Google Site Search is ending on the 1st of April, so I’m going to give you some alternatives and explain exactly why you need to be using a site search product on your web site.
We’ve had about a year to come to terms with this and find an alternative to Google Site Search, but if you’re anything like me then you’ll be lazy and leave it until the last minute.
So here I’m going to give you a couple of alternatives that you can use to let people search your website, once Google Site Search closes up shop for good.
Now you might be thinking, ‘well I’ve already got WordPress so I can just use that search feature instead’… but as most people know the WordPress search feature function is pretty poor.
And it doesn’t give us everything that we need because when it comes to using search, first of all it’s for the benefit of our visitors – to make their lives easier.
But when used properly it’s also it’s for our benefit too because it gives us vital information about our visitors.
And this is why we really need to be using search on our websites.
We’ll know the exact type of content they are searching for, we’ll find out user intent and this is the stuff that we can’t really get from surveys.
When we have a search feature on our website we can use that mine data about our visitors so we know how to serve them better.
And what is more according to the latest research visitors who use a website’s search feature are 216% percent more likely to convert.
That alone should be a massive reason to start using search on your website.
Now I’m going to give you some alternatives to Google Site Search – some of these options are paid and some of them are free.
But remember, the Custom Site Search from Google is still available but you will have to display adverts and that means potentially sending traffic to your competitors, so I’m excluding that from my research.
During my research I’ve found two very good alternatives to Google Site Search.
The first one that I have got for you is called Site Search 360 and this is a very robust search product.
If you’re concerned about the pricing it’s free for the first 150 pages indexed, and 1,000 queries per month.
That might be a really good alternative if you have a small website and I can certainly recommend using Site Search 360 as your alternative to Google Site Search.
For larger web sites the price increases at a very reasonable rate.
But the site search product I’m using is called Algolia and this is free forever if you display the companies branding.
If you don’t want to display branding the price is very reasonable.
I’m currently using Algolia on Profit Copilot (that might change in the future), right now it does everything I need and I can recommend it.
So if you’ve found this helpful, please share it with others who might benefit too. This stuff is important so they’ll probably be thankful that you have, and it helps me out too.