Pax (02:02)
Justin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Justin Loera (02:04)
Thanks, Pax and appreciate you having me on today.

Pax (02:07)
yeah, this is going to be a great, great topic. And, ⁓ you know, I think internal search is one of those things that I think was talked about a little bit more, maybe a decade ago in the digital landscape. And I think a lot of marketers kind of forgot about it and, ⁓ or maybe looked once and then haven't revisited it again, but it's, it's in those places that people aren't looking that I think a lot of gems are, ⁓ are found. so

From your perspective, what types of companies and sites are, is internal search more relevant for and who is it maybe less relevant for?

Justin Loera (02:43)
That's a good question. think the hard part with that is you have to really understand your business model. So where are you trying to attract your customers? I think what people forget about in this gem is that there's so many synergies between site search and SEO. I mean, they're almost synonymous with each other. Granted, there's different levers you can pull at the end of the day, you know, between what you can do on Google and what you can do on your own site. But once you understand your business model, I think the biggest thing is saying, if I'm an e-commerce company, you're definitely going to want a site search. You're going to want to be able

people to find what they are looking for when they're on your site. If you're a mom and pop shop or maybe a construction company, probably not going to want, you're probably not going to need that. You're probably just going to want to cater your business towards, you know, external traffic coming into your site because they're likely going to fall exactly where they need to go. But like commerce is a big one. If you're offering services or support for something, you're certainly going to want that because you're going to have a plethora of content that you're going to want to expose.

and customers aren't always going to start their journey on a Google. We know that most customers start their journey in a Google-like experience, but you have to be able to meet your customers where they're going to come to you. So whether that's direct and they need to search on your site or externally and come to your site and then search from there.

Pax (03:59)
I love that. Do you use a site search yourself as a consumer? Do you find yourself like actually typing in search query?

Justin Loera (04:07)
Yeah, I mean like

how many times have we gone to Amazon and just gone direct and searched? I mean, how many times do we go to YouTube and search? Even outside of that, even when I go to buy something, a lot of times I'm going on the site to do research to understand what I'm buying. So I'm going to be searching their site for documentation or stuff they have about the product before I purchased the product. Then I also do a Google search as well. Say, Hey, what are the external reviews versus what you know?

Pax (04:11)
yeah, for sure.

Mm-hmm.

Justin Loera (04:35)
boilerplate that a company would be trying to sell me on the site itself.

Pax (04:39)
Yeah, I love that. was doing some research into this because like outside of YouTube and Amazon, I don't ever use the search bars and websites. And it's mostly that I'm just, it's like, I'm blind to it. I don't even think to use it. You know, I tend to do most of my navigation through a nav bar looking for what I want, but some research states like over 25 % of people actively use those search bars. And so, I mean, that's back to marketing one-on-one just because

I don't do it often doesn't mean it's not done. so this potentially I think is why it's so overlooked by a lot of people is like maybe you don't use this. And so you're not thinking about this as data source, but there's a lot of people that use that site search. And as you mentioned, yeah, like technical and support, there's going to be a huge volume and amount of data in there. what would you say are some of the like high level benefits for someone like mining?

the site search for data. How could they expect to benefit from that data?

Justin Loera (05:44)
Well, the nice thing about getting data on your site, so when people are searching on your site, you have a well of information that you don't get if you're looking at like Google Search Console or some of the analytic tools that are out there. You get very limited data. Now what I get when somebody's on my site, not only are they, I can get what they've done before they searched, but I can also now say, hey, they searched on the site, they went to, they searched X query, let's say, ⁓ buying a computer or buying something.

Then they said, hey, well now I want to look for that particular item, clothing, whatever. ⁓ Then you could say, what did they click on? What results did they click on? And where did they click in the results? Are they clicking on the fifth result? Are they clicking on the first result? Are they going multiple pages into your experience? Which, as we know from SEO, that's usually where we bury the bodies on the second page. You're not on the first page. But what that analytic data tells you is, am I optimized correctly?

Pax (06:37)
Yeah.

Justin Loera (06:43)
on my customer journey, meaning am I ranking the right stuff on my site? And a lot of times with lot of these site search tools, you have the ability to influence what is there. You could create featured results, you could pin content to the top, you could boost content, ⁓ and then it also might tell you, I need better content. And nine times out of 10, as you know from SEO, you could have the best search engine in the world, but if your content isn't good, it doesn't matter. And it's an inverse relationship too. You could have great content, poor search, and still have the same problem.

There's very symbiotic relationship between what people are looking for and your content. So you've got to make sure that you have those gaps filled. So the data on your site is going to give you a lot of information of what people are searching on domain, but that's what they could be searching off domain, too, and you don't know them. So now you can create content, you can optimize your content, and there's that synergy. Not only are you optimizing an on domain, but it's going to help your off domain searches as well.

