You may have noticed when searching for certain sites that have a built in search, the search box appears along with sitelinks on a Google SERP. Now, Google has updated these search boxes in three ways:

• The search box now appears above the sitelinks, as opposed to below as was before.
• The search box now features auto-complete queries.
• When using the correct markup, it will send users directly to your site’s search pages.

How do I get my site to show a search box on a SERP?

 
If your site has a site-specific search engine then you can markup your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite. According to Google: “You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, you can let us know by marking up your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of the schema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details on our developer site.”

By adding this markup on your site, your users can go to your site directly from the search box in the SERP. If Google doesn’t find the markup, then they will simply show a Google SERP (relating to your site) for the query, as has been done until now.

Does your site have a built in search engine? It’s time to add that markup.

About The Author

Shiri brings her knowledge in online marketing and social media, among other things to the Rank Ranger team. She’s excited to be a Ranger and looks forward to wearing the ranger hat and getting her sheriff’s badge in the SEO force.