Track On-Site Search to Improve Keywords & Usability

We all know that keyword research is the foundation of successful industrial search engine marketing. However, we also know that the tools we use to predict the volume of keyword searches don’t always give us the most accurate results. Especially in the industrial and B2B markets, where industry terminology can conflict with popular culture, finding the right keywords can be a daunting task.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see exactly what keywords YOUR customers use to find your products? Good news – if you have an internal site search and a Google Analytics account, you can!

All you need to do is go to your Google Analytics account, then edit your profile settings for “Site Search” to “Do Track Site Search” and input the Query Parameters your site search uses. (See instructions here. )

Once you’ve done that, you can gather a pile of useful information:

Keywords: Not surprisingly, with industrial websites, we see a lot of searches based on part numbers. But we also see general terms and long tail terms that we can add to our list of keywords to focus on.

Visitors: You can see what percentage of your visitors is using your site search, if they exited after using your site search, if they refined their search, and even if they converted.

Want to get really geeky? Then set up an advanced segment for visits using site search and you can pull some really fun numbers. I like to use it to see what traffic sources and keywords brought those site search users to my clients’ websites.

Site search tracking is a great resource to give you direction to improve both SEO and Usability – 2 of my favorite things!

For example, on one client website, part numbers are definitely the majority of the search terms. The bulk of the visits are returning visitors coming from direct entries, and from Google searches of the company name. Looks like our current clients are big fans of our site search and are using it regularly. Now we can start tweaking the site search to improve usability and increase conversions.

On another client site, we found some gems of keywords that didn’t look promising from search volume estimating tools, but had large numbers of on-site searches. Now we are optimizing for those keywords organically, and will be watching for increased traffic.

What have you learned from tracking on-site search?

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