Why site search is broken for marketers

Jae 

Thanks for taking the time to chat, Sameer. So the first question is –  the topic is really around modern site search, and why is site search right now broken for marketers? Why is it difficult for marketers? And we talked about this in the context of better control of the overall experience. You’ve been in this industry for a really long time – can you describe how people typically think about site search experience as a capability? What are their expectations – like what do they think about it? We’ve heard a lot of things about “it’s just supposed to work” – can you provide a little baseline context about that first?

Sameer

Yeah, so let’s start with people who are responsible for the experience of the property, in this case – it could be mobile, it could be web, but essentially, the experience that they are responsible for. Today, you’ll find when you talk to those people, there are a few different ingredients that those people use in how they think of site search. There are folks who don’t know anything about search. And for them, they have no understanding or visibility, or even an  appreciation around the value of site search, and what it brings to the experience around – whatever it brings to the content experience, right?  So that’s one.

I think the second is folks who know site search can – have probably dabbled around,  either they have past experience with site search, and they have done some projects with search, but for them, I think they don’t go near them –  it’s because they’ve either had a bad experience with it, or those projects have not achieved  the ROI that they were hoping to achieve. And because of that, they see it as a black box. And the fear about going close to that is because they feel like they don’t have the full appreciation and how to talk about it, and they don’t understand it. And they sometimes treat it as black art or magic that happens. And they don’t take full control of managing and doing certain things that they could utilize that search functionality or feature to really have a positive impact on the experience. 

And then there is the third group of people who really understand the value of search, who have the knowledge of convincing people within the company that site search is important and the value that site search can bring to the table. And they have through past experiences figured out a way to convince everyone that the solutions they have today – regardless of the cost of those solutions – is important enough and valuable enough to be actually undertaken into their initiatives and actually want to do something about it, right? And they’re okay with the heavy lift, they’re okay with the long ROIs, they’re okay with the inefficiencies because for them, they see the value so much that they can justify that expense and they’re totally fine with it. 

So to me, those are three ways of how you can bucket these three types of people within an organization or marketing team right now. Then the question becomes, why are these three behaving the way they’re behaving? And I think for the first part, it’s just lack of awareness. Right? So there’s nothing outside of – they don’t know anything about site search. For the last one, they know the value. But it’s more about, “What do I have in front of me that is available today to solve this problem”, right? And the path that they go after is, “I understand there are a lot of search vendors. Depending upon my need, they’re heavy, they require implementation, they come with a cost, they’ve come with a price tag. And that’s okay. Because I have gained that experience in this ecosystem. And I’ve been in the marketing teams enough that I can justify the value proposition of spending $250,000 to $300,000 to $500,000 to a company”, right? And it also depends on the size of the organization where ROI totally makes sense. And they are like, they can choose a vendor, or they decide that I’m going to assemble the team that has search experts, right. And I’m going to bring all the search experts, and I’m going to assemble that team, and I’m going to get that right. So now that that’s more of a build versus buy decision, right, whether I use a vendor or whether I do it myself, that’s  the path they go after. Now, the third – and , again, it’s just the building of it, and then the care and feeding of it, right? And they’ve accepted the fact that it’s just expensive, and “I need to rely on the specific specialized expertise to manage and enhance it, and I’m okay with it.” And so they’re living with it, and they’ve made their peace with it.

And then there’s the middle part where I think what happens is, they have a fear of search, because it feels like they look at the folks that are doing it well, but they feel like they don’t have the expertise – they can go out and get the expertise, but that expertise costs so much that they can’t justify the value proposition. Or they can go buy into a vendor’s solution, but the vendors are too heavyweight, right? So then they end up either doing nothing, even though they know that they want to do something, mostly because they’re not going to get enough wind behind their sail to actually make it happen. Or they sometimes choose some sort of a – they rely on the team that they have. But, they don’t really get the results that they’re looking for. And that’s primarily because it is a specialized skill that needs to happen. So from a marketing perspective and the audience’s perspective, that’s the way to think about what happens today, and why marketing teams and certain organizations behave or act, or don’t act on a search experience the way they could.

