On-site search analysis can provide valuable insight into your customer’s mind. Your internal search logs essentially provide you with a report of exactly what your customers want now and on the horizon. SEOs have used this data for years, but any savvy business owner can use this data to develop better marketing campaigns and gain perspective on the market. Several gems are available if you take the time to dig into your on-site search, and I have listed a few of those to get the right side of your brain churning.
New Business Development
Paying attention to what your customer’s are searching for can lead to valuable business insights. If your customers are looking to you for a service or product, then you have an opportunity to give them what they want and make money in the process. In a former life, it was our job to sell consumer electronics such to customers across the web. People came to our site seeking everything from televisions to washing machines. Unfortunately for them, we did not sell the latter end of that spectrum. We essentially closed the door to those who searched for washing machines or any other of the many large appliances they wanted forcing them to find somewhere else to make their purchase. With over 30,000 searches on our site for various large appliances in a given month, this market was waiting to be tapped. By using on-site search data, we were able to aid our new business development team in their quest to develop a business case to bring in this new product category. A couple months later, our web development team had it’s first meeting to discuss the plan to put our first large appliance assortment on the web!
Paid Search Gap Analysis
Your internal search data is a great place to look for key search terms that you might be missing out on. If your customers are continuously looking for a product with a particular technology or referring to a product with a slang term that you hadn’t thought of, odds are there is an opportunity to bring new customers to your site with those terms as well. For example, when I heard the term ipod ’skins’, I always assumed people were referring backgrounds that you can put on your ipod screen. I decided to do some research after noticing it in the internal search logs. It turned out that this was slang for ipod covers, and I was missing out on a huge opportunity for paid search. And of course, rerouting these internal searches to a landing page with iPod covers wouldn’t hurt conversion either 
Blog and Forum Content Development
What are your customers most interested in? Odds are it lies in your top internal search results. Pay close attention to what your customers are most excited about and create articles and content that will excite them. If searches on a new technology start to spike, this is a great time to learn and speculate about this product with your audience. Providing them with a forum and a knowledgeable moderator can build excitement on your site for it’s arrival. Well-written blogs on the advances this technology offers over the previous version can help cement their decision to buy this from you, as well. As always, search engines love unique content such as this, so make sure these blogs are keyword rich so that you can maximize traffic and ultimately conversion.
Optimizing the Link Juice on Your Homepage
Your top on-site searches can also help you make the most of your home page. If your customers are looking to your website to provide them with particular products or services, why not improve the SEO by putting them on the homepage? Most webpages contain their highest rankings on the homepage, so it is very important that you think strategically about what links you place here. As a warning, we tested putting the top products on our homepage, and it was an absolute failure from a usability perspective. Users didn’t click on it and it cluttered the home page above the fold. However, that doesn’t mean that benefits weren’t extracted from this experiment. By simplifying the format and putting it at the bottom of the page, we were able to capitalize on search engine traffic while satisfying our usability team. We did some keyword research to come up with the most searched for anchor text and watched the rankings for our most popular product sellers rise!
0 Responses to “Analyzing On-site Search Data”