The Real ROI of Search Experience Optimization (SXO)

If you’re still optimizing your content just to climb the Google rankings, you’re already behind.

For digital teams tasked with driving growth, engagement, and conversions, traditional SEO simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Sure, you might still sprinkle in keywords and tweak metadata—but in a world of zero-click results, AI-generated answers, and disappearing organic traffic, getting users to your site isn’t the win. Keeping them there is.

And that’s where most websites fall flat. Users arrive and bounce. They search and come up empty. They scroll and get frustrated.

The real battleground today? Your on-site search experience.

Your visitors expect intelligent, intuitive results—fast. They want that “Google-like” experience, but tailored to your products, your content, your brand. They expect to ask questions, not just type keywords. And if your site search can’t keep up, they’re gone.

That’s why more digital teams are turning to Search Experience Optimization (SXO)—a strategic blend of UX, search tech, and behavioral insight that helps you actually convert the traffic you worked so hard to earn.

What Is Search Experience Optimization?

SXO is the intersection of search, user experience, and conversion rate optimization (CRO). SXO ensures your website visitors achieve what they came for, while driving measurable business impact. Great on-site search experience is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that search engines aren’t delivering the kind of traffic they once did. 

Gartner predicts overall search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026, as users increasingly turn to generative AI solutions like chatbots and digital assistants instead of traditional search. Another study found that when Google’s AI overview appears at the top of the search results, desktop clicks drop by about 33% and mobile clicks drop by about 50%. 

That makes optimizing owned search experiences critical for enterprises that want to stay relevant.

How Search Experience Optimization Differs From Search Engine Optimization

The evolution of SEO as a straightforward process (optimize content, monitor rankings, rinse, repeat) to a starting point for delivering better user experience (UX) reflects the  main difference between the two approaches. Where SEO focuses on optimizing content to achieve better rankings in (often) external search engines, SXO focuses on optimizing content, data, and search technology to deliver a better overall search experience for users. 

Your website visitors increasingly expect the same speed, relevance, and personalization on your digital properties that they get from Google. But they also want specificity and tailored experiences that intuitively connect them to the information and products they want. Effective SXO makes the search process easier for them. It also increases engagement because it delivers relevant results and ensures people stay on track by providing tailored information. 

SXO puts the spotlight squarely on the experience of search itself. That’s especially true in an enterprise search context, where users are navigating ecommerce sites, customer portals, or intranets. Here, relevance and usability are equally important.

Relevant reading: Search Relevance is the New Differentiator for Enterprise Experiences

Metrics That Actually Matter in Search Experience Optimization

Measuring the effectiveness of SXO requires evaluating metrics that go beyond traditional SEO success criteria like rankings, impressions, and clicks. Instead of focusing on visibility alone, SXO metrics highlight signals of a high-quality search experience. They examine how quickly customers find what they need, whether users stay engaged, and if their journey leads to a desired outcome.

The most important metrics for SXO overlap with areas like customer service success and digital commerce (e.g., sales, cart abandonment, AOV, etc.) They reflect how well your search experience is working for visitors, how it drives relevance, and how it ultimately impacts revenue. Here’s what you should consider when choosing which metrics to track for SXO:

Search Exit Rate

A high exit rate after a search often indicates customers can’t find what they need. Regardless of industry, this directly translates to missed sales, harms customer relationships, and extinguishes opportunities for cross- and up-sales, as users abandon sessions rather than continue their journey on your website. 

Monitoring exit rate helps you identify when irrelevant results or poor query handling directly affect downstream outcomes like conversion rate and average order value, long-term customer engagement, and renewals. 

Session Depth & Engagement

Session depth measures how many pages someone visits after their initial search. Longer, more engaged sessions signal that users are finding relevant content and exploring related information. 

For example, athenahealth used customer analytics to track which queries weren’t returning results and where users dropped off. Those insights guided content improvements that reduced dead ends, increased engagement, and encouraged users to stay on the platform longer.

Time to Find (or Task Completion)

The quicker someone finds an answer—or completes a task—the better the experience. Reducing “time to find” equates to minimizing effort for site visitors. 

Many customer service teams now look beyond NPS to metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES), which track how easy it is to resolve an issue or locate information. NPS alternatives also include search analytics to help understand what’s working (or not) with site search (e.g., keyword insights, average click-rank, and zero-result searches). 

Conversions From Search

Perhaps the most impactful SXO metric connects search directly to conversions. Tracking conversion events that originate from search helps you tie experience quality directly to revenue impact. 

This can range from webinar sign-ups and high-intent asset downloads all the way to measuring average order value (AOV) for sessions that include search. Higher AOVs from search-assisted journeys signal that search is returning more relevant results and encouraging service or product discovery. 

Connecting search with conversion rate profitability highlights how optimizing findability and relevance leads to measurable business outcomes across the customer lifecycle.

Why a Better Search User Experience Drives Higher Conversions

Search UX influences how visitors find the information on your website, or if they leave without converting.  Designing your search experience effectively requires building in a combination of traditional search functionality (e.g., typing your query into a search box) and advanced AI capabilities like generative AI na(GenAI) and natural language processing.