Jae 

That’s really interesting, because what I’m hearing is that it’s almost like there are really three very, completely different mindsets. There’s not a gradual, sort of set of people who look at search as – in other words, either you’re in the ROI bucket, or you’re not. And you’re really looking at it as a long term investment, or you’re just  somewhat scared of it. And you’re like,  what, I don’t really even know how to approach it. And you mentioned it from the marketing standpoint, so then, how does this impact developers? Because what we’re hearing is, and what we know is that over time developers have taken such a heavy lift – they take on so much of the responsibility in the role when it comes to ownership of the site search experience, right? And so can you talk about how the developers think about that role? And maybe also, how would what you just described impact the developer?

Sameer

So if you think about it from a development perspective,  I think there’s an aspect of developer who’s focused around implementation, right? And what they’re saying is, ”Hey, marketers want a search tool. I’m going to take a vendor and I’m going to implement a search tool, right?” That’s one. 

Then there is an aspect of DIY – and especially at the lower end, they don’t even know the problem. So the developers aren’t even  worried about anything. But at the mid-sized segment of the market, the developer pretty much has a choice of utilizing one of the existing systems that are available out there. I think also developers are in two buckets. One is around a developer that’s oriented to the marketing team that is trying to build the search experience. But they’re primarily focused on the implementation aspect of the search experience, right? They don’t have the tools, neither do they have the budget or the time to really do a full  justice to search. They don’t have the tools, or they don’t have freedom to go make sure that they can gain the benefit of capturing analytics – or user behavior – around search. They can implement a basic site search capability. But there is an aspect around search quality, which may be out of their depth – in other words, they may struggle with how to make sure they can deliver a high quality site search experience. 

And then the third aspect of it is around continuous care, feeding and innovation around that site search capability that is expected – which, again, consumers are spoiled by Google and Amazon. And because they’re spoiled, they expect the same level of search from a digital experience for any of the company’s websites. So pretty much from a developer perspective, it’s about the success in being a web developer, which means skilled at building good experiences in service to the marketing team. That web developer may know how to integrate search, but what they – and I’m making a generalization – but a large majority of organizations don’t know how to get the maximum value out of site search. So there’s a difference between implementing a search functionality, and making sure that the value can be realized out of a search function. And that’s why when you go to a lot of sites, you see that they will have site search, because a developer implemented site search as a feature. But if you search for something, you may not be able to find it. I think I was on a website the other day – great company that has a great

brand that talks all about candies, they have a site search capability. But if you search for candy, nothing comes up. But if you search for candies, plural – things come up. So that’s the level of nuance, which is a poor search experience, right? If you search on Google for that, that’s going to give you results. If you search on that website’s search bar, nothing’s going to come up. If you mistype candies, you’re going to have a poor experience. So there’s a lot more in the experiential aspect of search, which is related to quality, which  unfortunately will all too often not get the benefit of ongoing improvement, once the developer has implemented that basic site search capability on the website, because they don’t have the depth of taking it to that extreme. Again, most of them don’t have that. There is a certain piece, which you called search expertise. And then you bring that search experience and you have to install that experience into your web team, which again, becomes a very costly proposition, and the large enterprises can afford to do that, and they do that. 

But then there’s a third aspect of it – the day to day,  looking at the quality aspect of search, understanding if the quality is being delivered, and what are we doing about it? That’s an area – I don’t think developers wanted to be in that situation. Because the developers love to create value, love to build value. But I – like I’m a developer, I don’t want to do the same thing every day again and again, right? That’s not what excites me. I’m a builder, I want to build something, I don’t want to maintain that. And I don’t want to have to keep on looking at the data and change the data day in, day out. So what ends up happening is most of the research projects get implemented and then forgotten about, because the marketing team, who do care about the content and the quality, they don’t have the tools to react to that. And they end up in implementations or projects that might have been implemented successfully. So developers did what they were asked for, developers did a fantastic job. But , there’s no one to then care, feed and have  a feedback loop and a cycle after that. Because the tools aren’t available in the market.

