I saw a post by Joe Dolson pointing to a thread at Cre8asuteforums called “When lots of your visitors go straight to site search“. The thread contains some speculation about what drives people to search – including poor navigation, and a large site. Another driver we see is some people are just search focused – they look for the search box on a new site when they first visit – it is (or should be) easy to find when scanning a page.
The original poster said that he put a second search box at the bottom of his navigation. He found 5% of people used it vs 25% for the one at the top. This is a good idea – it provides easy access to the search for the people that have scanned the page and not found what they were looking for.
One thought to “When lots of visitors go straight to site search”
Shaun,
I think the trick is to get people to actually use search. We track which visitors to our sites (frightcatalog.com & yumdrop.com which use SLI actually) use search in our analytics package and very few visitors actually use search. Its really hard to miss it too since its at the top of the page on the left hand side. Users who do search will convert better than those that don’t, so having effective search that works is definitely key.
-Bill
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