[00:00:00] Speaker A: As both AI search and AI in general develop, marketers are facing the problem of having less and less data, less and less analytics. And so anything that can give us more insight into our audience and more insight into how they're using our site and our content is going to be golden. Today's episode is all about how we can take advantage of data from internal site search, an absolute treasure trove of insights that too many marketers leave behind. I'm Paxton Gray and this is the Campaign Foreign I'm Paxton Gray, CEO of 97 Floor. We are a digital marketing agency built to deliver world class organic and paid channel strategies for mid level and enterprise organizations. Thank you for joining us today for another episode of the Campaign. The Campaign is a marketing podcast about better knowing your audience, innovating beyond best practice, and converting visitors into customers.
You can find past episodes of the campaign on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify and at 97th floor.com. today we've got a great topic for you. One of my favorite things in marketing is finding hidden gems in data and using old tactics in new ways. And this topic falls within both of those. Marketers are in desperate need of more data and in particular more first party data about their audience.
Internal site search is an excellent way to get data for your marketing team, sales team, and for your whole company to make informed decisions. In this episode we're going to break down what makes for great internal search experience, how to build it, and why it's not just a UX feature, but that it's a strategic advantage that can shape content strategy and sales development.
Our guest for today's topic is my friend Justin Larrea, search strategist and owner of Justin Larrea Consulting. Justin has spent over a decade building both external and internal search programs for enterprise tech companies. He's a rare expert who understands how to drive qualified traffic and how to help users find what they need once they're on the site. I hope you enjoy.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Justin, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:02:04] Speaker C: Thanks Paxton. Appreciate you having me on today.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Yeah, this is going to be a great, great topic. And you know, I think internal search is one of those things that I think was talked about a little bit more maybe a decade ago in the digital landscape. And I think a lot of marketers just kind of forgot about it or maybe looked once and then haven't revisited it again. But it's in those places that people aren't looking that I think a lot of gems are found.
So from your perspective, what types of companies and sites is internal search more relevant for and who is it maybe less relevant for?
[00:02:43] Speaker C: That's a good question. I think the hard part with that is you have to really understand your business model. So where are you trying to attract your customers? The I think what people forget about in this gem is that there's so many synergies between site search and SEO. I mean they're almost synonymous to each other. Granted there's different levers you can pull at the end of the day, you know, between what you can do on Google and what you can do on your own site. But once you understand your business model, I think the biggest thing is saying if I'm an E commerce company, you're definitely going to want a site search. You're going to want the people to find what they are looking for when they're on your site. You're, if you're a, a mom and pop shop or maybe a construction company, you're probably not going to want, you're probably not going to need that. You're probably just going to want to cater your, your business towards, you know, external traffic coming into your site because they're likely going to fall exactly where they need to go. But like commerce is a big one. If you're offering services or support for something, you're certainly going to want that because you're going to have a plethora of content that you're going to want to expose. And customers aren't always going to start their journey on Google. We know that most customers start their journey in a Google like experience but you got, you have to be able to meet your customers where they're going to come to you. So whether that's direct and they need to search on your site or external income to your site and then search.
[00:03:58] Speaker B: From there, I love that. Do you use site search yourself as a consumer? Do you find yourself like actually typing in?
[00:04:07] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean like how many times have we gone to Amazon and just on direct and searched, I mean how many times do we go to YouTube and search?
Even outside of that, even when I go to buy something, a lot of times I'm going on the site to do research to understand what I'm buying. So I'm going to be searching their site for documentation or stuff they have about the product before I purchase the product. Then I also do a Google search as well to say, hey, what are the external reviews versus what, you know, boilerplate that a company may try to sell me on on the site itself.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. I was doing some research into this because like outside of YouTube and Amazon. I don't ever use the search bars and websites and it's mostly that I'm just, it's like I'm blind to it, I don't even think to use it. You know, I tend to do most of my navigation through a nav bar looking for what I want. But some research states like over 25% of people actively use those search bars.
And so, I mean that's back to Marketing 101. Just because I don't do it often doesn't mean it's not done. And so this potentially, I think is why it's so overlooked by a lot of people is like maybe you don't use this and so you're not thinking about this as a data source, but there's a lot of people that use that site search. And as you mentioned, yeah, like technical and support, there's going to be a huge volume and amount of data in there. So what would you say are some of the like, high level benefits for someone like mining the site search for like, for data? What could they expect to, how could they expect to benefit from that data?
[00:05:44] Speaker C: Well, the nice thing about getting data on your site, so when people are searching on your site, you have a well of information that you don't get. If you're looking at like Google Search Console or some of the analytic tools that are out there, you get very limited data.
