Improving content

Background

Optimizing your site's content for search ensures a better user experience by providing relevant results to users. It also results in making machine learning models work more effectively.

You should review your Trends and check if click-through rate (CTR) for some of those queries is low.

If the CTR is low, it might be an indication that the page's meta and content needs improvement. It is also important to ensure that the language on the webpage matches the search terms that of your users.

Improving meta and webpage content

When calculating a relevance score for a particular query, the standard Site Search query pipeline analyzes text from your webpages' meta and content.

• The webpage's meta includes title, description, and keywords.

• The webpage's content includes all the text, i.e. headings, paragraphs, and lists.

• Title, description, and headings (H1) get the highest weight when determining the relevance score.

If the users' search term isn't included in the meta and content, then the webpage will not appear in the search results for that specific query.

To get the best possible search results, we recommend optimizing your page meta and content. Ensure that each relevant page contains words that users might search for.

Improving titles and descriptions

Users generally decide based on the title and description whether a given result is what they searched for. In most cases, the webpage's title, description, and URL are displayed to create the result listing displayed in the search results.

Assess whether your titles and descriptions accurately describe your page's content and purpose. You can get clues to help you work this by looking at the CTR for a query or the page performance in the Learning report.

Removing duplicate content

Every page on your website should have a unique title and description. If there are duplicate titles or descriptions on your website, it will be harder for users to distinguish which search result is the correct page.

Site Search Health Report

Get an overall understanding of how well your content is optimized by using the site search health report. Based on a sample of a few hundred webpages, the report will highlight duplicate page titles, missing tags, page speed and a number of other elements.

Further optimization

Once your webpage's content is optimized, you might want to further optimize your results by adding synonyms, boost rules, and excluding content.

For more information about further search results optimization, see:

pageSynonymspageUnderstanding relevance and rankingpageExcluding documentspagePromotion rules