What is Cross-Site Search?
Cross-site functionality allows you to group as many of your websites together and display results for an entered search term. So, say you have one website dedicated to dog training and another site about dog health. It would make sense to link both of these together, as someone may search for related topics on either of these websites. You don’t want to risk losing them to another site altogether by not having them synced. This is useful to your visitor because they find the content they were looking and it makes for a great search experience.
In our opinion, a search engine is incomplete without this feature. The way users search content on your website has changed a lot. Today’s user expects instant and relevant results without having to do too much digging around. We believe this feature is a must-have component for any search engine to be efficient.
Implementing Cross-Site Search with SearchIQ
One of the main questions we get regarding cross-search functionality is how to implement it. Let’s dive a little deeper to explain how SearchIQ displays posts from multiple websites when a search is performed on a specific website.
Since this functionality is user centric, we designed this feature to focus on keeping it simple and effective. So we’ve made it incredibly simple to turn this feature on and off at your discretion.
Steps:
• Create cross-site group
• Select which search engines you would like in this site group.
• You will see the cross-site group you just created in the admin overview. Under “Show cross-site search results” turn on either or both autocomplete and search page and your search results will be synced.
Benefits
There are many reasons why one should implement cross-domain search to fine-tune their search and make it more efficient. One reason might be that you have multiple websites that have a similar theme or niche. Cross-site search will expand the search results for your users and provide them with plenty of content that might be of interest.
Another reason may be to gather more user insight by capturing search term data. Along with cross-site search, we provide cross-site analytics so you can see what visitors are looking for, what they clicked on and where (which site) they came from. This would help when optimizing your website’s content for better conversion.