Site Search—Capturing and Using the Second Term

Your site search provides a rich idea of what your website encompasses. It can be thought of as a navigational tool, providing an index of all the pages on your site and how they are related. Further, as we have seen, you can track referring search terms and follow-up site search terms to get a better idea of what visitors to your site are really looking for. Knowing this, you can get into more sophisticated uses of your data. If you can track what terms brought a person to your site, you can apply a secondary search against your site search engine and return the results dynamically in your web page, to further aid your user in navigating your site (as well as correlating this data against the other related searches people have performed on your site). That is, you can basically create a section on a page that shows what other users thought was relevant or related to the landing page. You can also use site search data to refine faceted navigation elements on your site. Amazon and Google are very effective examples of this: both provide a spot where correlated or related searches are presented to the user.

Offering up related searches can provide a more predictive path through your site. Providing refinements (facets) based on data you have already collected can also help you retain users, by ensuring that you return results you know to be relevant. While developing these sorts of real-time applications that utilize your site statistics is beyond the scope of this book, this example illustrates how you can move from using data from search in a reactionary manner to providing a real-time service to your end users. All the user engagement information you need is already available based on site search and SEO traffic and terms.

If you can track what terms brought a person to your site, you can apply a secondary search against your site search engine and return the results dynamically in your web page, to further aid your user in navigating your site (as well as correlating this data against the other related searches people have performed on your site). That is, you can basically create a section on a page that shows what other users thought was relevant or related to the landing page.

Establishing real-time applications that draw upon your search analytics data unleashes the power of the information you have been collecting. You can use this data everywhere from your home page, through to articles, to products. Integrating search data into your site to provide navigation points dynamically uses the voice of your customer to build data elements and can provide relevant links between your content that you may never have thought of.

You will begin to see that everything we have been tracking through SEO and paid search can provide data points to apply to your site search. You can even take SEO and paid search queries and track their pathing through your site to further aid in optimizing your site search algorithm. Providing a set of related searches, as well as a set of results that show that people who looked at page “A” also looked at page “B,” may further improve the usability of your site. These are again all features that will require A/B or multivariate testing on your end, but they are also features that can be enabled through the data you have collected.

Source of Information : MASTERING SEARCH ANALYTICS MEASURING SEO, SEM AND SITE SEARCH

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