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Sitecore Search for Marketing

In this blog post, I have shared information about Sitecore Search. Most of the content in this post are my notes from a webinar presented by development team of Sitecore Search that I felt I should share with you :)

What is Sitecore Search?

Sitecore Search is an API first product designed by Sitecore to build search experiences from scratch without the need of complex code. The APIs can be integrated in any solution and the look and feel can be configured to match the application. Sitecore SPEAK also provides some UI elements that can be integrated with these APIs to build the search experience.

Sitecore Search can be a great offering while re-platforming an application. In this post, we will learn more about capabilities of Sitecore Search.

How Sitecore Search can help your organization?

  1. Sitecore search is great for marketers. It empowers them to configure searchable experiences without need of technology personnel.
  2. It enhances content discovery which generates more leads. Hence, it ensures higher customer conversion.
  3. It allows automation to be implemented in search with controls.
  4. It is a scientific method, powered by analytics which can tell which content is doing well and where are the content gaps. It helps you find most important stuff about your site content and work on enhancing it.

Why there is a need of Sitecore Search?

Most of the features asked by customers related to website search are provided by handful of vendors only. Sitecore Search is developed with this in mind so that it becomes a full package which helps marketers, customers and end users. We will learn more about this in coming sections.

How Sitecore Search can help Marketers?

It is important to track how users are interacting with your search page and then analyze the collected data in the right way, so that you can focus on improving what is not good, instead of wasting time and money making something that’s already working well, better. To aid this, Sitecore Search empowers marketers with search analytics.
  • Marketers get statistics of each piece of content, how it was visited and lot more then what you can see in content editor.
  • Sitecore Search helps marketers to merchandise content by boosting or burying records in search results. Based on user journey and other metrics, more relevant content may get boosted and promoted.
  • There is questions and answers feature where use can type a question in search and Sitecore Search will try to provide answers.

  •  People are really used to Google type search responses. Sitecore search is trying to provide this power to marketers. Empowering marketers to be able to pull up similar things without the need of a technical person.
  • There is also recommendation feature which can recommend content based on the type of content user has searched.

How can Sitecore Search benefit Customers?
  • Sitecore Search has the capability to support better UX.
  • Firms that show correct and relevant search results can benefit by reduction in number of contact center cases for information. 
  • Sitecore Search has the analytics to show bad content. Hence, it allows customers to reduce bad content and focus on good content only. 
  • Sitecore Search ensures to provide better user engagement based on OOB personalization.
  • Sitecore Search improves SEO.
  • Better content discovery generates more leads and hence provides more insights about visitor. 
  • Sitecore Search can show personalized search results to end users, hence, ensuring that right content is presented to the right person at the right time. Based on a visitor journey, Sitecore Search is able to return relevant search results-


Sitecore Search empowers by providing out-of-the-box configurable personalization to ensure content relevancy - 


Below snapshot outlines the major benefits of Sitecore Search to Sitecore customers-



Sitecore Search has a mechanism to search on scale based on its out of box features and only tweak parts that are most relevant to you.

Sitecore Search allows user to preview search which includes complete functionality with visual and textual suggestions


Sitecore Search provides results in fast way without losing the page or context.

Sitecore Search provides Full Page search which includes filters and facets, supports sorting, pagination, personalization controls etc. as in snapshot below.


    

How Sitecore Search works behind the scenes?

Below are the steps that get executed in Sitecore Search to ensure relevant content is returned to the site visitors - 




I hope it helped to understand few basics about Sitecore Search.
Note - The snapshot shared in this blog post are property of Sitecore.

Thanks for reading! Hope it helps you!

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