Jae   

Then what ends up happening? What do – like if somebody today finds that candy example, with the spelling variation, does it fall on the developer, ultimately, to implement that little tiny change?

Sameer  

So if I’m in the marketing team, what happens? And I’ve heard that a lot, right? Hey, my CEO sent me this note on Slack, saying, “Hey, I tried to search for candy. I can’t find candy on our website, and we sell candies.”  Or, we talk about candies; our brand is candy. So to the marketer, it seems like there is a problem. But they don’t always know how to articulate that, right? It’s just, “Hey, the search function doesn’t work.” But when you go to the developer – he’s like, well I implemented what we asked for. Right? So then the question is, they have to go back to the developer to say, what do we need to do? And then, you end up where the developers are saying, “Oh, now we have to build something in reaction to what we heard.” And they go back to the developer to ask them to change things. And then the developer makes the change and comes back, and that – apparently, that cycle keeps on going forever. So again, it solves the problem, but it solves the problem in a very inefficient manner. And it solves the problem where the developer’s probably not happy doing that every day. And the marketer’s not happy not having control and having to depend on a full development team and reacting in ways that change the priorities every now and then of the development team. So it’s a bad experience internally in the organization, and inefficient.

Jae   

You mentioned earlier that we’ve been spoiled by Google and Amazon, the ecommerce experience search – I would imagine what you’re describing – those little changes that you need to make – they probably are happening a lot more frequently now, because digital experience is so much of an important part of the overall customer journey for most organizations

Sameer  

Yeah, I mean, look, experience is critical – people have recognized that, and this is just the reality. People have recognized that an experience on your website, or any of your property, is very important. And people have certain expectations around that experience. And when people have a bad experience on your website, that reflects on your brand. That reflects on your ability to create a perception in the buyer’s, or the site visitor’s mind, right? They are trying to do something on your website. If you’re going to provide a bad experience, especially when I know your brand and I’m coming to look for something that’s important to me, whether it’s research, whether it’s evaluation, whether it’s purchasing, whether it’s support – if I come and I asked for that information, and I’m looking for information, my perception of your brand goes down if I can’t find it. If the value decreases, in my mind, sometimes I may –  you may have a captive audience that they’re going to be willing to stick with you. But in a lot of cases, they’ll be like, I’m going to go to the alternative, which has a better experience.

Jae 

Yeah, and you mentioned brand there. So it’s not just about commerce. And you mentioned a bunch of examples where it’s just like searching for information and research and things and it’s not just about commerce, and to your point, then that the brand itself is affected, just because I didn’t have a good experience. It’s not like I couldn’t find a product, and therefore I didn’t buy it, and therefore you lost revenue opportunity. It’s just brand damage, reputation, because I have a perception now that they don’t have their act together.

Sameer  

Or they don’t have the content I’m looking for, right? I mean, today’s consumers – or customers or consumers, whatever form or fashion – purchasing is, I think, what’s very common. We all relate to purchasing. But if you look at the B2B websites, a lot of times purchasing is complex, right? Brands, there is an aspect of marketing where it’s not just about the last mile of the transaction, it’s also about that entire journey, as you mentioned. And that journey has so many different stages. 

If you map out the entire customer journey and ask any customer experience person, purchase is just one part of that entire experience cycle. There is loyalty, there are referrals, there are evaluations, there is awareness, there is research. There are so many steps that go into creating a great experience that you can’t just think about the last mile of purchase. That’s thinking too short term. Or too tactical. And if you look at all those,  if I come to your website, let’s say I am a particular architect who’s looking for certain information, versus a buyer, what information you present is going to be significantly different for different personas that are coming in at a different stage and in a different buying cycle. That has nothing to do with conversion or commerce. It has to do with providing the right information to the right person at the right time.

