Ep 73: Quicktake: Why Your College Website Search Isn’t Working and How AI Can Fix It

Website search is one of the most-used tools on a college website, but for many institutions, it’s also one of the most frustrating. Prospective students often type a question into the search bar only to get outdated meeting minutes, random PDFs, or irrelevant pages. In this Quick Take episode, GradComm CEO Cheryl Broom is joined by Joel Goodman, VP of Growth Strategy at Squiz, to unpack why this happens and what colleges can do about it. They discuss the limitations of common search tools, especially free solutions like Google Programmable Search, and why they often fail to deliver helpful results on college websites.

Also, Goodman shares how institutions can improve the experience by focusing on two key areas: better content strategy and smarter search technology. When colleges organize their content clearly and pair it with modern search tools, they can make it dramatically easier for students to find what they need.

What You’ll Learn:

• Why Google-based search tools often fail on college websites
• The impact that poor search experiences have on prospective students
• How AI is changing the way users search for information online
• Why content strategy plays a critical role in search performance
• Practical ways colleges can improve website search and user experience 

Thanks for listening!

Connect with GradComm:
Instagram: @gradcommunications
Facebook: @GradCommunications
LinkedIn: @gradcomm
Send us a message: GradComm.com

Higher Ed Conversations is hosted by Cheryl Broom, CEO of GradComm, a marketing and branding agency specializing in community colleges and public education.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: Hi, I am Cheryl Broom, CEO, of GradComm, and host of Higher Ed Conversations, and this is Quick Takes and usually I am by myself on Quick Takes sharing a hot tip or answering a question from one of our clients, but I actually got a question that I wasn't able to answer by myself for the Quick Takes. So I had to call up an expert and he graciously agreed to join me here. 

[00:00:23] Cheryl Broom: So I'm really excited to have Joel Goodman, who's the VP of Growth Strategy with Squiz joining me today. So welcome.

[00:00:31] Joel Goodman: Thanks, Cheryl. Super excited to be here.

[00:00:33] Cheryl Broom: And you're my, my first Quick Take guest. So we are gonna get right into it, right into the question. So I have heard from a couple clients who are really struggling with their website, particularly with the most popular feature on the website, which is search, and they're continuously getting terrible results from the, the Google plugin they have or whatever search function what's going on behind the scenes and, and what can they do to get this working better?

[00:01:03] Joel Goodman: Yeah. There's the Google programmable search, like it's, it's one of those products where Google's really good with like billions and billions of data points, but when you have like a few thousand, or you know, 10, a couple tens of thousands or whatever, it's just not that great unless you put a lot of work into trying to tune what's there, but even when you're using that Google product there, it doesn't give you an easy way to do the con like to the control how the answers are coming back.

[00:01:31] Joel Goodman: And so a lot of times, yeah, it's, it's the cheap or the free way to, to get search on your website, but then you have to question like, is it. Actually doing your brand a disservice. Is it doing your, you know, your prospective students or the, the parents or whoever else is coming onto, onto your site a disservice as they're, as they're, trying to find the things that they need.

[00:01:51] Joel Goodman: And so you kind of have to weigh that cost, value ratio, right? Is it worth not paying money to give people a really bad experience, or should you try to find a way that's a little bit more strategic to improve that user experience for everyone that hits your site?

[00:02:05] Cheryl Broom: We do secret shoppers for colleges and we will go onto their search and search for things that we are looking for that they've asked us to shop. And most of the time we're getting like old academic senate needing minutes.

[00:02:21] Joel Goodman: Yeah. Well, and that's the thing.

[00:02:23] Cheryl Broom: the library.

[00:02:24] Joel Goodman: And Google's like fairly indiscriminate with that stuff, right? And so like, if you're gonna put in place something that is built for generic content which Google is built for all the information on the entire internet, right? If you're gonna put that on your website, you have to do the work to actually, make it like, exclude the things you don't want it to see and, and, and highlight the things you want it to see. And they just don't give you great tools to do that outta the box because Google's value prop is everything. You know, it's, it's try trying to catalog all of the knowledge of humanity. So you, it, it, it pays to kinda look at other options that might be a little bit more tailored to your specific audiences or your specific use case with a, with a college website for instance.

[00:03:06] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I mean, Google's philosophy is like, here, it's a catalog. Here is everything you asked for. This, here you go. And I'll sort through it and find out what's most relevant to you. But AI is, is changing that. I mean, it's changing the way we ask for information, the way we interact with it.

[00:03:24] Cheryl Broom: I think it's an opportunity to take a look at this function on your website.

