Build and deliver frontend experiences fast, with intuitive visual editing tools.
A low-code content management solution for non-technical teams.
An AI-powered website search.Surface content from any source or in any format.
AI chatbot with a governance interface. Secure, personalized support, without hallucinations.
Build and deliver dynamic forms in minutes, with a visual form builder.
An integration platform to connect your systems, data and content together.
Maximize the impact of your content and drive successful conversions.
Easily build and deploy web components across all your sites, at scale.
Centralize and manage customer data for personalization and analysis.
Deliver experiences the way users expect – consistently, securely, and lightning-fast.
Unify and manage your entire tech stack from a secure, centralized AI-Powered Platform.
Transform your digital citizen experience.
Create meaningful student lifecycle journeys.
Attract and retain clients with personalized experiences.
Accessible experiences that customers demand.
Hit campaign goals and make data-driven decisions.
Skip the developer queue to build pages and forms.
Audit, pilot and scale at speed, without major project work.
Make every event easily discoverable across your channels.
Bring your solution to life with expert partners in strategy, design and development.
Unify your systems, content, data and workflows with Squiz Digital Experience.
Upgrade to Matrix 6 (SaaS) and get the full benefits of Squiz's new content authoring experience.
Log in to access partner resources.
Let's grow together. Join our partner network.
Explore our network of agencies and implementation partners.
Discover all our pre-built integrations to popular services, or build your own.
Supercharge your DXP with components, templates, extensions, and more.
Speed up your development, get answers, and discover new DXP functionalities.
Join the discussion, share your experience and get help from other DXP users.
Your go-to place to get hands-on experience and deepen your DXP knowledge.
Submit a suport ticket or contact our 24/7 global support team.
Read the latest articles on all things digital.
Success stories from our amazing clients.
Watch on-demand and register for upcoming online sessions.
We're focused on delivering the best product in the market. See what's ahead.
Stéphane Recouvreur 09 Aug 2023
50% of web users go straight to the search bar to navigate a higher education website.
If you are not investing in your site search, this stat alone should give you cold sweat.
But there's more.
According to Alan Etkin, a web analyst at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, “Search revenue is approximately 40% of total site revenue, generated by 10% of site users. Now that’s a fine argument in and of itself for investing in site search.”
Prospective students using site search during their journey typically convert at 2-3 times higher than those who simply browse.
Another stat to convince you?
Students demand a high-quality search experience and if they don't get it, they'll not only leave your site, with 68% of them never returning.
No doubt, the stakes are high. So what specific challenges are universities currently encountering and what solutions can be implemented to overcome them? Let's find out.
Universities are facing two major obstacles when it comes to improving their search results: content discoverability and search personalization.
The biggest obstacle universities are facing to improve their search results is having to index content hosted on disconnected content platforms.
Universities often have multiple departments (e.g., engineering, medicine, law) all running on different CMSs and with varying levels of governance. For example, the engineering department might be using Drupal, while the medicine department is on WordPress, etc.
These "content siloes" have made it difficult for central university communication teams to consolidate content and assist users in finding the information they are looking for through site search.
This situation leads to incomplete search results, with different search engines for each school's website, and a poor search experience for the end user.
Another challenge: every user expects a different search experience based on their unique needs.
Consider the following user journeys: high school students might be looking for course information, current students might be looking for academic resources or financial aid information, and staff members might be trying to navigate to research papers.
Each situation is unique, and offering the same search experience to all these personas also leads to user frustration. Even if they all use the same search query, the context of their situation can drastically influence the information presented on the search results page.
Empowered with these insights, how can universities overcome these challenges? Here are a few suggestions to guide your endeavor.
Some search solutions now offer multi-source indexing capabilities, enabling universities to crawl disparate content repositories (e.g., social media, department websites, student portals, etc) and offer a consolidated search engine for all their content.
Users get the confidence that they are indeed getting access to the whole content repository of a university, and are not tempted to switch between school's websites, or worse, abandon their search altogether.
University site search should make it simple for users to identify themselves and filter results BEFORE they even initiate a new search.
A good site search should be able to anticipate the different needs of its users and suggest easy adjustments to improve the search process:
Implementing predictive search can have the following benefits:
In higher education, the search experience can be extremely subjective.
A prospective student and a faculty staff will have different intentions when searching for the term “engineering”.
A great site search engine should allow users to refine their results with:
Search analytics provide metrics that indicate how effective your site search is for users.
Based on those insights, university administrators can run tests and make improvements to increase conversions on their websites.
Any good search report for a higher education organization should include the following:
There are, of course, more search metrics that you can include in your report, depending on what information you are looking for.
Squiz Search, part of the Squiz DXP, offers sector-specific search with pre-built templates for universities and higher education institutions. Get complete control over your search results with valuable insights for continuous optimization.
Join our community of experts and enthusiasts by subscribing to our newsletter today.
You can unsubscribe anytime.