Administer Search & Navigation
Optimizely Search & Navigation adds powerful search functionality to websites. Most visitors abandon a website if they cannot find what they want quickly. With increasing information volumes, menu navigation is insufficient, so search becomes critical for locating information. Search encompasses internet search engines (like Bing) and a website's search function.
Search optimization helps site visitors quickly find the right website content. This is closely related to search engine optimization (SEO), also known as improving website content's visibility in search results.
Optimizely Search & Navigation bases search functionality on visitor search behavior and website statistics. Using this information, you can add automatic landing pages, adaptive navigation, and guided search to increase website traffic and boost conversion rates.
Your website receives more visitors as a Web page's search rank increases.
Optimizely Search & Navigation lets you develop customized functionality to create automatic landing pages and types of adaptive navigation with minimal effort. While Optimizely Search & Navigation bases its SEO strategies on visitor statistics, you can manually optimize targeted content to enhance the search experience.
Most of Optimizely Search & Navigation's automatic SEO is based on queries made by site visitors. As the number of queries grows, Optimizely Search & Navigation "learns" and bases search suggestions on previous successful queries.
- New website – When developers set up a website and configure search, they use the programming interface to develop custom filters (along with built-in filters) and faceted search features. Because the site is new, search optimization has few statistics, so you can help visitors by adding search phrase suggestions. See Autocomplete.
- Growing website – As your website matures and accumulates search data, use search statistics to analyze search activity. Optimization evolves to let you monitor, fine-tune, and promote content to deliver the right content to visitors.
Search & Navigation features
- Develop customized functionality, such as filtering and faceted navigation, based on content properties like price or color.
- An index service and interfaces, which are cloud-based or installed on-premises.
- Multiple language support.
- Indexes any website object, and not only web pages. When an author publishes content, Optimizely Search & Navigation pushes data to the search engine, making or updating content available in near real-time.
- View and analyze search statistics for your websites, and use the statistics to optimize search.
- Explore the site index to see what was indexed and when, and use this information to customize search features.
- Add related queries to guide visitors in their search for specific content.
- Define synonyms for similar search phrases.
- Weight content properties to boost search results as desired.
- Support basic Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, and NOT. Special symbols such as + and - are not supported. Complex nested combinations have limitations.
Optimizely Search & Navigation Connections Edition also lets you add connectors, which index external content related to but not part of your website.
For purchasing information about the Connections Edition, see Order Optimizely Search & Navigation. To learn how to use it, see Add search connectors.
Access Search & Navigation features
Note
If your organization migrated to Opti ID, you must manage users in Opti ID. See the Opti ID user documentation.
Optimizely Search & Navigation lets site administrators control who can access components of the Optimizely platform. Your website's membership and role providers must be configured to use the built-in groups and roles in Optimizely Search & Navigation. A developer typically does this during site set up. See Users and user groups for information on how to work with user access.
To access Optimizely Search & Navigation features, you must be a member of one of these groups:
- Administrators, CmsAdmins, and SearchAdmins – Can access the Optimizely Search & Navigation edit view, Optimizely Search & Navigation search features, and the Clear Indexes screen.
- SearchEditors – Can access the Optimizely Search & Navigation edit view and the Optimizely Search & Navigation search features. SearchEditors cannot execute the Clear Indexes action.
Because most users are not members of Administrators or CmsAdmins, they must have membership in SearchAdmins and SearchEditors to access Optimizely Search & Navigation features in the admin view.