Jae   

Absolutely. And then having the visibility to understand what they’re looking for and what they’re doing on the backend.

Sameer  

And how complex it is for them to find what they’re looking for, where they’re looking for it. And it’s important for marketers to have that information in their heads.

Jae  

Are marketers today, then – following up on that question, and maybe going back to the idea that developers are the ones that those changes fall on, right? So the responsibility for that. They don’t want to do it. Is there already an operational process in place then, right now, for legacy search technology, legacy implementations? Are the developers making those changes? And therefore – are the marketers even aware that they could control the experience and that they should be controlling the experience? Or is it still that the developers should be doing it?

Sameer  

I think that’s a good question. I feel like, in a general sense, I think today, in the market, marketers in their mind have written off that it’s something that they actually do – there are things around it where they can have more control, and have the ability to change that themselves. And I think they’ve written it off to say, I always have to go to a developer for this, right? And I – , it’s – the corollary to that is email campaigns. Email campaigns used to be a purely developer oriented function, right? Like, if you look at companies like MailChimp, what they did was they really enabled a content person who was a non-technical, non-engineering person, to be able to create amazing email campaigns, and give them the ability to have control over sending these, analyzing these, making these changes, and optimizing the entire experience without talking to the developer. Now the developer is involved in maybe creating the first template or maybe creating a few templates, right, to make sure that that initial template completely matches my brand identity, right? But once that identity and the foundation has been set, I don’t need a developer to run campaigns. I don’t need a developer to do A/B testing. I don’t need a developer to do subject testing. I don’t need a developer to analyze all that stuff. And to me, I think that’s the part that I feel marketers need to know that they can now do that with search. And they don’t.

Jae 

I’m curious what you think about this, then – , you said the marketers need to know how they – that they can do it. What do the developers think of that – it’s almost like they’ve been forced into doing this for a long time – how do you think they feel about “giving up control”? Because, at the same time that it’s something that might be tedious for them,if there’s a process in place, sometimes people are resistant to change, and therefore, how do they look at that problem from the developer angle, right? Again, from the perspective of, “I’m doing this, this is part of my job. This is maybe even job security.” And how do we think about that?

Sameer

I think in the marketing teams – I mean, there’s two aspects of that. I’ll answer that in two respects. I think if you look at the pure marketing team, I think the developers that are aligned into the marketing team – I think those are, those individuals don’t sweat it. And I don’t see a pattern where they’re defensive about that aspect, right? Because they are focused on the end user experience, as opposed to the operationalization of the search capabilities. Right? But where I’ve seen that come up, at least in my experience, is in sometimes the consulting organizations that serve the marketing team, whose incentives are aligned around statements of work, as opposed to experience optimization. I have never met a developer who sits inside the marketing team or within an existing company, if they’re aligned to the marketing team and the experience, I’ve never seen them resistant to adapting to new search operations, they’re very happy to offload the search operations away from them. Because they can go build more capabilities that the web team needs – to go build more, go build the whole interactions around, user interactions, and user experiences, and all that stuff. Not just basic search.  

Jae  

Higher order tasks.

Sameer  

Yeah, higher order value, right there. They’re aligned to say, look, we’re all aligned to make the company win, right? And how we’re going to make them win is by delivering a better user experience. And they’re honest about – look, we’re not experts in search. And that’s not what we should be doing. We are experts in web experience, not search experience.

Jae 

Right. You abstracted out that piece of it so that they can focus on what they do best.

Sameer 

Correct.

Jae   

Yeah. And so then let’s move into sort of, that discussion about – it sounds like that’s going to make even the developer’s life easier. They’re now architecting, and building scale into applications or doing other higher value work.

