As websites have become complex (take Amazon which has millions of pages) users will use the internal search tool to find what they want. Internal search usage numbers are easy to retrieve using Google Analytics Site Search tool combined with Google’s Custom Search Engine (CSE).
This shows the statistics from the site search report in Google Analytics.
The CSE will index 100% of the sites content if provided via an XML feed (Google has 2 indexes, 1 for regular search and one for its Custom Search Engines). This was the easiest way to gather user search data and didn’t involve developing a search function. The benefit of using the CSE is the results are algorithmically generated not just a simple SQL query based search, this results in far better targeted results.
Site Search is of great value to copywriters and web masters. Being able to understand the user when engineering information architecture is a crucial step in the future success of a website and one of those steps is analysing Site Search.
The data is usually quite difficult to come by as the information contains sensitive business information. If you have a similar website in the same market, this insight gave an understanding of what the user expected to see from the Mumbles.co.uk brand. Based on those results determined the information architecture for the new Citys.info internet franchise and what order to put on channels i.e. Hotels, Restaurants, Bars, and Beaches. Instead of offering content which the user might not have wanted to read by understanding the site search results it gave a voice to the user. By further analysing site search data, it will give good content suggestions which otherwise might not have been thought of. This is effectively a vertical search marketing and content suggestion tool in the hands of every webmaster.