Now what I get when somebody's on my site, not, not only are they, I can get what they've done before they searched, but I can also now say, hey, they searched on the site they went to, they searched X query, let's say buying a computer or buying something.
Then they said, hey, well now I want to look for that particular item, clothing, whatever.
Then you could say what did they click on? What, what, what results did they click on and where did they click in the results? Are they clicking on the fifth result, they clicking on the first result? Are they going multiple pages into your experience, which as we know from SEO, that's usually where we bury the, the bodies. On the second page you're not on the first page. But what that analytic data tells you is am I optimized correctly on my customer journey? Meaning am I ranking the right stuff on my site? And a lot of times, a lot of these site search tools, you have the ability to influence what is there. You could create featured results, you could pin content to the top, you could boost content and then it also might tell you I need better content. And nine times out of 10, as you know, from SEO, a lot of you could have the best search engine in the world, but if your content isn't good, it doesn't matter. And it's, it's an inverse relationship too. You have great content, poor search gonna install the same problem. There's very symbiotic relationship between what you people are looking for and your content. So you got to make sure that you have those gaps filled. So the data on your site is going to give you a lot of information of what people are searching on domain, but they, that's what they could be searching off domain too. And you don't know. So now you can create content, you can optimize your content and there's, there's that synergy. Not only are you optimizing it on domain, but it's going to help your off domain searches as well.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Yeah, what, what behavior would you see in the data that would indicate they're not finding what they're looking for? Like are you able to see your own version of bounce rate, which is kind of funny to think about with an internal search? Is that what you're looking for? Or are you looking like, are they just constantly doing more and more searches and that's an indication that they're not finding what they're looking for?
[00:08:03] Speaker C: Well, there's a lot of different things you're going to want to look at. You're going to want to look at your searches per visitor spv, you're going to want to look at your acr, your average click rank and just your click through rank. In general, if you see people searching a particular word at mass scale and you see them, you know, not clicking through, that's an indicator.
If they're clicking multiple pages into your experience and then finding what they're looking for, that's an tells you I need to move this particular result or optimize this content for what people are searching for. Because I think what we, we fail to understand as marketers is just because we think what customers are searching isn't what necessarily they're searching. We need to think about it in the mindset of how do customers engage, how do customers search for things? I mean, there's data out there that says the average customer uses two to two and a half keywords. That's not enough data a lot of times. So we have to try to influence our customers to provide more context. And we can do that through our on domain opportunities by having typewriter text in the search bar, giving examples like Marriott Home and Villas does a good job of saying hey, hey, I have an AI function within my search and this is what you can ask me. You can ask me, I want to go this day, for how many days, for how long and then say and then I want to end up here.
That's a great experience for a customer to say hey, I can give you this much information, wow, I've never been able to, I didn't think I could ever do that.
So those are things that we have to re educate our customers on on how to search even ourselves sometimes because we get caught in that paradigm of I'm only going to provide a word or two or three.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: Right.
I love that. And that that to me is I think for a lot of sites, depending on the site the site search has been more seen as the fail safe. If the main nav can't get you to where you need to go, there's always this and what I hear you describing as we can re educate and re optimize the site search experience to where it can be the preferred way to navigate and find what you're looking for on a site.
But showing prompts and what you can find. Go ahead.
[00:10:10] Speaker C: I'm sorry, I was going to say it's spot on. I mean when you think about navigation, think about the sites and how hard it is to navigate a website at times like the taxonomy and ontologies of the website aren't intuitive to customers unless they know your product. They've been lifelong customers but you still want to try to capture all those new customers that have never bought your product and you don't want them to be caught in a loop of trying to say well where do I go to get this? So you want to give it easy and seamless to them sometimes that search, sometimes that's navigation depending on the complexity of your site.
[00:10:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
Are there as far as implementation goes, are there.
How would you recommend somebody approach this?
You know there's things as simple as WordPress plugins for search and there's, you know I, I'd imagine it can get much more complex than that is.
[00:11:04] Speaker C: Oh yeah.
[00:11:04] Speaker B: How would you guide people in that in that way?
[00:11:07] Speaker C: That, that one's, that's, it's a slippery slope conversation in some ways because depending on how big of an operation you are, like if you're an e commerce operation doing tens of thousands of dollars a year versus hundreds of thousands of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars, you're going to need to have tools that are going to meet those needs. So you know, you're probably not going to have a WordPress site, you know, unless you're a mom and pop shop or something smaller that caters to maybe a smaller audience as far as volume is concerned.
