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The Value of Website Search
MYTH: Your
customers don’t care about the quality of site
search results.
FACT: Eighty
percent of visitors will abandon a site with
poor search functionality.
MYTH: Freeware
search engine software is good enough for site
search.
FACT: Freeware
products often end up costing website owners more,
both in IT maintenance time and in lost sales and
traffic because of poor search results.
MYTH: Site
search requires significant IT time for
administration and maintenance.
FACT:
Integrating hardware, software, and support,
Google’s search solution is designed to be fast
and easy to administer – which helps your IT staff
and your bottom line.
MYTH:
Effective site search means a big up-front
investment.
FACT: Unlike
traditional site search products – where initial
costs for installation, configuration, tweaking,
and training can be staggering – the Google Search
Appliance lets you avoid both the painful up-front
expense and the ongoing hidden costs of
maintenance contracts and IT staff time.
Value of Site
Search
When customers come to
your website, they should be able to find what
they are looking for quickly and easily.
Fortunately for your bottom line, there’s an easy,
effective way to close the gap between your
visitors and the information they need. The Google
Search Appliance brings the power of Google search
technology to your company’s website. The
importance to your business of having site search
that really works, and the low total cost of
Google’s search solution, add up to a value
proposition
you can’t ignore. Customers expect great site
search to find what they want. Your online
visitors count on search to find what they want –
90 percent of
companies report that search is the No.1 means of
navigation on their site and 82 percent of
visitors use site search to find the information
they need.3
User
expectations have been set by positive experiences
with Google web search, and users expect your site
search to provide the same accurate, quick
results. Unfortunately, most sites don’t meet
these high expectations:
85
percent of site searches don’t return what the
user sought,3
and 22 percent return no results at all.4
The cost to companies of poor site search is clear
as 80 percent of visitors will abandon a site if
search functionality is poor.5
Besides
turning away potential customers, poor site search
has another costly downside: Jupiter Research
found that only 8 percent of site visitors studied
used search as their primary way of answering
customer service questions, while 72 percent
relied on phone calls and email6. By making
self-service support information easy to find, the
Google Search Appliance reduces customer service
costs and increases customer satisfaction. Besides
the long-term revenue growth that comes from
keeping your customers happy,
IDC has found that companies save $30 every time a
user answers a support question online7.
In addition, the Google Search Appliance increases
the effectiveness of internal customer service
representatives by enabling them to find answers
to customer support questions quickly and
efficiently.
Putting Google on your site gives you a
competitive advantage.
If you’ve ever used Google, you know what your
customers and visitors will like about the Google
Search Appliance: the fast, accurate access it
gives them to the products, services, and
information on your site. The Google Search
Appliance harnesses the power of Google.com’s
industry-leading search technology to return
highly accurate
results to site search queries. The Google Search
Appliance incorporates helpful features for your
users such as a self-optimizing automatic
spell-check, and synonym matching that pairs
generic terms to product names
Independent third-party research consistently
finds that enterprise search services, such as the
Google Search Appliance, can produce the following
results:
• Increased e-commerce revenues by boosting
browsing-to-buying conversion rates.
• Increased conversions of online researchers to
offline buyers, driving offline sales by
connecting users to products and information
quickly and easily
• Reduced customer service costs by connecting
users to support information
• Increased order size and frequency of purchases
• Increased ability to find products previously
not found through navigation alone
• Increased cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
• Increased the number of page views and length of
each visit by providing visitors with the
information they want.
Google’s plug-and-play solution cuts
administrative overhead. The Google Search
Appliance packs Google’s award-winning search
technology into a plug-and-play solution. This
solution eliminates the large up-front investments
and hidden costs that burden the users of
traditional site search products such as:
• No added hardware or support costs. The Google
Search Appliance includes hardware, software,
support and product upgrades – eliminating
significant,
incremental costs of many competing products.
• No added deployment costs. Traditional site
search products require costly professional
services for implementation, while the Google
Search Appliance works
right out of the box.
• No maintenance fees. In many cases, the 20 to 25
percent annual maintenance fee charged by
enterprise search vendors is greater than the
entire annual license fee
for the Google Search Appliance.
• No manual tweaking of documents. Unlike most
site search products, the Google Search Appliance
takes the burden of organizing information off the
administrator
with an automated approach that doesn’t require
complex weighting and tweaking of documents and
indexes.
Easy to use and simple to deploy, the Google
Search Appliance provides your website visitors
with the highest quality site search results at a
price you can afford.
1 Search
Technology: Resurrecting the Web’s Workhorse,
Jupiter Media Metrix, November 2000
2 Specialize Your Site’s Search, Forrester
Research, December 2001
3 Enriching Search: Efficiency Without Additional
Spending, Jupiter Research, March 2002
4 Unpuzzling Search: Best Practices from Mondosoft
Study, IDC, August 2002
5 Search Technology: Resurrecting the Web’s
Workhorse, Jupiter Media Metrix, November 2000
6 Self-Service Strategies: Creating Value with
Natural Language Search, Jupiter Research, Volume
2, 2003
7 Unpuzzling Search: Best Practices from Mondosoft
Study, IDC, August 2002
GOOGLE SEARCH
APPLIANCE: VALUE OF SITE SEARCH
© Copyright 2003. Google is a trademark of Google
Inc. All other company and product names may be
trademarks of the respective
companies with which they are associated.
“The Google Search Appliance met all our needs.
There wasn’t another vendor that could search all
of our web and intranet content and perform to the
same level as
Google in relevance and spelling.”
Jonathan Grant,
Lead Web Developer,
Sur La Table
Contact Us
dfg@goebelgroup.com
440-289-3227
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