According to our 2025 Customer Experience (CX) Relevance Report, site visitors want generative search experiences to help them with complex issues like comparing electronics products (43%), getting how-to advice for home improvement projects (33%) and getting recipe ideas while buying groceries (33%).

They expect search recommendations and results to match their intent, even when they’re not necessarily clear about what they want. When search consistently delivers relevant, personalized answers, visitors are more likely to convert because they feel understood and supported during their journey.

Improving Product Discovery

Better UX also increases product discovery. Site visitors who conduct a search convert at a higher rate because intelligent ranking systems elevate the products they are most likely to buy. The future of digital experience is rooted in AI that adapts search results in real time, making personalization a scalable practice. 

Key features that drive better search UX include:

• Relevance ranking: because results are prioritized not only on keywords, but also on signals like past behavior, user context, purchase history, or which pages have led to conversions. This increases the likelihood that users quickly find content that matters.

• Predictive search: which provides intelligent auto-suggestions to guide users toward relevant results before they finish typing. Helping people complete queries faster reduces exit rates and increases satisfaction.

• Faceted filtering: also called faceted search, filtering lets users refine results by categories, features, or topics. It gives them control over how they browse, speeds up decisions, and prevents frustration from choice overload or irrelevant content.

• Synonym support: which accounts for variations in language. Whether someone searches for “phone case,” “cover,” or “protector,” strong synonym mapping ensures they all land in the right place rather than experiencing dead ends.

The above search elements focus on the UX of search. They get people to the results they want quickly. They directly combat one of the biggest pain points from our 2025 CX Relevance Report, having to expend a lot of effort on search. More than 80% of respondents said they had to put in a moderate or high amount of effort to find information or get help.

Building a Search Experience Optimization Strategy

SXO requires an ongoing cycle of evaluating, improving, and scaling your search experiences across owned digital properties. For this to work at the enterprise level, you need to gauge where you are now, then scale your approach to match your users’ needs and your specific goals. Here’s a high-level SXO blueprint to get you started:

Audit Search Queries and Exit Points

Start by understanding your site search experience from the user’s perspective, particularly where it breaks down. 

Analytics on query patterns, high exit rates, or zero-result searches reveal where users are getting stuck. Reviewing these gaps helps you prioritize fixes and focus on search query optimization.  

This involves refining the way queries are handled through natural language processing and autocomplete suggestions so searchers see the most relevant results.

Map KPIs Across Journey Stages

SXO metrics like time to content, session depth, and conversions from search should be tracked across the customer journey. 

For service portals, this might mean measuring case deflection rates, while on ecommerce sites it may be tied to boosting conversions.  Connecting metrics to stages helps you measure the user experience along with the business impact.

Layer in Personalization and Intent Signals

Your site visitors’ individual buying journeys are unique. Personalized search uses behavioral data and intent detection to tailor results, recommendations, and suggestions for specific audiences. 

Artificial intelligence makes it possible to scale this approach, no matter the size of your business or audience, so each user gets appropriate and relevant content recommendations.

Continuously Optimize Based on Analytics

User behavior changes over time, which means SXO requires a feedback loop. Monitor your search performance data, run experiments, and use A/B testing to evaluate new relevance models or interface changes. Insights from analytics should fuel a steady cycle of testing and improvement. 

For example, the Project Management Institute discovered that fragmented content across seven platforms made it difficult for their learners to easily find information. By using AI-powered analytics to unify search, PMI immediately improved content discovery. 

Relevant reading: Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization in Site Search

Embrace AI and Automation

Artificial intelligence supports SXO by automating relevance tuning, predictive search, and content recommendations. It can identify patterns in search queries, reduce zero-result outcomes, and accelerate decision-making for customers. You’ll spend less time making manual tweaks and more focused on creating meaningful experiences tied to business goals and customer needs.

Search experience optimization strategies work best when supported by a unified platform. Solutions like Coveo allow you to centralize indexing, apply machine learning models, and unify analytics across all owned digital properties. The result is an experience that feels personalized, efficient, and measurable.

From Rankings to Relevance: Measuring the True ROI of SXO

A good website search experience is one where visitors move seamlessly from search to solution. 

Old-school search engine optimization—the kind that focused on rankings over experience—doesn’t factor this type of UX into the process. SXO goes beyond SEO by focusing on search UI, relevance, and a measurable reduction in search effort. 

SXO reframes success by asking whether people can find what they need (quickly), complete their tasks, and leave with a positive impression on your site search performance. Done well, SXO lowers support costs by reducing unnecessary service requests and inspiring visitors to convert. 

The business value shows up in real numbers. A financial services company using Coveo discovered high search activity around “divorce” and “QDRO” (qualified domestic relations order) queries. The digital CX, contact center, and content teams worked together to create a tailored checklist and added search-based campaign triggers. The effort generated $1.5 million in revenue without paid media, while also reducing call volume and boosting on-site engagement.

This is a great example of how driving SXO forward requires cross-team investment. When relevance becomes the shared focus, website visitors are better served and business goals are much easier to achieve. 

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