Whereas you may have a hosted site and you may want to put it on something like Google Vortex AI as an example, easy to implement all the power of Google, all the back end of Google that they know of. Or you may want to have something more sophisticated. You know, it depends on what, what kind of operational team you have around search as well as do they have the experience or do you have an outside dev team that's going to be laboring that load because you have, you know, as easy as like, hey, I can install a beacon on a site and that does it for me. Or you could have a very sophisticated environment that requires a lot of data engineers and support or search engineers to make sure they're optimizing that journey for all your customers. So it is really just kind of, you have to really sit back and say, I have to understand my business and I have to understand where I want to take my business. Because when you decide to go with a search engine, that's likely going to be your North Star, that's going to be, hey, this is where I want to go and this is where I'm going to go for years, versus I'm going to change in six months. Because the technology is changing so quickly. You kind of really have to look at that from that length, in my opinion.
[00:12:53] Speaker D: Recent data shows that brands are seeing a 30 to 50% decrease in traffic because of Google's AI overviews. That's an enormous traffic loss. If this is something you're thinking about, either because you need to recover traffic or stay ahead of all the changes in AI search, I want to offer you a completely free AI overview audit. I'm Brittany Dillard, a senior SEO strategist at 97th Floor, and our teams use this exact audit for our clients to discover where brands sit in AI Overview results compared to competitors.
This AIO audit informs our strategy for how to drive more conversions as AI continues to develop in search. And we've been able to help brands maintain conversions and therefore revenue even while search traffic drops. If you're interested in getting this comprehensive AI Overview audit done for your brand completely free, head on over to 97th floor.com AI audit and fill out the form on that page so our team can get started. A link to that page will also be in the show notes. And trust me, you want to take advantage of this one.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: Hey everyone, it's Paxton here. I want to take a break from this conversation to bring you the latest in marketing and AI news.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: First up, Google has added AI search.
[00:13:58] Speaker A: Mode traffic to Search Console reports.
AI mode clicks and impressions are now included in your existing totals rather than showing up as a separate category. There's also a metric for position and AI mode, which works the same way as regular Google search results pages. Google notes that all impression, position and click data in the new response are counted as coming from this new user query and that quote, the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search. Also, John Mueller confirmed on June 17 that quote for what it's worth, no AI system currently uses LLMs txt files unquote. So if you were worried about that, don't be. Reddit just launched two new AI powered ad tools to help brands better understand conversations happening on the platforms. The products were announced on the first day of the Cannes Festival and are powered by what Reddit calls quote Community Intelligence insights drawing for more than 22 billion posts and comments.
The first tool, called Reddit Insights, is a social listening tool for marketers to see conversation summaries about topics and brands with links to specific posts and top subreddits. The conversation summary Add on lets brands display positive user posts or sentiment summaries right below their ad. Creative Reddit has formalized what used to be manually provided audience insights into a scalable self service tool powered lightly by AI.
Coo Jen Wong uses the word lightly because the tools are ultimately meant to help advertisers go deeper right into the communities. The discussions and the actual posts of the tool will surface.
Finally, Chat GPT now allows pro users to connect with apps such as gmail, Google Drive, HubSpot and more.
Now instead of importing manually the document you're working on, Chat GPT is synced in real time with whatever you choose to share with it. You can prompt the AI to conduct deep research in your very own inbox. The possibilities for efficiency and exploration here are enormous. Note that if you're using a pro plan, you need to toggle off the quote improve the model for everyone's setting unquote to prevent OpenAI from using information access in your apps for training, no word as to whether these features will become available in the free tier. Now back to the episode for somebody.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Who'S looking to let's say they're at a mid level org with a decent size audience and somewhat technical offering. So there like there's need for support around like let's say it's a I Don't know, let's just say some, someone that fits that and they don't have anything like this. They're looking to, to get investment.
What, what would you recommend somebody go to the C suite as they're trying to campaign for this investment of like resources and time and energy?
What would be some of the upside that they could, like they could pitch to get this kind of investment?
[00:16:51] Speaker C: That's a great question and it's one that comes up quite often. Like what? Once you understand I need to add this investment into my site, then you need to take a look like how many people are coming to your site directly, how many people are engaging with your site and take. Carve out that, that mix and say, let's say that's, let's say 60% are coming from organic and 30% are coming to your site direct. Well, of that 30% figure out maybe half of that is going to do a search on my site. If I have that option, then you got to say, okay, great. What is my average search? What are, what is my average cost to sell a product?
