The saying goes, “waste not want not.” It’s totally applicable to a digital age and in this case we can aim its usefulness at website visitors and their data clues. Don’t waste them when you can put them to good use to enhance your content development plan.
Your marketing team could fail to capitalize on this prized digital marketing tool – site search. A treasure trove of information remains about your customers based on what they search for on your website. Evaluation of this data and putting tools in place to improve the website experience and convert more visitors into leads, customers and sales is essentially a top aspect of an online marketers’ job. Here’s some help on how to get started.
Defining Site Search
Site search functionality permits website visitors to search for material by entering their keywords and phrases. This allows them to go directly to information on your site, which is often faster than browsing through the site navigation. Google Analytics reporting provides a site search report within the behavior report that allows webmasters and marketers to understand how visitors search for content on your site.
The site search report provides invaluable insights about website visitors including:
- Visit duration after a search
- Percentage of users exiting your site after performing a search
- Search terms visitors enter searching for content on your site
- Destination pages viewed after a search
- Search pages from which they initiated a search
Here is an example of a Google Analytics site search report by category:
You can access the site search report by enabling site search in the Google Analytics view settings.
Making Use of Site Search Insights
Elevate Content on Your Home Page
It is absolutely critical that your home page is outlined with what your visitors are expecting to see. Categorize what are already the most popular site search terms and then align your home page with content that is similar to these searches and include the most common site search keywords. This will increase organic rank, enhance traffic and absorb prospects by delivering the information they want.
Your site search data could indicate that website visitors are searching for specific products or services so make sure it is easy for people to find from the home page. You might implement a noticeable link to make it easier for users to navigate directly to the product or solution page.
Identify Other Content Requirements
Internal site search data should allow your team to identify topics that are important to your customers. From there, they should refine your website and content plan to meet your target audience’s needs and requirements. Precisely, a site search analysis permits you to identify content gaps and generate content distinctly related to topics that are of most interest to visitors. This information can help you prioritize your website improvement plan and justify the creation of additional content specifically related to support those topics.
Analyzing Site Search Data
Your marketing team should have a plan to develop site search custom reports. Creating a custom report with the following metrics is not only smart but easy:
- Medium: channel the visitor came from
- Landing page: webpage visitor landed on
- Search page: page where they initiated their site search
- Search term: search query they entered
- Search destination page: page visited after they performed a site search
- Total unique searches: number of unique searches performed for this search term
A custom report that serves as a site search funnel to show how visitors who perform site search flow through your website is a good start. Here is an example of a site search user journey.
Embrace and Use Visitor Content Clues
Website visitors are leaving plenty of insightful clues for you via site search data. Utilizing this trail of breadcrumbs to understand more about your customers’ habits, wants and needs can serve to improve the overall website experience. Never miss out on one of the most intuitive and fundamental tools at your fingertips: Site Search!