[00:03:28] Joel Goodman: Yeah, 100%. And I mean, we're seeing that across the higher ed landscape. And it doesn't matter if you're, you know, a, a a community college or a, a trade school or a four year or an Ivy or, you know, anything like, we're seeing it even beyond higher education. Every sector is seeing how AI search in particular the, you know, even Google's overviews when you're searching on Google or people searching from chat GPT or perplexity a lot of the traffic is not even making it to your website.

[00:03:57] Joel Goodman: And then it's really important that the traffic that does make it to your website through the answers that are showing up on these, these search engines. That they actually can find the things that they need in a, in a way that feels natural. And so a lot of times I think that comes down to implementing similar patterns, right?

[00:04:14] Joel Goodman: So if you think of it from a, from a designer standpoint or a user experience standpoint, if your website visitors are used to asking questions to a search engine on Google or somewhere else, why wouldn't you replicate that same experience on your own website and focus it down to your own content? You know, a lot of times.

[00:04:33] Joel Goodman: This really comes down to how, how good your content is. You know, like sometimes you can, you try to like slap one of those things on your site and if your content strategy isn't quite tight enough, you, you end up with bad responses or bad answers. And I'm sure there are. I'm sure there you have listeners that have like, played around with AI search in the past or like, you know, have put a chat bot on their website hoping that it's gonna pull content from their, from across their site and, and answer questions for people, and it just hasn't quite worked. And a lot of that comes down to how well is your content written and built and organized, and then how well is it indexed by that tool so that it's actually bringing up the correct answer to questions that people are asking and not getting confused by, you know, things that it's pulling from other places or, or just the content that you actually have.

[00:05:22] Cheryl Broom: You gave me like a flashback to when I was working at a college and student services purchased this tool. I mean, this has gotta be like 15 years ago. It was like an ask tool, like, like an Ask Jeeves tool, but like we had to populate the answers.

[00:05:36] Joel Goodman: Right, yeah.

[00:05:37] Cheryl Broom: So I was like, oh my gosh, we're like already doing this to the website.

[00:05:40] Cheryl Broom: Now I have to populate like 4,000 answers for this tool.

[00:05:45] Joel Goodman: Right. And I mean, you still see that today. And I mean, you know, that may have been 15 years ago, but even, even five years ago, people that were putting chat bots on their websites were still having to do that. And then as AI kind of entered into the scene. It became more than just entering answers, it became like training the actual bot on separate content.

[00:06:07] Joel Goodman: And it was still kind of this dual path where you had to do all your content for your website and then you had to do another focus set of content for your chat bot. And there, you know, the old, the old sales adage, there's gotta be a better way. Right. You know, like, and there really is. But you have to choose the right technology and it should be technology that's built on.

[00:06:26] Joel Goodman: In my opinion anyway. And, and definitely from, from the standpoint of how Squiz operates its products built on your search index. If it's able, if you have a search in place that's able to look at all of your content, make the right search inferences and, and relationships that all happen in the background that make really good search results come up, if you then apply AI to that you've already done.

[00:06:48] Joel Goodman: 90% of the work. I mean, you're, you're really close to having something clean. And then what happens is the AI layer actually helps you just get that other 10% of the way fixing the content that's on your site to be better for, yeah, for, for like the results that are coming up in search or the results that are coming up in your AI chat.

[00:07:06] Joel Goodman: Also for the normal people that are hitting your site and reading that content, it makes the whole experience better. And so I keep coming back as I'm, you know, as I hear the same things that you're hearing about search and, and kind of the one, the fear of outside AI engines, kind of taking our traffic away, but then also the struggle of the ongoing struggle for what, two decades of not getting good search results on our own websites.

[00:07:30] Joel Goodman: I hear those same things, but it always comes back to good content strategy. You know, really good human oriented content that makes sense, doesn't conflict with itself, doesn't have contradictions across your site. And now what we're seeing is if your, if your content is really good for humans to consume, the next step is making it really good for robots to consume as well.

[00:07:54] Joel Goodman: And so then you're, you're able to kind of handle both sets of, of challenges there.

[00:07:58] Cheryl Broom: I watched my my older son going through college admissions and actually the podcast out in February, I interviewed him and a friend about it, and he complained all the time because he'd go to a university site and search for something he needed for his application, and then he would leave the site and just search for it in Google, like he used to be like, this is pointless. I am so frustrated.

[00:08:22] Joel Goodman: Yeah. And, and go. And like, I mean that's, I've heard that a lot when I, I ran an agency before I joined Squiz and, and I heard the same things from, from clients all the time. 'cause they were hearing that from their, their prospects or, you know, or prospects that they lost, you know, that went to, that, went to other schools and, and it, you know.

[00:08:39] Joel Goodman: They're, you try to like tune your, tune your content for then the main Google search. Right? But how do you, how do you main control, maintain control over that experience on your own website? And, and it's tough, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's getting easier and there's, there's kind of more sense coming around it when you really approach it from the standpoint of good quality content.

