Sitefinity Advanced Site Search and Indexation

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Everything You Need To Know About Indexation and Search Functions within a Site

Sitefinity Search and Site Indexing

A Forrester research report showed that 43% of the people who visit a website use its search bar immediately after opening it. They don't scroll through your numerous products, and they don't hover and admire your web design. Instead, they know what they want and use Site Search to find it.

What do they do if you don’t have a search bar, though? Their task will be equivalent to looking for a needle in a haystack. Not only is that frustrating, but it takes a lot of time. Businesses exist because of their customers, and as a businessperson, you must make sure buying on your website isn’t that difficult. The best way to do so is Sitefinity Site Search. Site searches allow customers to look through a particular website's products quickly and efficiently. It also gives users direction when exploring the page. They can discover content they may not have known they were interested in.

Everything You Need To Know About Indexation and Search Functions within a Site

A good site search has two vital features. First, it is customized to a website's needs - there is no one uniform site search function. And second, it is indexed continuously to make sure the latest content is available.

Web creators use Sitefinity site indexing to define various sets of content. Visitors can then use the internal search of the website to go through them. For example, you can make a search index for all the women's clothing products you sell. And when a client types in a keyword, it'll be applied to all the relevant products. Furthermore, you can customize your Sitefinity site indexing settings to let your customers look for content in a specific field, such as women's jeans or jackets. Thus, narrowing down options and making the customer experience more pleasant. Also, you can specify what language you want the search results to be in.

Creating top-quality user-experience

Sitefinity CMS for Site Searches

People use search engines like YouTube and Google every day, and they've become an essential part of their lives. In fact, customers are so used to their search bars and the speed and ease that comes with them that they expect the same comfort with all the other websites we use. Therefore, it's essential for any website that wants to succeed, to use search bars and indexes. Any website without one seems quite bizarre. In fact, having them on a webpage is a no-brainer.

Better User Experience

But beyond that, a good site search, made by a CMS like Sitefinity, can substantially impact conversions. They have allowed businesses to tailor their webpage to the user's needs.

Such a site search takes relevant and fast search results and post-search discovery experience to build a memorable customer experience. These searches give your users the ability to filter results, look through specific categories or subcategories of content, and search for related products. Being able to go through the content easily leads to positive interactions between the content and your users.

Boost Conversion Rate

If you use Sitefinity Site Search, you can do the opposite. Instead of driving them away, you can increase engagement and boost conversion. How? Well, when you help them find what they're looking for, you can increase sales.

Customers can only make purchases if they can find the product they want. Imagine having to scroll through a few hundred moisturizers when you’re just looking for one. This will be frustrating and time-consuming. Having an advanced site search option will allow your customer to bring it up on their screen in under a minute. They can then purchase it easily.

On the other hand, if finding information on your webpage is too difficult, customers will just leave. The market is super competitive these days, and if they go, they will find another company. You need to make sure they stay.

A step-by-step guide to search indexes

How to Create Search Indexes

First, you have to set the parameters for a search index. Then place the Search results widget and Search widget on your website. Next, follow these steps:

  • Go to the Sitefinity CMS menu, pick 'administration,' and then click on 'Search indexes.'
  • Select the 'Create a search index' option, and a new page will open.
  • Type in the title for your search index in the 'Name' field.
  • Pick the content for the index. For example, a cosmetic's website can create indexes for skincare, or perhaps eye makeup. Then a customer can look for products in those specific categories. There are quite a few things you can index: Events, Content blocks, News items, Blog Posts, Documents, Products, Static HTML in pages, List items, Any dynamic module item, and Forum posts
  • If your business works out of different sites, you also need to choose if the index will contain information for all areas or just one.
  • Once you have finished the entire process, click 'Create this search index.'

In the instance that you create the index after publishing an item, you will have to reindex it. It's a simple process. All you have to do is go to the 'Search indexes' page, click the 'Actions' link for the index, and click 'Reindex.'

Editing search indexes: A search index automatically gets reindexed once you edit it. For example, if you wanted to create a new or remove an old dynamic type from your index, you can easily do it. Just follow these steps:

  • Find your way to 'Administration' and click on 'Search indexes.'
  • Pick the index you want to make edits in
  • Deselect or select the type you want to exclude or include
  • Save the changes
  • Your search index will be updated and then reindexed.
Editing Search Indexes in Sitefinity CMS
Additional Functions and Services

Sitefinity Services & Sitemap Generator

The Sitefinity CMS offers three in-built services: Lucene, Elastic Search Service, and Azure Search Service. Azure and Elastic separate the machine storage from the search index and give the users access to full search skills. These include updates, reindexes, etc. However, Lucene is the default Sitefinity CMS. It is perhaps more easy-to-use than the other options. When using it, the website database will store the search index specifications. And the actual index files are on the file system. If you are using the default settings, you can find the files in the ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/Search/ folder.

You can use the Sitefinity sitemap generator to make an XML sitemap. This map tells users about your site, the different pages, and the content available in them. The sitemap generated is an XML file that will list out the URLs for your site. Additionally, it provides metadata for each URL. If you are using different sitemaps, it also creates a Sitefinity sitemap index. You use this index to navigate between them. Since the maps list various files, search engines can look for them and quickly process them. After creating the map, the Sitefinity content management system pings search engines like Bing and Google.

How can we help

Clarity Sitefinity Experts

Site Search is an excellent way to grow your website. The Sberbank in Slovenia increased their customer conversion rates by 30% with Sitefinity. And you can do it too. The process is simple and there are no limitations to what you can achieve with it.

One could even say that Progress Sitefinity has changed the content management game. Now, any businessperson or developer can use Sitefinity Site Search to increase sales, customer engagement, and conversion rates, and it has never been easier!

Clarity Sitefinity CMS Experts

Additional Features & Resources