If your site has an internal search engine, it might be time to do some mind-reading. Search keywords reveal your visitors’ intentions, which is quite possibly the best way to understand why your site succeeded or failed at meeting their needs. You’ve probably looked at the top keywords that bring visitors to your site from external search engines, but your site’s own search engine can be especially valuable -- 

-- because you can focus on visitors who engaged with your site long enough to seek out their desired content.

Most visitors will first attempt to find what they’re looking for via your site navigation. They’ll only resort to using your internal search function if they can’t find what they need. Thus, this can be a great place to see where you’re attracting visitors but possibly falling short on delivering what they want.

Do you have “the gift”?

Your site search keywords may not automatically appear in your Web analytics data, but it’s not terribly difficult to configure. Some sites pass the keyword right in the URL - to determine if your site does this, submit a search on your site and look at the address bar on the search results page. If your keyword appears in the URL (see example below), configuration of internal search in Lyris' ClickTracks is a breeze.

Example: http://www.yoursite.com/searchresults.php?q=your%20search%20term

1) Go to the “Data Dissection Report”

2) Click “Add…”

3) Enter a name for your report (i.e. Search Results)

4) Under “Show values for the” select “URL parameter”

5) Select the parameter containing the search term (“q” in my example above) from the drop down box.

If your search term doesn’t appear in the URL of your search results page, you’ll have to implement javascript on that page in order to collect the term as a custom variable. Talk to your account manager about some professional services to help you with this.

What do you do with this data?

First, look for keywords that are related to important content on your site. If the visitor had to resort to using search to find this key content, your navigation might not have been clear enough.

Also look for keywords that aren’t applicable to your site. Some of these terms might simply indicate that the visitors weren’t well targeted for your site, which can help you tweak your pay-per-click campaigns. Others might reveal opportunities for additional products or content that could be appealing to your visitors.

It can be especially helpful to view the keywords in terms of quality. The Data Dissection Report allows you to sort by metrics such as Average Time on Site, Goals Reached, Conversion Rate or Revenue, depending on your configuration. I also like to create an advanced segment based on visitors who exited from the internal search results page - in theory, most of these visitors couldn’t find what they wanted and left.

The beauty of the psychic ability of your Web site’s search engine is that it doesn’t just enable you to see the future - it helps you to improve it.

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