Sameer   

And I think they feel like they are now given options. Let’s talk about folks who’ve implemented SearchStax. It requires developers, right, to implement it. But once they implement it, they’re super excited about giving both the analytics as the management tools back into the marketing team, so that they build once, and then pass on the tools which can be used directly by the marketers and, it’s like, I’m going to teach them to fish. And now I don’t need to be there.

Jae  

Right. So everything you’ve said here, so far, points to something in my view, we obviously have an out of the box site search product. And maybe you can speak a little bit to this concept – of all the things you mentioned, it seems like the requirement is, I have these people, I have this process, I’m looking to try to give back control to the right teams who need that level of control. How do we think about this in a pragmatic way to balance the difference between implementation, updating the search experience, and the operational aspects of it? To me, it’s  like an iPad. Where you just don’t have to worry about a lot of the lower-level details, like operating systems and device interfaces and all these other things. The interface is just, it’s there to help me work on the tasks that I care about the most, right?

Sameer   

I think web marketers will appreciate an example. If you look at the marketing team, why do marketing teams use content management systems or digital experience management systems? Are they building their own digital experience platforms? I mean, the promise of a digital experience platform is, “I have the power to create content. I have the power as a marketing team to publish content. I have the power to make sure that content is available, in a medium, the right medium to my visitor, and I have the power to analyze how that content has been consumed.” And we’re pretty much doing the same thing from a search perspective. Right? It just happens to be search – there’s depth in search. And we’re trying to pretty much, in some sense, give the same power to the marketer in that context. It’s making sure that the search experience is what people expect. Making sure you have the tools to analyze the behavior, making sure you have the tools to control content placements, to control search quality, right? And then making sure when you do see, when you do see abnormalities or areas of opportunities, from an experience perspective, you have the tools to directly impact them, right? Within a minute or hours, not days or weeks, or even months.

Jae   

That sounds extremely powerful. What doors then open up for that web team? The broader team, right, and now we’re focusing on the marketer, but really – it sounds like what you’re saying is the marketer is now driving a lot more of the things that they need to be driving, the decisions that they want to make have more agility. How does that – what doors does that open up for the team? They currently have a clunky process. So, what does it enable them to do? I’m assuming at a minimum, they can make more frequent updates. But what are the other things?

Sameer 

I think they can make more frequent updates; they can be very smart about targeting the right content to the right user; they can do personalization in a much more  contextual way, right? And not just at a typical experience level, but also at the search level. Right? Those are some things that the marketers now have the direct control to improve without delay. I mean, if someone searched for something, and the quality is poor, at the end of the day, it really boils down to the quality aspects of it. And if you care about quality, then you have to make sure you have the tools to address it.

Jae 

Absolutely. Can you maybe close with just like the – maybe we can close the loop – because you mentioned earlier, some people are just  unaware, right? And they look at search as a black box. And so for them, even maybe search is just like content findability and that’s it. But what you’re – what I’m hearing from you is that you can get smarter about how that engagement happens. And so, I’m assuming that you’re talking about the analytics side of things where now they also have better visibility?

Sameer 

You have better visibility, and you have better intent, right? You also – what you don’t know is search is probably the only place on your website where someone is utilizing their own vocabulary to tell you what they’re looking for as opposed to a vocabulary that you’re providing to them to communicate what they need. So it’s also a very important mechanism for you to look at how the landscape is changing in your users’ intent, and how that intent is changing over a period of time, so that you can react better, not only to the experience side of things, but also to the content side of things.

Jae 

So maybe let me ask one last question, then, why is this all even an issue? Can’t I do these with the tools that exist today? Or is it just a legacy issue? Are legacy tools too clunky? And again, what would help people to understand this a little bit better? It’s just that it sounds like there’s really a more fundamental issue. Again, you refer to the black box, I’m going to go back to that one more time, because I think it’s really powerful to hear you say that. The black box is – the assumption when I hear black box is, I don’t know how it works. It’s magic, and I can’t touch it and it just – things just happen, right? So, why is it so important at this point in the search industry’s long evolution thus far, for us to be able to give marketers that level of control, why can’t they do that today?

