Step 1: Strategy & Scope

Overview

The first step is to determine what content you want to include in your Search experience, both in the backend (what you want users to be able to search on) and frontend (what you want to display on results cards).

You may have to adjust your content strategy based on how easy it is to both collect and maintain your data.

Keep in mind:

• Data quality dictates the overall quality of the build
• How you structure your data dictates how you set up the frontend and the backend

Verticals

Yext Search groups similar results or content types into verticals. Examples of verticals are locations, products, and FAQs. If you want your Search experience to display certain types of content separately, or have them be displayed or searched differently, you’ll want to separate them into different verticals.

Verticals may differ depending on the industry you’re in as well. Financial institutions may have agents, ATMs, and locations. Healthcare organizations may have doctors and healthcare facilities.

Verticalized search can present benefits to the overall user experience, however single vertical experiences can also be created for uses cases only requiring a single content type, such as a store locator, doctor finder, or product search.

Data Scope

As part of your strategy, decide on the verticals you want to have in the Search experience. As a rule of thumb, we recommend no more than seven verticals to maintain good search quality and to not overwhelm users with information.

Here are some factors to consider when determining what type of content you want to include and how to structure that content:

1. What are users currently searching for on your site?
2. What does success for the Search experience looks like? (e.g., increase self-service, higher click-through-rate, etc.)?
3. Where on your site would you like to drive more traffic and user engagement?
4. What type(s) of content or content types do users navigate to or engage with most frequently today?
5. What about those content types you want to be searchable or displayed on the results card. For example, you may want to search any people verticals by full name, languages spoken, and location.
6. Any dependencies, including other products or initiatives happening
7. Your timeline for launching your Search experience. If your data collection timeline does not meet your launch timeline, you have the option to start with a sample of the data or a subset of verticals, with the expectation you’ll add more later. Note this may cause an awkward experience if users expect to find all locations in your search, but you only show a subset.

For each vertical you decide to include in the scope of your Search experience, you’ll want to keep track of a few things:

• Frontend Search Results: The attributes you’d want to display in the results
• Backend Searchable Fields: The attributes of the vertical you want to allow users to search by (for the Search experience to index on)
• Data Ingestion: The data sources for the vertical - Where the data will come from, how you can pull that data and ingest it into Yext, and how you can keep that content up-to-date
• Additional Search Configuration Options: Any custom logic to apply to the vertical, such as sort options, how a vertical should rank against other verticals, any custom icons, etc.