What is my revenue going to be if I have that person search and get that, that same product more quickly and efficiently than having to call me, email me, chat with somebody? Same thing if I'm offering other services. If you want to make these the offer, simple customers don't want to call these days. They want to make it. They want to get on their phone, they want to get on their device, whether it's a tablet or a computer and buy. They want that gratification right at the point in time and you got to make it easy for them. So when you're taking a look at that, you got to take a look at how much is this, Whatever the product you're buying from a search standpoint is, let's say it's going to cost you $10,000 a year as an example.
Well, am I going to make up that revenue by having people search on my site? Am I going to, am I going to drive an ROI to that or am I going to make multiples of that? That's really how you have to drive it. Because most C suite, you know, if you're talking to an executive or a president, well, what is it going to cost me and what is my return on investment? Yeah, those are the two big things they're going to ask you and those are going to be the driving factors of are you going to get approval to do that?
[00:18:42] Speaker B: I love that. Yeah. And I think a lot of marketers will say well, it's a better user experience and that's not enough. You know, unfortunately that's not enough, not in this market. Yeah, no, definitely. I love what you're saying. So like take your direct traffic, let's say half of them search and then that's going to have an impact on their conversion rate and it's going to have an impact on probably speed to close. We could justify, if I can get them the right content faster, then in the sales process they're going to close faster because they've already been delivered the information that they need.
So there's a handful of like very bottom line metrics that this will have an impact on.
Now I want to know what it actually looks like. So in doing my research on this because you know, this is one of those things for me, my experience has been site search. Like oh yeah, that's great. I looked at it and I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And then I kind of moved on to other things and so I've been revisiting this topic and one person I saw they use, I'm not sure what they're using for their search, but whatever their search bar, you know, it creates search parameters within URLs and they're using analytics to analyze the searches that are being done to say how many times does this URL with this URL parameter appear?
And then I can dissect that URL to understand what the query was. That seems like a very roundabout way to analyze that data, although you know, can be done. I'm, I'm curious where it comes to actual looking. You mentioned searches per user as a metric. I think was it searches per user.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: Searches, searches per visit as an example or. Yeah, but I mean that's a great.
[00:20:27] Speaker B: Thing to look at. What else would they be looking at from a data like how would you analyze that?
[00:20:31] Speaker C: I mean for one, if you're analyzing URL parameters to decide what people search for and how they did it, that's too difficult. You've already over complicated and now you probably have a lot of man hours in headcount to do that. Unless you figured out a way to automate that through AI or using large language models, which is possible as well. But when you're starting to look at like a platform, like if you're looking at a platform like gext, Solar Coveo, even Google Vortex, AI, you're going to get all that information as part of the reporting suite. So you're going to see what did somebody search, what did they do after the search and what they, by what did they click on and where did they click on the results? You should have all that data readily available in whatever platform you get. Now, even if you was a WordPress, there's plugins for that which then you could, you could add reporting suites to it to help you with that reporting as well. It's very much, you know, a lot of the reporting back end is going to give you a lot of rich data that you otherwise wouldn't have. And you should, it should make it easier for you to make educated business decisions as to what do I do because I have people searching to use a Josh Bazinski quote, you know, red apples and you know, they searched red apples. So because they searched red apples and I'm not showing them anything, there's no click, there's, you know, or minimal click events.
I need content for that likely or I need to optimize my existing content because I'm not using that terminology correctly.
The other thing that you're going to want to look at is from that data, how can I influence marketing patterns? How can I go ahead and go back to my, my sales team or my marketing team and say, hey, I have customers looking for this. Do we have plans to offer this or do we have something that fits this that I can optimize or put within the experience so that customers can find it and then either buy it or use it as a service or whatever, whatever it is your company's doing.
[00:22:32] Speaker B: That's interesting.
I'd imagine too that you could also think of it as like a lagging indicator validation of other marketing initiatives where you could say, hey, I'm getting actually a significant amount of direct traffic that's coming to the site and searching for this term that we're trying to coin. We can see that go up. So it's like it's having an impact. Whereas in the past we had to rely on searches on Google are going up for this term. So that's going to be some indication of success. But all this direct traffic is kind of lost when we could now attribute a bunch of that to they're looking for this thing that was more top of funnel. We can indicate and connect that back to them very much Interesting.
[00:23:17] Speaker C: I mean, just think about the data we don't get from Google anymore. Now you have that data and you can utilize it in a much more efficient manner and share it with your internal teams to drive more visibility, which is sales or support or whatever it is that your company's offering.
[00:23:38] Speaker B: I love that.
Are there other teams within an organization that would find benefit from this in your experience outside of just the like content and search teams.
[00:23:53] Speaker C: Yeah, content's a big one. So content marketing teams are really going to enjoy having the access to that data. They're also going to be able, it also will influence their content cycles as far as production and or evergreen content, updating or modifying existing content. The other teams that really find value in is marketing and sales.
