Avinash Kaushik just did a great post on Internal Site Search traffic - the often neglected or overlooked sister of Internet Search traffic.
"As websites have become complex (just look at amazon’s home page) an increasing amount of site users are jumping to the site search box and using that to find what they want. Internal site search usage numbers are hard to come by but in a simple google search for metrics seems to indicate around 10% as typical (YMMV). "
I've seen numbers both lower and much higher than 10% of a site's visitors use site search. I think many people don't know how to use the data from site search. Also, some of my clients who should collect site search data (ie: house plan architects - typically don't collect the data from floor plan searches but really should).
"The key insight is that most searchers are looking for generic things (think for example “category terms”) in google or yahoo or msn to locate a relevant site. But once they are on the website they are looking for something specific. "
Correct. While you might look for a printer driver on Google, your more likely to type in the exact part number in the site search box.
"If you use Click Density / Site Overlay you already know that it is difficult to find a feature (or even the dreaded “path”) that is used by 10% of your site traffic. Yet internal search is a feature that is being used by 10% or more of your site traffic. This is a gift from God for a site owner because you just analyze this one things, optimize results / content and you have a huge winner on your hand.
That's a good point! I had not looked at it that way before but it makes sense that site search is a direct clickstream overlay of the searcher's intent on your site - why not use it?
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Atleast on a weekly basis review the top 25 key phrases from your internal search report (you could look for more, just look for where numbers fall off a cliff, usually after the top 20 – 25). You are looking for interesting and surprising key phrases (to solve for the above two examples, are there key phrases for content that you actually have prominently displayed and key phrases that surprise you i.e. content you don’t have).
- ClickTracks has a feature (perhaps others do as well) where you can do click density / site overlay on search results. This is magnificent because now you can see if customers think you are serving up relevant results (as opposed us the proud site owners thinking that).
Have a goal that for your internal site search should be so good that most of the click density should be clustered on the top five search results links and no one should click Next Page (shoot for the moon I say : )).
- If you have the GSA the it will allow you to create synonyms and best bets. Use these features for atleast your top 25 key phrases. Then use the Click Density to see if people are clicking on your best bets, if not optimize.
- Measure conversion rate (if you sell something) and customer satisfaction & task completion rates for internal site search users (something like ForeSee/ACSI, see Disclaimers & Disclosures).
The hypothesis is: relevant search results = faster access to relevant data = higher customer satisfaction and task completion rates = higher conversion = more money = higher bonus for you in your annual employee review.
These are all important things to do - and in fact, we need to do more of this for some of my clients. Thanks Avinash!
And I love this point Avinash makes:
"Life Lesson: You can put the greatest tool on earth, Google, on your website but if your websites are sub-optimal (url structures, content key words, missing meta tags and best bets) then all GSA will enable on your website is your customers finding crap much faster than before you implemented the GSA."
Garbage in - Garbage out.
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