[00:09:00] Cheryl Broom: Now I know that you, at Squiz you have a tool for AI search, for the website, and I wanted to ask how that works and do people have to like redo their entire content management system to implement AI search or is this something that they can look into separately?

[00:09:19] Joel Goodman: Yeah, no, our product for search especially, so we, we, we have a search engine called funnelback that's, been around in the higher ed scene for probably the last 16 or 17 years out as, as of this recording there, a lot of colleges and universities use it across their websites already. And then in the last year and a half or so, we.

[00:09:37] Joel Goodman: We've built on this conversational AI layer that allows your website visitors to ask a question to the search. It uses those same search results that that are, are traditional, you know, traditional like link based search engine uses, and then summarizes those and gives those answers similar to what you'd get out of, out of, a Google AI search or something like that.

[00:09:57] Joel Goodman: And it's completely, CMS agnostic, so. Yeah, we have a full CMS and A DXP that it integrates with and, and provides you some other features. But even if you're on a Drupal site or a WordPress site or you know, another proprietary CMS out there, you can still put this in place and it'll index all your content actually from any source that you have.

[00:10:17] Joel Goodman: And then you can build custom chat interfaces to allow. Excuse me. Build custom chat interfaces to allow people to ask those questions to your content and get proper answers back.

[00:10:30] Cheryl Broom: That's great. Now they're getting the same experience on your site that they're getting in the search engines. Right? They're getting a summary based. They're able to ask questions the way they wanna ask, get a summary response, and then maybe other links that are relevant.

[00:10:44] Joel Goodman: Exactly, and, and you have full control over where it answers questions. So if there are certain things that you know, a lot, a lot of, a lot of states have specific guidelines over how say tuition information is presented or, or, or financial aid information is, is presented. You can just turn it off so that the AI doesn't touch that at all, and you can have it just.

[00:11:05] Joel Goodman: Bring back those, those links for you so you, you get a deep control over where the AI is actually answering things. And then on top of that, we have checks in the background that are making sure that every answer that the AI does bring back to a user is coming from your content. It's not making anything up, it's reducing those hallucinations or getting rid of them entirely because it's built on your content with those checks in place in the background.

[00:11:30] Cheryl Broom: Okay, so this is why I had you on this Quick Take. So I'm excited about this. I think it's such a great solution for colleges. So I think we answered why does the Google solution currently on a lot of sites, not function as well. And you touched on kind of things you can do outside of fixing, fixing search, like concentrating on your content, cleaning things up.

[00:11:54] Cheryl Broom: But really, I mean, if you really want to fix the problem, it sounds like looking at a paid solution that actually is founded or used in 2026 might be the way you know the way to go.

[00:12:07] Joel Goodman: Yeah. And, and I think it's, you know, it's a really big job to take care of all of the, the content side of it, right? And so if you can find a solution that allow, that helps you figure out what content needs to be updated, what content's good, prioritizes that stuff for you, and then can help you move towards a really good search interface and, and bringing in those, those AI patterns that people are getting used to across other search engines.

[00:12:33] Joel Goodman: Yeah, it costs a little bit of money, but it's definitely going to save you a lot of time on the backend. And it has so many better effects or so many improved effects across your entire website. It's not just the search, it's actually the full user experience up and down your content.

[00:12:49] Cheryl Broom: Well this is for another, another podcast or another quick take. But what I'm excited about in this kind of age of AI. Is, I feel like content has taken a backseat for, for a while and we've been focused on tools and I'm like, content's really important again.

[00:13:04] Joel Goodman: It is, and I mean, content's still king, even if we forgot about it for a while, like content's still king. And it, it really does, it really does matter. It matters to the regular people that show up on your website that wanna find out, you know, if you offer an academic program that, you know, that they're interested in or just want to figure out how to, how to pay for, how to pay for school.

[00:13:27] Joel Goodman: And it matters to all the, the new robots that we have to, that we have to entertain. Now, across the internet, it matters to all the AI. So if you, if you improve your content, it's going to make all those things better.

[00:13:39] Cheryl Broom: Well, Joel, thank you so much for joining me today and if people have questions for you, how do they get ahold of you? We're can they go

[00:13:45] Joel Goodman: Yeah, you could visit squiz.net. You can email me at jGoodman@squiz.net or find me on LinkedIn. I am Joel Goodman. You'll just search me. You'll find it. I'm pretty, pretty, pretty into the higher ed scene, so you'll find me there.

[00:13:59] Cheryl Broom: Great. Well thank you so much. I really appreciate you, coming on and lending your expertise.

[00:14:04] Joel Goodman: Yeah. Thanks Cheryl. This is a lot of fun.