Especially if you have someone in those organizations, which a lot of people do. As far as business analysts, those business analysts in those sales and marketing teams go, hey, wait, we're thinking about offering this product or hey, we, we have something that may fit this, let's present this to that person. And then you can also use that to influence what you're doing online from PPC all the way to SEO.
So those synergies are just, it's amazing how many people forget about all the synergistic aspects, you know, between what people do on your site versus what they're doing off your site. I mean, so many times when I'm working with clients, they don't even have their PPC teams and SEO teams and insight search teams even talking to each other. They don't even know who they are in some cases or they're completely different teams in a silo. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, there are so many opportunities here because we already know from data that customers coming or customers doing searches convert at a higher rate and they convert at a higher rate on your domain. And from an SEO point of view, even more so than your ppc.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: I love that. And you're right, I've seen that so much these siloed teams, they could be running so much faster if they would just share data and work together.
I love that.
This has been a great discussion.
I really think as we start to lose more and more data from Google and Google, AI mode rolls out and AIOS continue to dominate SERPs, we need as marketers to be looking for other sources of data. And this is one of those nuggets that I think has really just been slept on. But we need to revisit in the industry and you've helped shed light on that. So I think that's, that's, that's really helpful.
[00:25:59] Speaker C: I mean, I think one of the things that to also consider about because even as you continue to develop for your own site AI is the catch coin phrase, you have an opportunity even on your own domain to implement AI, whether it's through Google Vortex or any other large language model, you should be looking at it and then looking at how customers are engaging and using that as part of your search experience or part of your chat experience, and using all that data to then compile how you go, continue to improve your business and, and your footprint.
[00:26:34] Speaker B: Is there any way that you would think differently about the data from, let's say an AI chatbot versus a search bar on a site, or would you be able to kind of combine those sets of data?
[00:26:44] Speaker C: I think I might be in the minority right now. So when I take a look at it from an SEO point of view, I don't like how it's quantified as direct or referral traffic.
I look at that, that's still search traffic. Whether it's searching in Google or searching on my own domain, that is, in my opinion, search traffic that is being allocated elsewhere that traffic. You still need to make sure your AIO or geo, whatever acronym you want to use for Generative Engine optimization, those practices should be in your head when you're modifying or optimizing your on domain content versus what you're showing in Google versus what you're showing in the AIO or any one of the LLM bots out there.
Those are all. Those should be looked at synergistically and holistically to say, hey, how am I optimizing this content to get visibility, to get eyes on it? Whether customers are searching an LLM to your point, or they're searching on domain or they're searching somewhere else.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I like that. I like that. Take in perspective. And it's true.
As things continue to develop and roll out at the end of the day, like keeping that customer experience and like, are we answering their questions? Are we giving them what they need? Has to be what we hold on to, especially as things just continue to get more and more opaque.
And that's what, that's what we're finding is being successful. Just like, just help them out, answer their questions, give them information they haven't seen before and help them along their journey. And maybe, yeah, I agree that they shouldn't. It's. It's all the same. Um, anyway, I think that's, that's a really great take. Um, Justin, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an awesome discussion and I think is something that all definitely search marketers should be looking at. All marketers should be looking at implementing and then digging into that site data. And I bet there's a significant amount of people listening today who have site search enabled and built on the site and nobody's looking at that information.
So I mean this would be a quick win to go dive into that today and see what you can find to help improve that that user experience. So thank you for for joining and sharing some light on that.
[00:28:57] Speaker C: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: That is all for today. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a five star rating and review and subscribing so that you don't miss future episodes. Huge, huge thank you to Justin Larrer for joining us today. You can find justin on LinkedIn if you want to talk with him more about this topic.
Major takeaways for me from this episode include Number one, if you're an E commerce brand, of course you have to have strong internal search engine built out and you probably already should already do. If that's you, start digging that data today and look what you can uncover for other facets of your marketing. Number two, if you're not using internal search, hopefully now you have a better idea of how it works and how you can better utilize that data to improve your overall user experience and marketing.
So great to talk about a topic that doesn't get enough attention or credit for what it can do for a business.
You can find past episodes of the campaign and
[email protected]. Also, you can learn more about the agency and get in touch with a marketing specialist if you want support for your own marketing campaigns. Please join us next week for a conversation with FullStory's VP of Brand, Adam Gunn, about the importance of behavioral data and AI in understanding user experiences. We'll also cover how marketers may need to start building online experiences for AI agents. We'll catch you then. See ya.
SA.