Pax (07:35)
and

Yeah. What behavior would you see in the data that would indicate they're not finding what they're looking for? Like, are you able to see your own version of bounce rate, which is kind of funny to think about with an internal search? Is that what you're looking for? Or are you looking like, are they just constantly doing more and more searches and that's an indication that they're not finding what they're looking for?

Justin Loera (08:04)
Well, there's a lot of different things you're going to want to look at. You're going to want to look at your searches per visitor SPV. You're going to want to look at your ACR, your average click rank, and just your click through rank in general. ⁓ If you see people searching a particular word at mass scale and you see them, you know, not clicking through, that's an indicator. ⁓ If they're clicking multiple pages into your experience and then finding what they're looking for, that tells you, need to move this particular result or opt...

Pax (08:23)
Mm.

Justin Loera (08:32)
this content for what people are searching for because I think what we we fail to understand as marketers is just because we think what customers are searching isn't what necessarily they're searching. We need to think about it in the mindset of how do customers engage? How do customers search for things? I mean there's data out there that says the average customer uses two to two and a half keywords. That's not enough data a lot of times. So we have to try to influence our customers to provide more context and we can do that through our on-domain opportunities by

you know, having typewriter text in the search bar, giving examples like, ⁓ Marry a home in Villa's does a good job of saying, Hey, hey, I have an AI function within my search. And this is what you can ask. You can ask me, I want to go this day for how many days, how long, and then say, and then I want to end up here. That's a great experience for a customer to say, Hey, I can give you this much information. Wow. I've never been able to, I didn't think I could ever do that.

Pax (09:13)
Yeah.

Mm.

Justin Loera (09:30)
So those are things that we have to re-educate our customers on, on how to search, even ourselves sometimes, because we get caught in that paradigm of I'm only going to provide a word or two, or three.

Pax (09:41)
Right. I love that. And, that, that to me is, think for a lot of sites, depending on the site, the site search has been more seen as the fail safe. If the main nav can't get you to where you need to go, there's always this. And what I hear you describing as we can re re educate and re optimize the site search experience to where it can be the preferred way to navigate and find where you're looking for on a site. ⁓ but showing prompts and what you can find, ahead.

Justin Loera (10:08)
That's spot on.

I'm sorry, I was just gonna say, it's spot on. mean, when you think about navigation, think about the sites and how hard it is to navigate a website at times. Like, the taxonomy and ontologies of a website aren't intuitive to customers unless they know your product, they've been lifelong customers. But you still want to try to capture all those new customers that have never bought your product. And you don't want them to be caught in a loop of trying to say, well, where do I go to get this?

You want to give it easy and seamless to them. Sometimes that's search, sometimes that's navigation, depending on the complexity of your site.

Pax (10:44)
Yeah. Are there, as far as implementation goes, are there, how would you recommend somebody approach this? You know, there's things as simple as WordPress plugins ⁓ for search and there's, know, I'd imagine it can get much more complex than that. How would you guide people in that way?

Justin Loera (11:03)
yeah.

That one's, that's a slippery slope conversation in some ways because depending on how big of an operation you are, like if you're an e-commerce operation doing tens of thousands of dollars a year versus hundreds of thousands of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars, you're going to need to have tools that are going to meet those needs. So, you know, you're probably not going to have a WordPress site, you know, unless you're a mom and pop shop or something smaller that caters to maybe ⁓ a smaller audience as far as volume is concerned.

Whereas you may have a hosted site and you may want to put on something like Google Vortex AI as an example. Easy to implement, all the power of Google, all the back end of Google that they know of. Or you may want to have something more sophisticated. It depends on what kind of operational team you have around search, as well as do they have the experience. Or do you have an outside dev team that's going to be laboring that load? Because you have, you know,

as easy as like, can install a beacon on a site and that does it for me. Or you could have a very sophisticated environment that requires a lot of data engineers and support or search engineers to make sure they're optimizing that journey for all your customers. So it is really just kind of, you have to really sit back and say, I have to understand my business and I have to understand where I want to take my business. Because when you decide to go with a search engine,

That's likely going to be your North Star. That's going to be, this is where I want to go and this is where I'm going to go for years versus I'm going to change in six months because the technology is changing so quickly. You kind of really have to look at that from that lens, in my opinion.

Pax (12:46)
Mm.

for somebody who's looking to, let's say they're at a mid level org with a decent size audience and somewhat technical offering. they're like, there's need for support around. ⁓ like let's say it's a, ⁓ I don't know. Let's just say some, someone that fits that and they don't have anything like this. They're looking to get investment. What, what would you recommend somebody go to?

the C-suite as they're trying to campaign for this investment of like resources and time and energy. What would be some of the upside that they could like, they could pitch to get this kind of investment.

