “mailchimp.”

Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword, “mailchimp”.Mailchimp gets most of its organic traffic from the keyword, “mailchimp”.

Since you’re unlikely to rank for your competitor’s brand, you might want to exclude branded keywords from the report. You can do this by adding a Keyword > Doesn’t contain filter. In this example, we’ll filter out keywords containing “mailchimp” or any potential misspellings:

Filtering out branded keywords in Organic keywords reportFiltering out branded keywords in Organic keywords report

If you’re a new brand competing with one that’s established, you might also want to look for popular low-difficulty keywords. You can do this by setting the Volume filter to a minimum of 500 and the KD filter to a maximum of 10.

Finding popular, low-difficulty keywords in Organic keywordsFinding popular, low-difficulty keywords in Organic keywords

How to find keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t

  1. Go to Competitive Analysis
  2. Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
  3. Enter your competitor’s domain in the But these competitors do section
Competitive analysis reportCompetitive analysis report

Hit “Show keyword opportunities,” and you’ll see all the keywords your competitor ranks for, but you don’t.

Content gap reportContent gap report

You can also add a Volume and KD filter to find popular, low-difficulty keywords in this report.

Volume and KD filter in Content gapVolume and KD filter in Content gap

How to find keywords multiple competitors rank for, but you don’t

  1. Go to Competitive Analysis
  2. Enter your domain in the This target doesn’t rank for section
  3. Enter the domains of multiple competitors in the But these competitors do section
Competitive analysis report with multiple competitorsCompetitive analysis report with multiple competitors

You’ll see all the keywords that at least one of these competitors ranks for, but you don’t.

Content gap report with multiple competitorsContent gap report with multiple competitors

You can also narrow the list down to keywords that all competitors rank for. Click on the Competitors’ positions filter and choose All 3 competitors:

Selecting all 3 competitors to see keywords all 3 competitors rank forSelecting all 3 competitors to see keywords all 3 competitors rank for
  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
  2. Enter your competitor’s domain
  3. Go to the Paid keywords report
Paid keywords reportPaid keywords report

This report shows you the keywords your competitors are targeting via Google Ads.

Since your competitor is paying for traffic from these keywords, it may indicate that they’re profitable for them—and could be for you, too.

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You know what keywords your competitors are ranking for or bidding on. But what do you do with them? There are basically three options.

1. Create pages to target these keywords

You can only rank for keywords if you have content about them. So, the most straightforward thing you can do for competitors’ keywords you want to rank for is to create pages to target them.

However, before you do this, it’s worth clustering your competitor’s keywords by Parent Topic. This will group keywords that mean the same or similar things so you can target them all with one page.

Here’s how to do that:

  1. Export your competitor’s keywords, either from the Organic Keywords or Content Gap report
  2. Paste them into Keywords Explorer
  3. Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
Clustering keywords by Parent TopicClustering keywords by Parent Topic

For example, MailChimp ranks for keywords like “what is digital marketing” and “digital marketing definition.” These and many others get clustered under the Parent Topic of “digital marketing” because people searching for them are all looking for the same thing: a definition of digital marketing. You only need to create one page to potentially rank for all these keywords.

Keywords under the cluster of "digital marketing"Keywords under the cluster of "digital marketing"

2. Optimize existing content by filling subtopics

You don’t always need to create new content to rank for competitors’ keywords. Sometimes, you can optimize the content you already have to rank for them.

How do you know which keywords you can do this for? Try this:

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  1. Export your competitor’s keywords
  2. Paste them into Keywords Explorer
  3. Click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab
  4. Look for Parent Topics you already have content about

For example, if we analyze our competitor, we can see that seven keywords they rank for fall under the Parent Topic of “press release template.”

Our competitor ranks for seven keywords that fall under the "press release template" clusterOur competitor ranks for seven keywords that fall under the "press release template" cluster

If we search our site, we see that we already have a page about this topic.

Site search finds that we already have a blog post on press release templatesSite search finds that we already have a blog post on press release templates

If we click the caret and check the keywords in the cluster, we see keywords like “press release example” and “press release format.”

Keywords under the cluster of "press release template"Keywords under the cluster of "press release template"

To rank for the keywords in the cluster, we can probably optimize the page we already have by adding sections about the subtopics of “press release examples” and “press release format.”

3. Target these keywords with Google Ads

Paid keywords are the simplest—look through the report and see if there are any relevant keywords you might want to target, too.

For example, Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter.”

Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter”Mailchimp is bidding for the keyword “how to create a newsletter”

If you’re ConvertKit, you may also want to target this keyword since it’s relevant.

If you decide to target the same keyword via Google Ads, you can hover over the magnifying glass to see the ads your competitor is using.

