I’ve written before about how most marketers are missing the boat by ignoring people who search on their own website. Most marketers wouldn’t dare ignoring people who search on Google, but once they come to your site, you ignore them.
I say that you ignore them because most marketers have no team (or even a person) working on website search, even though they have people devoted to search marketing.
If you need motivation, try thinking about who your website searchers are. They somehow found your site. They navigated around. But they didn’t find what they were looking for.
So people in this situation are faced with a few choices:
- Keep navigating around. Perhaps some will do this, but everyone eventually loses patience when they still can’t find what they are looking for, so they leave to do something else.
- Go to Google and search the entire web. Many people will do this. In fact, the people who do this are the ones who really don’t care about where they find the answer. As long as they get their question answered, they are fine. This is probably the majority of people.
- They search on your website using your little search box. Only some people will do this. Who do you think they are? They are the people who really want to find the answer from you. They are existing customers. They are people who are brand loyal. They are people who have check everyone else out and want you, but they have one more question–one only you can answer.
Why would you ignore these people? They are the most likely to buy from you. And if the website search results aren’t good, you are telling them to go away. And they will.
