How Google Custom Search Can Save Your Marketing Funnel

[This is a transcription from the Clickx Marketing Hack of the Day video series.]

Implement A Custom Search Engine On Your Website For Valuable Insight

Hey Everyone! I’m Solomon with Clickx. For today’s Marketing Hack of the Day, I’m talking about building a custom search engine from Google you put that up into your website and you are going to get valuable insights as to what your users or your visitors are looking for once they land on your website. Alright! Let’s get started!

So, to set up your custom search engine, it’s really easy. Go to Google custom search engine, you just google that terms, the first thing you see is Google on search results and you go there and you sign up with your Google Account, I believe it’s free, If you don’t mind having some ads on there, but if you wanted to remove the ads and Google branding; you pay a hundred bucks, literally, you can get to set up well to be relatively simple without much time from your developer!

Now, why would you want to add a custom search engine? You are like, man! It seems like a lot of work, why would I need to search, I’m a small business, I’m a medium size business, we are only a hundred million dollar company; we don’t need it man! We don’t need it.

Your Losing Visitors When They Can’t Quickly Find What They’re Looking For

Well! I’m telling you right now, you are losing people from your funnel, because they came to your website, they landed on it, they were looking for something and they couldn’t find what is that they are looking for! When they cannot find what they are looking for they will bound up, they will go somewhere else where they can find the answers to the question. So, if you can solve that problem for your users, you will get more conversions! If you can understand that what it that people cannot find on your website, maybe you could have your design team, your development team restructure your content, so the things that they are looking for; it’s easier to find! Right! If you are going to do that, you probably, already made 10 percent more conversions on your website. If you could just do that over-and over, make people search less. Maybe that’s your goal! But, I have done so many insights after putting this; I mean the things that we are looking forward the simple step that we should be able to put it somewhere closer to the navigation or on the side bar or something where they can find it. They don’t have to really go in, click the search bar and hit it in search results and click on it, while Google provides you so many insights about wat they are looking for; you should work on having your people not have to search so much to find what they are looking for!

Allocate Money To Fine Tune Your Website To Increase Conversions

For a 500 bucks a year, if you can increase your conversion, if you can find what it is that people are looking for, so you can fine tune your website to get more conversions; I see that as like a no brainer. Alright! Because I would pay that all day, if can use a hundred bucks and generate 10000 dollars in sales, maybe 50000 dollars in sales, just because I’m going to make it easier for my users and have my design team A/B test and fine tune the layouts and do all these things and make more money; I would think that any CEO, any entrepreneur, any marketer is willing to do that.

You May Know Where To Look But Visitors May Not

The fact to the matters, I don’t actually see search bar on lot of the websites! Let’s say you are a product company, let’s say you have 70000 products on your e-commerce website, right! You have a massive website, you know what they are looking for no one else is going to find. Why! Imagine Amazon without a search bar! I t would be insanity! I couldn’t even find any of the stuff I’m looking for! So you want to make sure you implement something like this for especially a bigger website, if you are a small website; try to solve what it is that they are looking for that they can find. And for the big websites; help them find what they are looking for faster. Right!

Solve Consumer’s Needs With A Better UX Website

The other thing about this is Google gives you all the different keywords that they punch into your search engine, so you can, kind of mind that information, you can download it, and look for patterns. What are the struggles that people are having and how you can solve that with better design, better usability, better user experience and make that something you would do on a regular basis. Right!

So, what I’m trying to get to you is that you have to understand what your audiences really want! Right! If you don’t know what they want you cannot give them what they want! And to know that, this is what the common search term that we get on our website over-and over, maybe you can write blogs about that, maybe you can make it easier, maybe you can make it part of your navigation, maybe you can make it part of your footer, maybe you can make it part of your side bar whatever it is you need to make sure is that those tab search things are easier to find and that user is not going to leave your websites to go to your competitors; simply because they can find what they are looking for!

This is especially useful, if you have two sites, for instance, let’s say, your main site which is www.domain.com that is one CMS system, maybe it’s a custom built CMS system and then you have blog, maybe it’s running on WordPress which is blog.domainname.com. So of two sites, which search engine is going to search both things at the same time! Right!

Your main site does not know the all the content that you have on your blog, because it’s actually two different databases. So, at the end of the day, if you can implement this custom search engine for your website, Google can crawl both domains like nothing. It’s a piece of cake for Google and it will give the user exactly what they want in a similar search results page just like that of Google. They see exactly they want, they click on it and they go onto it, they trust Google, it’s similar to them, it’s really easy for the user and making a hell of a lot easy for you to know what they are looking for!

Google’s Tools Will Inform What Consumer’s Are Looking For

Using Google Analytics and Search Console, using all these tools you are going to know what people are using to get to your website, but when you use a custom search engine, you are able to use that insight to find out what they are looking for once they are on your website! You want to know what they searched to find you, but you also want to know what happens once they land on your website, what are they looking for now! Because there is sort of answering questions in their head, there in that buyer’s journey they are going from trying to accomplish something, maybe they are in the top of funnel stage, early learning discovery, they are looking for providers, maybe they are looking for price and maybe they landed on your website and they can find price easily and they are going to search for price. Maybe they are going to search for rates, whatever it is that they are looking for; you need to understand, where is that buyer and what kind of search queries are coming in and how you can actually make that better by improving your entire user experience.

You’ll Get A Plethora Of Information To Grow Your Business

Now, if you really want to take it to the next level which I think you should, you want to hook up your custom search engine with your Google Analytics. If you can actually hook that up, you are going to get plethora information that you could use to grow your business.

Trust me! Reason is you get to know so much more insights about how your custom search engine is doing, what are the queries maybe add that to a keyword tracker like Clickx so that you can actually know that, what am I looking for, what are keywords that we rank, what do we need to do more, because people are not finding this thing, literally on a website. Maybe we need to optimize that page easier so that they don’t even have to search on our website; they are going to land on the right page from the Google itself. You need to think about the whole process of the person searching, finding your page and not even have to search for it, because they already got what they wanted! It’s quick and easy. And that’s when it is really powerful and you are going to actually be able to return more visitors and get more conversions!

I hope you guys had some insights as to how you can use custom search engine to improve your conversions, generate more traffic for your business!

Thank you again for watching another edition of Marketing Hack of the Day.