Justin Loera (16:51)
That's a great question. And it's one that comes up quite often. Like, once you understand, I need to add this investment into my site, then you need to take a look at, like, how many people are coming to your site directly? How many people are engaging with your site? And take, out that mix and say, let's say that's, let's say 60 % are coming from organic and 30 % are coming to your site direct. Well, of that 30%, figure out maybe half of that is going to site.

do a search on my site if I have that option. Then you're to say, okay, great. What is my average search per... what are... what is my average cost to sell a product? What is my revenue going to be if I have that person search and get that that same product more quickly and efficiently than having to call me, email me, chat with somebody? Same thing if I'm offering other services.

you want to make the offer simple. Customers don't want to call these days. They want to make it... They want to get on their phone. They want to get on their device, whether it's a tablet or a computer, and buy. They want that gratification right at the point in time. And you got to make it easy for them. So, when you're taking a look at that, you got to take a look at, hey, how much is this... Whatever the product you're buying from a search standpoint is. Let's say it's going to cost you $10,000 a year, as an example. Well...

Am I going to make up that revenue by having people search on my site? Am I going to drive an ROI to that? Or am I going to make multiples of that? That's really how you have to drive it, because most C-suite, you know, if you're talking to an executive or a president, well, what is it going to cost me? And what is my return on investment? Those are the two big things they're going to ask you. And those are going to be the driving factors of, are you going to get approval to do that?

Pax (18:42)
I love that. Yeah. And I think, a lot of markers will say, well, it's a better user experience and that's not enough, know, unfortunately that's not enough, but I love what you're saying. Yeah, no, definitely. I love what you're saying. like take your direct traffic, let's say half of them search, and then that's going to have an impact on their conversion rate. And it's going to have an impact on probably speed to close. could justify if I can get them the right content faster than in the sales process.

Justin Loera (18:50)
No, not in this market.

Pax (19:12)
They're going to close faster because they've already been delivered the information that they need. Um, so there's a, uh, a handful of like very bottom line metrics that this will have an impact on. Now I want to know what it actually looks like. So in doing my research on this, cause you know, this is one those things for me, my experience has been site search, like, oh yeah, that's great. I looked at it and it was like, oh, this is really interesting. And then I kind of moved on to other things. And so I've been revisiting this topic and,

One person I saw, they use, ⁓ I'm not sure what they're using for their search, whatever their search bar, it creates search parameters within URLs. And they're using analytics to analyze the searches that are being done to say how many times does this URL with this URL parameter appear and then I can dissect that URL to understand what the query was. That seems like a very roundabout way to analyze that data, although,

you know, can be done. I'm curious when it comes to actual looking, you mentioned searches per user as a metric. think what was it, searches per user? Per visit, okay. So that's a great thing to look at. What else would they be looking at from a data? Like how would you analyze that?

Justin Loera (20:23)
Searches, searches per visit, as an example, or... yeah, but I mean...

I mean, for one, you're analyzing URL parameters to decide what people search for and how they did it, that's too difficult. You've already overcomplicated, and now you probably have lot of man hours in headcount to do that, unless you've figured out a way to automate that through AI or using large language models, which is possible as well. But when you're starting to look at a platform, like if you're looking at a platform like ⁓ Gex, Solar, Caveo, ⁓ even...

Pax (20:39)
Yeah.

Yes.

Justin Loera (21:01)
Google Vortex AI, you're going to get all that information as part of the reporting suite. So, you're going to see what did somebody search, what did they do after the search, and what they... by what did they click on, and where did they click on the results. You should have all that data readily available on whatever platform you get. Now, even if you would... was a WordPress, there's plugins for that, which then you could... you could add reporting suites to it to help you with that reporting, as well. It's very much, you know, a lot of the reporting back in...

is going to give you a lot of rich data that you otherwise wouldn't have. And you should... it should make it easier for you to make educated business decisions as to, what do I do? Because I have people searching... to use a Josh Byszynski quote, you know, red apples. And, you know, they searched red apples. So, because they searched red apples, and I'm not showing them anything, there's no click, there's, you know, or minimal click events, I need content for that.

or I need to optimize my existing content because I'm not using that terminology correctly. ⁓ The other thing that you're going to want to look at is, from that data, how can I influence marketing patterns? How can I go ahead and go back to my sales team or my marketing team and say, hey, I have customers looking for this. Do we have plans to offer this or do we have something that fits this that I can optimize or put within the experience so that customers can find it and then either buy it?

use it as a service or whatever it is your company's doing.

