7 ways your charity can use internal search to boost support

29 October 2024  |  Stuart Palmer

What would four times as many monthly donations mean to your charity?

Simply adding an internal search function to a website has been shown to increase conversions by a staggering 480%.

If you already do have an internal search facility on your website, it is possible that you’re not making the most of it. Reading this article and taking just a few of the 10 suggested action steps below could result in more donations, campaign signups and supporter engagement.

1. Prioritise internal search development

If your charity’s website is run on WordPress, the good news is that all of the steps below can be implemented on this platform. However, your development team must have both the skill and resources (time and budget) to meet your brief.

For example, to modify the core WordPress search engine, your developers will need to use custom pieces of code known as ‘hooks’. This can get quite technical.

In short, if you want to make the most of your website’s internal search function, treat internal search development as a standalone project rather than something that can be squeezed into some spare agency hours.

2. Understand your search algorithm

Don’t panic! You won’t need to know the technical details of your algorithm’s code. Your developer should be able to give you a plain English answer to the following two questions:

1. What type of content does your internal search engine index?
2. During a search, how does it decide which content is the most important.

If you have a WordPress website, this will be determined by the core files. Indexed content will include text in your post titles, header content and general post content.

Search results, as you might expect, will be ordered by relevance to the keywords/search terms entered by the visitor (this wasn’t always the case: WordPress used to order webpages by date written).

Next, you need to have a deep (but still non-techie) conversation with your developer about how you want your search engine to work.

The rest of the tips in this article will give you some ideas to bring to the table.

3. Add filters and facets

If your charity website is big and complex, you may benefit from simplifying your internal site search. There are three main ways that you can do this:

Adding filters will enable your visitor to focus their search on a specific area of interest. For example, you could add a dropdown menu to the side of your search bar with options for ‘campaigns’, ‘case studies’ and ‘products’.

Take a look at Amazon’s internal search function for inspiration. Visitors can choose from a vast number of options ranging from ‘Alexa Skills’ to ‘Toys & Games’.

Facets are a great way to help visitors further narrow their search to quickly find what they’re interested in. For example, if you have a nationwide pet charity, you could create facets of ‘Region’ and ‘Pet type’ in your campaigns category. A horse lover from Devon could then select the ‘Horse & Pony’ and ‘South West’ options to immediately see all nearby horse-focused campaigns.

A third option is to customise your search function by page. This can be useful if you run a charity store. By restricting the search function to your product catalogue, your charity can capitalise on a visitor’s purchase intent.

4. Don’t beat them – join them!

Google are a dominant force in the search industry, so rather than reinventing the wheel, you could simply use Google as your internal search engine. This can be done through a useful bit of tech called an API (Application Programming Interface).

APIs are also available for artificial intelligence models such as ChatGPT and Gemini, enabling you to transform your simple site search into a powerful chatbot. The drawbacks to this method include costs, usage restrictions and an overall loss of control over how your internal search engine works.

5. Make your search bar stand out

Even the best charity internal search engine will be of little use if visitors can’t find it. By default, most WordPress themes place a simple magnifying glass icon on the navigation bar, but this is not always very noticeable.

Google’s home page provides an obvious reference source when designing your own search bar. The long, rounded bar and magnifying glass icon instantly shows visitors where to type their query, and the colourful icons on the right highlight Google’s voice search and image search functions. which leads on nicely to our next tip…

6. Consider voice and image search functions

Yes, it is perfectly possible to add voice search and/or image search to your WordPress charity website. Again, the answer is APIs, and your developer should know how to source and connect these to your website.

Voice and image search are two ways that you can make your internal search function faster and more convenient, especially for people using mobile devices.

Voice search is also worth considering from an accessibility standpoint, especially if your target audience is an older demographic or your charity supports people with visual impairments.

7. Optimise your content for internal search.

The bonus of being in control of your website’s search algorithm is that you can take care of the other side of the coin too: making sure that the content on your webpages can be easily found. Here are some tips:

• Make sure there is enough ‘meat on the bone’ for your internal search engine to work with. Aim for at least 300 words per page.
• Align keyword placement with your algorithms rules. Your search engine won’t be as sophisticated as Google’s, so you may need to specifically add important keywords and phrases, including plurals, to your content.
• When writing articles, add keywords to any fields your modified search engine indexes. This might include image ‘alt tags’, categories, tags and keywords. This is in addition to ensuring keywords are in your title and description fields.
• Consider asking your developer to add an invisible custom field for entering common misspellings of important keywords.

Hold on though! You will need to strike a balance between tailoring your content for internal search and ensuring your pages rank for general web search.

For example, stuffing your content full of repetitive keywords may help visitors on your site find a specific page, but it will almost certainly be pushed down Google’s rankings, reducing overall traffic to your site.

If in doubt, follow best practice for Google, Bing and other big search engines because this will be most closely aligned with providing a great user experience.

Three bonus tips…

Do you want to go even further with your internal search function. Here are some more possibilities:

• Sites like Netflix and Disney+ have perfected the art and science of presenting recommended content to their subscribers. You can take a similar approach by using cookies to store user information and then feeding these data back into your search engine. You can then rank search content based on your visitor’s previous behaviour.
• Add autocomplete and autosuggest functionality. Autocomplete will complete individual keywords and phrases once your visitor has entered the first three or four letters. Autosuggest will provide a dropdown list of potential keywords and phrases before the visitor has finished typing. Both functions will speed up internal site searches.
• Enable ‘site search tracking’ on Google Analytics (GA4). By switching on this metric, you will be able to monitor how visitors are interacting with your search bar. This will help you to improve your algorithm and site content to suit user behaviour. You can also pick up on red flags such as zero-result queries, whereby a user searches for content that you either don’t have on your site, or that is not properly indexed. You can activate site search tracking by clicking your website’s Data Streams and toggling on ‘Enhanced Measurement’.

Are you ready to level up your internal site search?

Charities can learn a lot from how behemoths like Google, Amazon and Netflix design and optimise their internal search function. By increasing the speed, relevance and personalisation of visitor searches, you will almost certainly boost engagement and support for your campaigns.