Search Evaluation and Enhancement

To provide meaningful results, search must be customized to your content, users, and organizational goals. Taxonomy is a powerful tool to enhance the search experience through tailored search engine results pages (SERPs), synonyms and relationships, and faceted filtering.

Understand your roadmap to a better search experience

Improving findability and user satisfaction with search starts with understanding the problems with your search experience. We begin with a thorough assessment that includes content and relevance analysis, search UX evaluation, and search log analysis. With a clear picture of the current state and key issues, you can plan for and measure the impact of changes over time and clearly illustrate the ROI for search enhancement.

Approach “search” holistically

Getting “search” right can be complicated. An organization must understand all its audiences and their needs in different contexts. It’s also important to consider the entire landscape of information across the enterprise, including text, digital assets, and product information. We consider all aspects of your content, metadata, technology, and user experience to develop a roadmap for fine tuning your search experience.

Elevate the right content in the right context

Out of the box, search engines use a default set of standard metadata fields for ranking results, such as title and publication date. To get more relevant results, you often need to add taxonomy and other custom fields to tailor the search experience to match your users’ needs.

We can help you understand your users’ search behaviors and expectations. We can also recommend fields that will influence search relevancy and ranking to support user needs and organizational goals.

Improve tagging quality and consistency

Tagging quality and consistency can also greatly impact search performance. Through taxonomy evaluation and enhancement, additional training, and refinements to your existing governance processes, we can help you address these issues. Using search log analysis and user and domain research, we can identify robust synonyms (alternative words and phrases) that your target audiences use for search.

Implement faceted filters to give users different paths to information

Faceted filtering helps users narrow their search using taxonomy terms from different perspectives. To identify which facets are most useful to your target audiences, we conduct in-depth user research, including interviews and focus groups. We design taxonomies for faceted filtering with user experience in mind, covering the hierarchy, term form, and other considerations around display.

We can help you with:

• Search assessment and benchmarking
• Search log analysis
• Content and tagging quality audit
• Search enhancement (relevance, ranking and SERP UX recommendations)
• Faceted search design
• Taxonomy evaluation and enhancement