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CASE STUDY
How SIFMA Made a Century of Financial Market Expertise Easier to Find
By combining a modern website redesign with intelligent site search, SIFMA helps members, regulators and policymakers reach critical market information faster
“SearchStax boosts our confidence that if they use the search bar, the likelihood of finding the right resource is very high.”
Laurie Moore | VP Digital Experience
For Organizations Built on Expertise, Discoverability Matters as Much as the Content Itself
For the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), that challenge is uniquely complex. The organization serves banks, broker-dealers and asset managers active in the capital markets while also informing regulators, policymakers, academics, think tanks and recruiting prospective members. Each audience arrives with different goals, different terminology and different expectations.
At the same time, SIFMA carries more than a century of institutional knowledge. Its website contains research, comment letters, testimony, court filings, white papers, press releases and regulatory resources that help explain and support policy positions across the financial services industry.
SIFMA needed to simplify and accelerate how users connected with their vast information library. They embarked on a major website redesign as a strategic priority.
Working with digital transformation agency Code and Theory, SIFMA selected SearchStax as part of a broader website transformation initiative designed to improve discoverability, strengthen engagement and prepare for the future of AI-powered search.
| Case Study at Glance |
|---|
| The content challenge: SIFMA has deep, high-value financial market content, but different audiences often use different language to search for the same topics. |
| Why SearchStax: SIFMA wanted more control, visibility and analytics, along with easier search tuning that did not require heavy developer support like they experienced with their previous site search provider. |
| What changed: With synonyms, rules, boosting and analytics, the team can better connect visitors to the right content, even when they search using different terms. |
| The results: SIFMA has seen improved average click position, stronger click-through rate and greater confidence that visitors can find the resources they need. |
A Search Experience Built for a Complex Financial Ecosystem
SIFMA’s website serves a diverse audience with highly specific information needs.
Some people arrive looking for the latest comment letter related to a regulatory issue. Others want research supporting a policy position. Market participants may need the latest recommendations on trading calendars and holiday schedules. Policymakers and academics often seek historical context or market statistics.
“We have a significant amount of content on our website,” said Kate Zickel, Managing Director at SIFMA. “It’s very deep, often locked in PDFs in the forms of comment letters, testimony, regulatory filings and court filings.”
That depth creates tremendous value for users, but it also creates challenges. As SIFMA approached its website redesign, the team recognized that traditional search tools were struggling to keep pace with how users actually looked for information.
The goal was straightforward: help users find the right content faster and more efficiently.
Why Information Architecture Alone Wasn't Enough
The website redesign represented an opportunity to rethink how people navigated content. The project included a major effort to improve information architecture and content organization. But the team understood that navigation could only solve part of the problem.
Search behavior is often unpredictable. People may use industry terminology, abbreviations, regulatory language or informal phrases. Different audiences frequently use different names for the same topic.
SIFMA needed search capabilities that could bridge those gaps.
“We wanted the ability to rank results based on content type and keywords,” Zickel said. “One of the issues that we run into is someone may call something ‘capital standards.’ Somebody else may call it ‘prudential regulation.’ Somebody else might be searching ‘Basel.’”
All three searches should lead users to the same relevant content. Without that flexibility, valuable resources remain effectively invisible. The downstream impact of a visitor failing to find what they need is a bounce back to Google or other sources. When search fails, it can weaken trust in the digital experience. For SIFMA, whose website serves as a source of authoritative financial market information, discoverability is directly tied to credibility.
When SIFMA Outgrew Its Previous Search Platform
Prior to the redesign, the organization’s previous search platform provided basic search functionality, but the team increasingly wanted more visibility into user behavior and more control over how content was surfaced. As the website continued to grow, it became more critical that the right content appeared at the right time. Their previous platform presented too much friction in the UX/UI, and too many steps to complete even simple search optimization tasks for marketing and digital experience owners to handle themselves.
SIFMA needed the ability to actively shape search outcomes based on organizational priorities and audience needs. For example, when users search for emerging topics such as digital assets, the team wanted to ensure foundational resources appear above more specialized content. Rather than relying solely on default rankings, they wanted the flexibility to elevate specific content types – like issue pages, committee resources and related research – in a deliberate order.
“We were able to identify across the board that we wanted the issue page to come up first,” Zickel said. “Then we have a committee page, then we have the most recent research and that’s all something that we’ve implemented with rules. SearchStax makes that process simple.”
The team also wanted deeper insight into how users interact with search. Understanding what users search for, which results they select and where content gaps exist would allow SIFMA to make smarter decisions across both search and the broader website experience.
As the organization evaluated its options, it became clear that the next phase of search would require more than a functioning search bar. SIFMA needed a platform that could evolve alongside its content strategy, support ongoing optimization and give the digital team greater ownership over the search experience.
Turning Search Into a Strategic Asset
SIFMA selected SearchStax to empower their internal teams to actively manage and easily fine-tune the search experience and quality of results.
“What really sold our team was the ability to easily fine-tune our results without having to engage our developers,” Zickel said.
Instead of relying on static keyword matching, SIFMA gained the ability to continuously improve search performance based on user behavior. Search controls have transformed the information discovery experience into a smooth, seamless journey.
