Internet República on SEonthebeach 2016
For the fourth year in a row, Internet República attended one of the best SEO events of the year. Not only are there top-quality speeches, but it is a place to learn, share knowledge and experiences and to enjoy the wonderful place where the event is set.
Yes, we must admit that we also took a bath. But more importantly, we took good notes to tell you the best tricks and strategies we heard of.
We attended speeches by colleagues such as Lakil Essady, Lino Uruñuela, César Aparicio, Aleyda Solis, Chuiso, Iñaki Huerta, Guianluca Fiorilli, Natzir Turrado or the master of SEonthebeach, the great Sico de Andrés.
One of the speeches we enjoyed most was that by Natzir Turrado, who gave some tips to improve the internal search engine of a website. Following some simple steps, you can improve your internal searches and use this information to improve the SEO of your page.
Naztir told us that internal searches in a web can come from as many as 10% of users reaching a given site. Therefore, it is crucial that everything works correctly so that we can deliver a nice user experience while browsing the webpage. To achieve this, we have to perform a deep static single assignment (SSA) of our site.
Foremost we have to activate the queries record of the internal search engine using Analytics. To do this we need:
- Locating the search parameter of the URLs that the internal search engine generates. Most internal search engines contain the parameter “s” or “q”.
- Activate and configure the parameter on Analytics: Administrator>View>Configuration>Set up Site Search
Natzir provided some tricks to improve internal searches and measure their reach, like:
- Locating the URLs where more queries are performed, since these tend to accumulate errors.
- Identifying the URLs to which users go after performing a search. This information can be useful to include related searches, affiliates, etc.
- Analysing the search funnels to check the path the user has followed after searching.
- Dividing searches into countries or devices to focus the content towards the most queried relevant keywords.
Other strategies for the internal search engine of a webpage are compiling the keywords that have a greater search volume. Normally internal searches are very varied, so, how can we choose the best keyword for our content from among all the search combinations? For this, Naztir suggests generating a tags cloud (Tagxedo.com) linking together how frequently each term is searched for. Of these, we would select only those with a relevant % of accumulated importance, because for small e-commerce businesses it is possible that most terms have been searched only once.
He also proposed grouping keywords by typology to improve the content of our web depending on the needs of users (price, products, brand, etc.).
Finally, Natzir shared 8 pieces of advice for the optimal internal search engine:
- Advanced search. Filters for an advanced search.
- Misspellings. The search engine has to be capable of interpreting misspellings.
- Avoid delivering “0” results. Include the possibility of visiting another part of the web or offer other options.
- Suggest but not force the user to access the suggested content.
- Show results for browsing and filters.
- Include the possibility of browsing under suggest.
- Compatible with voice searches.
- Best Best in suggest and internal crosslinking.
These and many more are some of the SEO strategies we learned about during SEonthebeach. If you want to know more about the speeches delivered at SEonthebeach 2016, watch out for our blog, and please do not hate us for spending a weekend with SEO on the beach. Do not miss it next year.
More tips on how to configure a good internal search engine.
Laura López
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