Do you have the content your visitors are looking for?

If you have an internal site search system (if you don’t you should), it will be fairly easy for you to determine what your visitors are looking for. Using the statistics from your sites internal search can help you determine many different things, today I thought we would cover a few to show off the power of having internal site search and why you should see what your visitors are looking for.

If you have internal site search but no way of tracking what your visitors are searching for with it, don’t worry as long as you have the ability to add third party analytics tracking code to your pages you should be able to figure out what your visitors are searching for and if your website is delivering.

Step 1. Understand what your visitors are searching for

The first thing you need to do is find out what your visitors are searching for, this is easily done by logging the keywords they use when searching your site. If you are using an analytics program to do this tracking you could also easily figure out how many people are actually using your sites internal search system. Depending on what type of a site you are running, you would be able to use this later method to determine it your sites navigation is working as it should or if it’s broken. That is if a high number of your visitors are using your sites search to all find the same thing, maybe this is something you should move into a navigation menu so your visitors would be able to easily click through to that particular page on your site.

(By the way I would suggest using the analytics method of tracking your sites searches, or if possible a combination of both. Both would be ideal as some searches might not get picked up from users without JavaScript support, where as  backend search logging system would log every search that went through the system.)

Step 2. What pages are your visitors searching from?

As we all know by now, most visitors to your website don’t start at the home page. They start from whatever page there keyword search sent them to, which leaves to question which pages are your visitors searching from? Not very many Content Management Systems have logging for something like this, so you will probably need analytics installed on your sites pages to track such metrics.

Once you understand (know) what pages your visitors are searching from, you can determine, what brought them to your site in the first place and whether or not you could improve the page in which they landed on. As mentioned about maybe you could change the navigation to help your visitors easily find what they are looking for, or you may want to conduct some split testing for a few of the offending pages to see if you could improve visitor satisfaction without them having to conduct searches on your site.

Step 3. How good does your internal search work?

Does your internal site search return relevant results for your visitors, or do they become frustrated and leave your site? You can determine this by tracking your visitors bounce rate from your sites internal search.

You already know what your visitors are searching for, but are they finding what there are looking for? By tracking their bounce rate from your search results you will be able to determine whether or not your visitors are finding what they are looking for.

Once you have found the terms which have the highest bounce rate, it’s time to figure out why this is so. First check out the search results for yourself, are the results relevant or maybe the content in which they are looking for doesn’t exist on your site. In the first case it should be high on your priority list to improve your sites search system so that it returns the most relevant results to the users queries. In the later case, is the content your visitors are looking for relevant to your site? If so, you should probably considered adding it to fill the hole, and keep your visitors satisfied and on your site longer.

In the worst case scenario the above three steps may not be the easiest implement on your website, but it will be well worth it in the end. Keeping visitors on your site longer gives you that much more of a chance and time to make the sale.