The digital team can now:
- Create synonyms that connect related industry terminology
- Adjust relevance based on content priorities
- Uncover searches that produce weak results
- Surface content that might otherwise be difficult to discover
- Analyze search trends to inform website improvements
Most importantly, high quality experiences via search optimization became something the digital team could actively manage rather than simply monitor.
Small Search Adjustments Create Big Discovery Wins
One of the most significant improvements came from SIFMA’s ability to align search behavior with the language their website audience uses. Christina Fortunato, Senior Associate, Corporate Communications and Marketing, highlighted how synonym management helps close the gap between internal terminology and user expectations.
“The synonyms tool has been super helpful,” Fortunato said. “For example, users searching for ‘crypto’ can now be connected to content categorized under ‘digital assets.’”
Similar adjustments help ensure users arrive at the correct resources regardless of the terminology they choose. The team also identified situations where searchers used shortened names instead of formal titles.
One example involved SIFMA President and CEO Kenneth E. Bentsen, Jr.
Users frequently searched for “Ken Bentsen,” but search results were not surfacing the correct content because official references used his full name. With SearchStax synonyms, SIFMA connected different name variations, allowing their audience to find the correct content faster.
These may seem like small changes, but they have an outsized impact on user experience. When users find what they need immediately, search becomes a seamless part of content discovery.
Search Analytics Reveal What Users Want
Beyond improving relevance, search data began revealing how users think. One example involved market holiday schedules.
Because fixed-income markets do not trade on centralized exchanges and therefore lack a single entity to establish schedules, SIFMA provides market holiday recommendations that promote orderly and resilient markets by helping market participants coordinate trading activity throughout the year. According to Zickel, the topic consistently outperforms nearly every other category on the site.
“It is far and away our most searched topic,” she said. “Plenty of people come looking for research and other resources, but the holiday schedule is consistently something that people care about. It affects their everyday lives.”
The discovery sparked several changes.
The team noticed users weren’t always searching for “holiday schedule.” Many searched for specific terms such as “Juneteenth” or phrases like “market close recommendations.”
Equipped with those insights, SIFMA not only tuned their search experience to surface their holiday schedule resource at the top of results pages for those various searches, but they also adjusted homepage content and messaging to incorporate the language people actually used. Rather than forcing users to adapt to organizational terminology, the organization adapted to its audience.
The result was a smoother path to critical information. Those insights also influenced email communications and content strategy, helping SIFMA better align future messaging with audience expectations.
Measuring Success Through Better User Outcomes
For SIFMA, search performance isn’t measured by search activity alone. The team evaluates success through broader indicators of user experience quality.
Engagement rate remains an important metric. SearchStax analytics provide visibility into how effectively users connect with content. The team also pays close attention to click position, which helps indicate whether the most relevant results appear near the top of search results pages.
“The click position is a great indicator for us to understand if we’re serving the content that people want,” Zickel said. “Since launching SearchStax, our average click position has consistently improved.”
Clicks closer to position one signal that users are finding the right information faster because relevant content appears higher in the results.
The team also monitors click-through rate (CTR) as another signal of site search success. They’ve seen improved CTR since their switch to SearchStax, which further validates their investment in search. It’s also a clear indication that search is working and users, regardless of their varied profile and needs, can find what they’re looking for.
SIFMA sees all of these improvements as a cohesive upgrade to their broader website redesign and improved content strategy, which work together to create a better experience. Users can now reach information through navigation, homepage content or search, whichever path feels most natural.
The objective isn’t to force people into one behavior. It’s to help them succeed regardless of how they choose to explore the site.
As Laurie Moore, VP Digital Strategy, explained, “We don’t necessarily care so much about how users are finding the information. We just want them to be able to find it quickly without getting frustrated and leaving. SearchStax boosts our confidence that if they use the search bar, the likelihood of finding the right resource is very high.”
Preparing for the Next Generation of Search
For SIFMA, the search journey is far from over.
The team continues to refine the search experience, analyze user behaviors and make incremental improvements that help their audience reach critical information faster. Those ongoing adjustments have become part of the organization’s digital operating model, ensuring content discovery evolves alongside changing market topics and user expectations.
At the same time, SIFMA is actively exploring how AI can further enhance content discovery across its website.
“We have capabilities built into the site today that we will start using,” Zickel said. “Some of those are AI-generated summaries at the top of our content posts, especially when something is really long or deep.”
For an organization that publishes extensive research, policy analysis and regulatory content, AI-generated summaries present an opportunity to help users quickly understand complex topics before diving deeper into the source material. SIFMA’s approach remains grounded in oversight and accuracy.
“Every single thing we do will have a human in the loop,” Zickel said. “It will have oversight, it will have approval, so nothing publishes live.”
This ethos of practical AI helping people move faster and more efficiently but always with human oversight aligns with SearchStax’s approach to AI-powered site search capabilities. Looking ahead, the organization’s biggest focus is AI-powered search itself.
“I think the next big endeavor for us is AI search,” Zickel said. “We’re confident in the site, in the data, in the quality of the information that’s there today. And now it’s about bringing that back in for users who are discovering us from the outside.”
That confidence is built on the work already completed. By improving content discoverability and creating a stronger foundation for search, SIFMA has positioned itself to embrace the next generation of AI-powered experiences while maintaining the accuracy, governance and trust its audiences expect.
Product
Site Search
Platform
WordPress
Location
North America
Industry
Financial Services
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