Mailchimp's Google Ad for the keyword “how to create a newsletter”Mailchimp's Google Ad for the keyword “how to create a newsletter”

You can also see the landing page your competitor directs ad traffic to under the URL column.

The landing page Mailchimp is directing traffic to for “how to create a newsletter”The landing page Mailchimp is directing traffic to for “how to create a newsletter”

Learn more

Check out more tutorials on how to do competitor keyword analysis:

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Google Confirms Links Are Not That Important

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Google confirms that links are not that important anymore

Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed at a recent search marketing conference that Google needs very few links, adding to the growing body of evidence that publishers need to focus on other factors. Gary tweeted confirmation that he indeed say those words.

Background Of Links For Ranking

Links were discovered in the late 1990’s to be a good signal for search engines to use for validating how authoritative a website is and then Google discovered soon after that anchor text could be used to provide semantic signals about what a webpage was about.

One of the most important research papers was Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment by Jon M. Kleinberg, published around 1998 (link to research paper at the end of the article). The main discovery of this research paper is that there is too many web pages and there was no objective way to filter search results for quality in order to rank web pages for a subjective idea of relevance.

The author of the research paper discovered that links could be used as an objective filter for authoritativeness.

Kleinberg wrote:

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“To provide effective search methods under these conditions, one needs a way to filter, from among a huge collection of relevant pages, a small set of the most “authoritative” or ‘definitive’ ones.”

This is the most influential research paper on links because it kick-started more research on ways to use links beyond as an authority metric but as a subjective metric for relevance.

Objective is something factual. Subjective is something that’s closer to an opinion. The founders of Google discovered how to use the subjective opinions of the Internet as a relevance metric for what to rank in the search results.

What Larry Page and Sergey Brin discovered and shared in their research paper (The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine – link at end of this article) was that it was possible to harness the power of anchor text to determine the subjective opinion of relevance from actual humans. It was essentially crowdsourcing the opinions of millions of website expressed through the link structure between each webpage.

What Did Gary Illyes Say About Links In 2024?

At a recent search conference in Bulgaria, Google’s Gary Illyes made a comment about how Google doesn’t really need that many links and how Google has made links less important.

Patrick Stox tweeted about what he heard at the search conference:

” ‘We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.’ @methode #serpconf2024″

Google’s Gary Illyes tweeted a confirmation of that statement:

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“I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that”

Why Links Matter Less

The initial state of anchor text when Google first used links for ranking purposes was absolutely non-spammy, which is why it was so useful. Hyperlinks were primarily used as a way to send traffic from one website to another website.

But by 2004 or 2005 Google was using statistical analysis to detect manipulated links, then around 2004 “powered-by” links in website footers stopped passing anchor text value, and by 2006 links close to the words “advertising” stopped passing link value, links from directories stopped passing ranking value and by 2012 Google deployed a massive link algorithm called Penguin that destroyed the rankings of likely millions of websites, many of which were using guest posting.

The link signal eventually became so bad that Google decided in 2019 to selectively use nofollow links for ranking purposes. Google’s Gary Illyes confirmed that the change to nofollow was made because of the link signal.

Google Explicitly Confirms That Links Matter Less

In 2023 Google’s Gary Illyes shared at a PubCon Austin that links were not even in the top 3 of ranking factors. Then in March 2024, coinciding with the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update, Google updated their spam policies documentation to downplay the importance of links for ranking purposes.

Google March 2024 Core Update: 4 Changes To Link Signal

The documentation previously said:

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“Google uses links as an important factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

The update to the documentation that mentioned links was updated to remove the word important.

Links are not just listed as just another factor:

“Google uses links as a factor in determining the relevancy of web pages.”

At the beginning of April Google’s John Mueller advised that there are more useful SEO activities to engage on than links.

Mueller explained:

“There are more important things for websites nowadays, and over-focusing on links will often result in you wasting your time doing things that don’t make your website better overall”

Finally, Gary Illyes explicitly said that Google needs very few links to rank webpages and confirmed it.

Why Google Doesn’t Need Links

The reason why Google doesn’t need many links is likely because of the extent of AI and natural language undertanding that Google uses in their algorithms. Google must be highly confident in its algorithm to be able to explicitly say that they don’t need it.

Way back when Google implemented the nofollow into the algorithm there were many link builders who sold comment spam links who continued to lie that comment spam still worked. As someone who started link building at the very beginning of modern SEO (I was the moderator of the link building forum at the #1 SEO forum of that time), I can say with confidence that links have stopped playing much of a role in rankings beginning several years ago, which is why I stopped about five or six years ago.

Read the research papers

Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment – Jon M. Kleinberg (PDF)

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Featured Image by Shutterstock/RYO Alexandre

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