Improve the Search Experience with External Promotions

How To / Improve the Search Experience with External Promotions

Improve the Search Experience with External Promotions

We are happy to introduce new functionality to our Promotions features in SearchStax Studio. The new feature lets you include external links in your search results in addition to existing content from your website. Examples of external links include: event sites, content on partner pages, advertisements and e-commerce promotions.

Curate Search Experience with Promotions

The Promotions feature in Studio allows marketers to easily curate what their users will see first when searching for specific terms. Sometimes, marketers want to tailor the search results so specific pages for a search phrase are shown before other items regardless of how they would appear based on the Relevance Model. Promotions ensure that website visitors are seeing the content that is most relevant for them and keeps them from having to view pages and pages of search results.

Previously, users could only promote internal content items from their website. With the new External Promotions feature, external links to useful information from other websites can be added to the search results.

How Can External Promotions Be Useful?

Have you ever looked at your No Results searches and realized your users were commonly searching for something that existed on another website that actually had jurisdiction over the subject? Maybe you just want to promote an external link for an organization group or event that’s currently being featured.

You can now use Studio to define External Promotions – drawing attention to external links and reducing the amount of feedback on searches with no destination. Check out these two use cases that we have added to searchstax.com search results.

Use Case – Promoting Content on External Websites

We work closely with the Drupal community and will be attending the annual DrupalCon conference in Pittsburgh later this year. To help promote the event and share this event with users on our website, we added a promotion to the DrupalCon event website. Whenever a user types “drupal” in our search bar, the first result will be for the DrupalCon 2023 website.

Use Case – Promoting an Internal Item

Another use case is where you want an internal content piece to get noticed and promoted separately in the search results. SearchStax recently published a Site Search Grader and we want this content to appear at the top of any search query that mentions “Studio” or “site search”. Even though this feature is called External Promotions, it can be used to promote internal content that you want to call out in a special way.

To see how to set up External Promotions, check out the SearchStax Studio product documentation.

Other Use Cases for External Promotions

External Promotions let you open up more possibilities to engage with your audience. Some other use cases include:

Curating a path for users who land in your search thinking your site holds their answers
Highlighting events, special courses, or conferences from partners
Promoting internal links so they will appear separately from other promoted items
Advertising links to commerce websites for your users looking to purchase items
Cross-promoting content from affiliated companies or from your local community

To see how SearchStax Studio can help make search easier, schedule a product demo with our search experts to get an evaluation of search on your current website, see how search can be improved and discover how to leverage External Promotions.