Sameer 

I think why they can’t do that today is because the technology is not accessible. It’s not affordable. Right? And I mean, it’s not that some people are not doing that. Those people have decided that they’re willing to spend that amount of money that is required to do that. So the rest of the folks are abandoning it, right? Because they feel like, either, well, the tools are just not available that allows them to do those things and have control over it. And when they say the tools are not available, it’s more about – is the tool available at the cost where it makes sense for my company? Is the tool available – that it’s easy enough so that I don’t have to dedicate two people to maintain it. Because that’s important! I remember, and I’m not naming names here, I know a vendor that every time you buy their search platform, you have to dedicate two people to make sure that the platform is running smoothly. I mean, we’re all familiar with – and maybe some of us are, at least on the technology side – are familiar with Oracle, right? If you’re going to install Oracle, you had better have a couple of people on the consulting side completely dedicated to Oracle. Search has been that way. But we are making sure the landscape is changing. So what SearchStax is trying to do, is to say, that’s the old way of thinking about it, there’s a better way. And that’s where we’re at.

Jae 

Can you give us one example, like a really powerful example that stands out in your mind of an organization that had abandoned things, right, and was in that realm of,  “You know what, we don’t even think we can do this.” And then all of a sudden, they realized, okay, there are actually a lot of doors open here for us that we just weren’t aware of, because we didn’t know the technology has evolved to be able to do this. 

Sameer  

Yeah, lots of examples come to mind in our customer base, right? You look at APQC- they are a research shop. They produce a lot of content around knowledge management, around processes and stuff like that. And people come to their site. And a lot of times they search for those things. And they had – like, they are in that bucket where the new site search is important, right? But it’s of course, not important that you can justify the entire farm on it. But at the same time, they had a Drupal developer who implemented the Drupal search on their website. And the marketing team was like, we constantly keep on getting feedback from our customers that our site search is not good enough. But the developer rightfully mentioned that they had implemented site search. It worked. But then the marketer was like, well, I don’t have analytics. But they had done everything they could from the CMS standpoint. It would take additional development work to add more enhancements they identified as requirements. So they kept on going to their development team to see how they could prioritize all this new work. And there were other projects they needed to implement but it might take too long or the team didn’t have that skillset. So they looked at SearchStax, and they were like, Oh, we can actually affordably adopt that solution. And we can enable our marketing team. I mean, the developer was very happy in implementing it. The manager of the development team was stoked that he didn’t have the developer worrying about every time they wanted to make a synonym change, whereas previously they needed to come to his developer. And the marketing team was happy to have the information at their fingertips, they had direct control so that when they needed to make a change, they could make it themselves. And it’s a true partnership, right, with the development team. It was a win-win – they both got the benefit of a solution that provides a better experience to their customers. Previously, they did not have faceting, they did not have all the core features that people expect out of a modern site search experience. And now they’ve also solved the visibility problem. They’ve solved the marketing  turnaround time problem. And then they’ve also solved an end user experience problem. And these are the three reasons that the value that SearchStax brings to the table at a much higher return on investment, a very high ROI.

Jae 

Even if you’re not a commerce site. 

Sameer 

No, this is content, there is nothing to do with commerce here. There’s no call to actions around conversions there. It’s all about getting people to consume the content that they are looking for.

Jae  

And like you said, that brand – that brand quality. That was a great example. I appreciate you sharing that with us. We have that customer case study on our website as well for anyone interested in reading more about it – just search for APQC on the SearchStax website, www.searchstax.com. 

Well, Sameer, I’m going to wrap this up. This was super helpful, and I believe our listeners will get great value out of hearing your perspective on site search and how SearchStax Studio addresses the biggest challenges that web teams face in modernizing site search in a fast, scalable way that doesn’t break the budget. I really appreciate you taking the time, thanks so much for chatting with me today.