While rushing to close 2018 deals, business teams everywhere are also finalizing 2019 plans. Business cases have been calculated, lists have been prioritized and they’re getting to green light 2019 initiatives. All of these are focused on yielding the greatest return for businesses. Increasingly, site search is on the list because of the hidden value in this capability.

Among the value being found by companies are:

We were recently looking at one of our client’s Google Analytics dashboards. One of the reports reported the marketing goal achievement of searchers vs non-searchers. While we’ve known for a long time the positive impact that site search has on transactional and commerce experiences (see next section) we were encouraged to see the data that showed that marketing goal achievement was 87% higher for searchers than for non-searchers. That’s almost double!

Now you can only get to these levels of performance if your search is really good. It’s about doing what we expect most search engines to do: Answer our questions accurately. This client has made the investment in understanding the sources of search failure and fixing many of those. Their search success rate is 44% and going higher. This is the type of experience that your visitors expect.

Higher conversion rates from site searchers is a well documented phenomenon. It’s intuitive that this is so. The person who is searching knows what they want and thinks you have that thing. All you have to do is point them to the thing that they want. Some studies of highly transactional businesses have indicated that searchers are up to six times more likely to buy.

Again, the table stakes for getting this value is to make sure that your search engine experience delivers highly relevant answers that allow the buyer to move forward with their journey.

Anyone who tracks traffic on their website knows how much of their traffic comes from Google. The data that not everyone looks at is the amount of traffic that goes back to Google. For many companies the amount of traffic that goes back to Google is almost equivalent to what they got in the first place.

We looked at data for a couple of companies and found that on average 30.5% of their traffic comes from Google. We also found that 24.5% of their traffic exits to Google. What is frustrating is that many companies spend a tremendous amount of money (it’s an $80B industry) on search engine optimization and search engine marketing. They’re paying to attract the traffic. What they struggle with is retaining that traffic.

What’s the value of retaining that traffic? One large chemical company we’re working with has determined that their digital lead value is $10,000. We recently calculated that just focusing on increased search retention of one product could yield over $60,000 in incremental revenue. This is a number you should be able to calculate for your business to demonstrate the value of better search.

Great search improves marketing goal achievement, improves commerce conversions and improves the yield on your SEO and SEM spend. What could be more valuable than that? Invest in better search. Site search is your hidden growth engine. What’s in your budget?