Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Optimizing Content for Search- and Navigation-Dominant Visitors
search is one of the most important user interface elements in any large website today.
as a rule of thumb, sites with more than 100 pages should offer site search. Keep the
following in mind:
p
•
lace a search query box on every page.
G
•
lobal search is better than scoped search.
•
a
nd, or, Boolean, and other advanced queries should be moved to an advanced
search page.
you can choose to split your visitors into two categories: search-dominant visi-
tors and navigation-dominant visitors. Create a set of segments so that you can actively
work with these visitor groups and achieve more precise content optimization based on
how they navigate your site. the segments should include:
s
•
earch-dominant visits
n
•
avigation-dominant visits
340
•
B
ounces (which consist of one page view only, by a visitor who used neither tra-
ditional navigation nor internal search)
Before showing you how to set up the segments in yahoo! web analytics, i want
to tell you why i think this is a significant discovery. i strongly believe that making a
visitor suffer through poor direction-finding elements (in other words, traditional navi-
gation or internal search) is bad for business. and “poor” means your visitors are not
able to find the content they are looking for.
when you set up the segments, i suggest using the following filters:
s
•
earch-dominant visit segment
• exclude all bounces
• include all visitors who searched on the first page of their visit path
n
•
avigation-dominant visit segment
• exclude all bounces
• exclude all visitors who searched on the first page of their visit path
B
•
ounce segment
• include all bounces
For some websites, it will be obvious how people navigate; for other sites this
behavior will be less obvious, and as indicated earlier, might differ from section to sec-
tion or from referring source to referring source. For instance, people may search to
get closer to the section on a specific product, but browse and navigate through your
14 offerings.
