Giving Web Visitors the Advantage With Site Search
Advantage Performance Group upgraded search to help website users discover the content they need
Advantage Performance Group is an award-winning professional services firm. Its network of thought leaders, made up of roughly 20 independent partners, deliver best-in-class talent-development and learning programs to Fortune 500 companies across the United States and beyond. Its solutions are fun and experiential, designed to develop leaders, improve sales performance, nurture innovation, promote inclusion, and support organizational changes.
Pandemic Changes
Pre-pandemic, Advantage’s programs were largely delivered in person by skilled facilitators at client locations. But with the pandemic’s forced behavioral shifts, Advantage pivoted and began offering its training in a virtual setting where facilitators work with organizations and participants on initiatives online in real-time.
Coinciding with the pandemic’s arrival, calls for social justice and reform became top of mind in the U.S. In response, Advantage ramped up its marketing efforts to show how it could help, offering webinars and roundtables on topics that had become organizations’ top priorities and most pressing challenges. This included supporting a remote workforce, employee well-being, and becoming more diverse and inclusive.
All of this digital attention meant Advantage’s website was more in demand than ever before. In response, Advantage built up its online content to include hundreds of pages (and counting) of resources such as blog posts, webinar replays, mini learning journeys, and training takeaways. This new wealth of content simultaneously serves as a knowledgebase for participants and helps potential clients understand how Advantage can help their companies reach goals.
Search Dis-Advantage
Easy website navigation was key to making this increase in online content and digital marketing successful. If a LinkedIn post, for example, sent someone to one web page, Advantage wanted to encourage visitors to explore other available content assets, but this proved difficult to implement. Advantage heard from its partners that clients searching for material from specific learning experiences were coming up empty handed. The content they sought was on the website, but the website’s search engine just wasn’t doing its job well. Search results lacked relevancy and important visual cues.
WordPress’ search function, along with all the other plugins Advantage tried, were less than ideal, so Advantage’s editor Julie Wolpers went on the hunt for a more robust solution.
She knew a new search solution had to match the experiential approach to Advantage’s training programs and client-first philosophy. Advantage wanted to offer featured images on its search results to give visitors a taste of what the link would offer. It needed the ability to boost, bury, and pin search results, and to provide facets and filters to make the discovery experience more intuitive. Additionally, newer content should be displayed above older, outdated results.
Lucidworks’ site search solution offered all the features Advantage was after.
New Experience
Implementing Lucidworks on the Advantage website was seamless. “I’ve been really happy with the technical support from the Lucidworks team,” Wolpers said. “Everyone has been so helpful in getting what we need. It was very easy to work with Lucidworks to get relevant search implemented on our site. Any issues, Lucidworks was very quick to respond.” She adds, “During the implementation process, Lucidworks helped us track down and resolve sources of duplicate indexing, helped embed and style the code, and customize the filtering.”
Livening up an otherwise dry list of text links by featuring an image for each search result was one of Advantage’s top priorities. While the Lucidworks team worked to implement this feature, Advantage’s site search was immediately improved with typeahead, faceting, and filtering capabilities, far surpassing the previous user experience. Soon, featured images for search results were also enabled, faster than the Advantage team expected possible. Wolpers also appreciates the ability to design search results to match the website’s look and feel via custom CSS.
Advantage Advantage
Advantage is now able to curate search results by boosting pages and blocking or burying others, helping visitors find what they’re looking for in less time and fewer clicks. An intuitive dashboard and access to Lucidworks’ comprehensive knowledgebase has made its search enhancement process easier.
Just months after deploying Lucidworks search on its website, Advantage now is offering an online experience much closer to parity with its experiential learning programs. “Lucidworks has opened up that potential for us,” Wolpers said.