Pax (22:31)
Hmm. That's interesting. ⁓ I'd imagine too, that you could also think of it as like a lagging indicator, validation of other marketing initiatives where you could say, Hey, I'm getting actually a significant amount of direct traffic that is coming to the site and searching for this term that we're trying to coin. We can see that go up. So it's like, it's having an impact. Whereas in the past, we had to rely on searches on Google.

are going up for this term. So that's gonna be some indication of success. But all this direct traffic is kind of lost when we could now attribute a bunch of that to they're looking for this thing that was more top of funnel, we can indicate and connect that back to Interesting.

Justin Loera (23:17)
Very much. mean,

just think about the data we don't get from Google anymore. Now you have that data and you can utilize it in a much more efficient manner and share it with your internal teams to drive more visibility, which is sales or support or whatever it is that your company's on.

Pax (23:39)
I love that. ⁓ Are there other teams within an organization that ⁓ would find benefit from this in your experience outside of just the like content and search teams?

Justin Loera (23:53)
Yeah, content's a big one. So content marketing teams are really going to enjoy having the access to that data. They're also going to be able, it also will influence their content ⁓ cycles as far as production and or evergreen content, updating or modifying existing content. The other teams that really find value in is marketing and sales. ⁓ Especially if you have someone in those organizations, which a lot of people do as far as business analysts, those business analysts in those sales and marketing teams, go, hey, wait,

we're thinking about offering this product, or, hey, we have something that may fit this, let's present this to that person. And then, you can also use that to influence what you're doing online, from PPC all the way to SEO. So, those synergies are just... It's amazing how many people forget about all the synergistic aspects, you know, between what people do on your site versus what they're doing off your site. I mean, so many times, when I'm working with clients,

They don't even have their PPC teams and SEO teams and in-site search teams even talking to each other. They don't even know who they are in some cases. Or they're completely different teams in a silo. And I'm like, what are you doing? Like, there are so many opportunities here because we already know from data that customers coming or customers doing searches convert at a higher rate. And they convert at a higher rate on your domain and from an SEO point of view, even more so than your PPC.

Pax (25:15)
I love that. And you're right. I've seen that so much. These silo teams, they could be running so much faster if they would just share data and work together. I love that. ⁓ This has been a great discussion. ⁓ I really think as we start to lose more more data from Google and Google AI mode rolls out and AIOs continue to dominate SERPs.

Justin Loera (25:20)
you

Pax (25:43)
We need as marketers to be looking for other sources of data. And this is one of those nuggets that I think has really just been slept on, but we need to revisit in the industry and ⁓ you've helped shed light on that. So I think that's, that's, that's really helpful. ⁓

Justin Loera (25:59)
I that. mean,

I think one of the things to also consider about, because even as you continue to develop for your own site, AI is the catch-coin phrase. So, you have an opportunity, even on your own domain, to implement AI, whether it's through Google Vortex or any other large language model. You should be looking at it and then looking at how customers are engaging.

and using that as part of your search experience or part of your chat experience and using all that data to then compile how you go continue to improve your business and your footprint.

Pax (26:33)
Is there any way that you would think differently about the data from let's say an AI chat bot versus a search bar on a site or would you be able to kind of combine those sets of data?

Justin Loera (26:44)
I think I might be in the minority right now. So when I take a look at it from an SEO point of view, I don't like how it's quantified as ⁓ direct or referral traffic. I look at that, that's still search traffic, whether it's searching in Google or searching on my own domain. That is, in my opinion, search traffic that is being allocated elsewhere. That traffic, you still need to make sure you're...

AIO or GEO, whatever acronym you want to use for generative engine optimization, those practices should be in your head when you're modifying or optimizing your on-domain content versus what you're showing in Google versus what you're showing in the AIO or any one of the LLM bots out there. Those are all... Those should be looked at synergistically and holistically to say, hey, how am I optimizing this content to get visibility, to get eyes on it? Whether customers are searching an LLM, to your point, or they're searching on domain.

they're searching somewhere else.

Pax (27:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

I like that. I like that take in perspective. And it's true. I, as things continue to develop and roll out, um, at the end of the day, like keeping that customer experience and like, we answering their questions? Are we giving them what they need has to be what we hold onto. Um, uh, especially as things just continue to get more and more opaque. Um, uh, and that's what, that's what we're finding is being successful. It was just like,

Just help them out, answer their questions, give them information they haven't seen before and, uh, help them along their journey. And maybe, yeah, I agree that they shouldn't. It's, it's all the same. Um, anyway, I think that's, that's a really great take. Um, Justin, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been an awesome discussion. And I think is, uh, something that all definitely search marketers should be looking at all marketers should be looking at, uh, implementing and then digging into that site data. And I bet.

There's a significant amount of people listening today who have site search enabled and built on the site and nobody's looking at that information. So, I mean, this would be a quick win to go dive into that today and see what you can find and to help improve that, that user experience. So thank you for, for joining and, ⁓ sharing some light on that.

Justin Loera (28:57)
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.