Using search analysis to improve your site.

Running user surveys and interviews are good ways of finding out what your users want, but they might not give you the whole picture. People can’t always say exactly what it is that would make a site and its content more usable. Furthermore, what a user wants and what a user needs might not be the same thing!

Analysing search patterns and results on your site is a great way of studying user behaviour which can give you different insights into how your site and its content could be improved to better meet their needs, as well as how you can optimise the internal search on your site.

It’s nothing to sniff at: users are becoming very comfortable and very proficient at using search engines, both on the web (using search engines such as Google) and internally (using your site’s search function). So the better your search works, well, the better.

Questions to ask

For example, you could track the below to come up with some useful information:

What are the searches that are most often queried?

• This can tell you what content your users expect to find, and the content that they think is the most valuable — and therefore should be prominent and easily located. It can also give you clues to which content is not being easily found through browsing and navigating, so that users are having to search for it.

What are the most common results for those searches?

• And are those common results also quality results? Are users landing on the pages and content that they should be, considering their queries?

Are there any common queries which don’t receive results?

• This gives you a clear indication of where you can improve your site!

What are the pages on which people frequently use the search function?

• This could show you where users give up on browsing and start searching instead — and how users are navigating through your site in their hunt for what they want.

Actions to take

With the results of your analysis, you can make changes to improve usability and optimise the search. This might include:

Setting up best bets.

• Best bets are manually selected “best” results that you can set up to appear for certain common searches, thereby ensuring that your users with particular queries will always be able to locate the best content.

Renaming obscure navigation to make it clearer.

• Site search analysis could tell you if your users are searching for something which is already on the navigation!

Modifying how your search results appear.

• Ensuring that your results are giving your users enough information about each option, so they can select the most appropriate for their query. This might be ensuring that the results show pages within the site structure (e.g., with a breadcrumbs trail), or ensuring that enough descriptive text appears for each result.

Implementing sign posts to key content on key pages.

• You can ensure the right call to actions are appearing on pages where users commonly use the search engine.