Does my website need a search bar?

[BopDesign]

We're redesigning our agency website and during development we noticed our current design doesn't feature a mock up for a search bar. It was a simple oversight, but it got me thinking how valuable it really is. I noticed the Moz blog doesn't have a search bar (unless I'm blind) and was wondering who else has made the decision to get rid of it.

We have a blog of almost 400 posts over the course of three years, unsure if that sways the decision in either direction. Is it better to just focus on good SEO instead of relying on a search bar nowadays?

Opinions appreciated!

[Vahe.Arabian]

Alot of search bar functions really don't provide accurate results, hence I would agree with you on not having this. Focus on good SEO. Organising blog posts into specific categories and then proper internal linking to encourage site dwell time and utlimately where you would like to end up is far more valuable (but more work).

[EGOL]

I think that the decision to use a search bar depends upon the size of your site and the type of information / products that you offer.

I have a small retail site (under 100 pages) and nobody used the search box even though I had it big and obvious in the upper right corner of the design.  When I say "nobody" that is not an exaggeration.  NOBODY.  I removed the search box.

I have a large information site (thousands of pages) that has a well-used search box at the top right of every page.  This is a google search box and adsense displays on the search results page.      Here is some data....

* Site-wide about 4% of the people who arrive at the site use the search.

* About 6% of the people who view the homepage use search.

* About 4% of my Adsense revenue comes from the search page.

* Using CrazyEgg's "Time to Click" feature I can tell that a lot of people who use search on our homepage  immediately click the search box - in under five seconds.  This suggests that these people are using the search box to navigate the site.

* The most valuable thing about the search box is the query data.  I use Clicky analytics and it captures the query strings. If I look at them I see lots of people searching for topics that I do not have on my site and topics that I do not address with a dedicated page (hundreds of searches per month for some queries - this is on a site that gets 100K  visitor per day and has thousands of content pages).  I am using this query data to inform content development.  Very valuable.

* In addition to the search box at the top of every page, we also have a second search box that appears at the bottom of every article.  It is used by about 1% of visitors.  When they finish reading an article the search for something.

So, although I removed search from the small retail site I am keeping it on the information site because it is used by some visitors to navigate, I find the query data to be valuable and we derive 4% of our ad revenue from search.

Finally... if somebody is on my site.  I don't want them leaving to search somewhere else.  I want them to use my site search where the content of MY site is the only thing that they will see in the search results.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

With the exception of good e-commerce sites, I find search bars outdated and rather unreliable. Even if it is a good search bar, people are so used to just googling for info, rather than using a website's search bar. For example, I just did a quick "experiment" with Zappos (who probably has a top level search bar) and I typed in their search bar "red shoes," then I googled "Zappos red shoes" and I got the same page.

If you have a bad search bar, (and users use it) they will get mad. If you have a good search bar (like Zappos), it's still not any better than google. Unless you have a bunch of pages that you want your users to read, but you don't want google to index (pretty odd scenario) i see no point in having a search bar these days.

Enjoy your weekend!

Ruben