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How to Gain Keyword Insight from Searches within Your Site

Search keywords express the intent of the user in a wonderful way -- an aspect of online marketing ROI I'm passionate about.

Missing Valuable Search Keywords

When you look at the search keywords report from Google Analytics, for example, it only shows the keywords that actually brought people to your site. It doesn't show you the search words that didn't result in people getting to your site -- that could have brought to traffic if you had only known.

In other words, the top keywords report is a reflection of the keywords you have chosen, and not a true representation of the broader activity taking place on the search engine. To a statistician, this is known as "sample bias."

Site Search

One way to discover some of the keywords you may be missing is to study searches done using your onsite search feature. Users type what they want and you get to capture and analyze every aspect of that intent. It's an incredibly rich source of data you can use to expand your paid search / SEO efforts and capture more visitors and strong intent.

The quality of data from onsite search is so good that many people add a site search capability simply to get their hands on this view of user intent.

Add Site Search to Google Analytics

Most web analytics tools have the ability to track site searches -- and of course Google Analytics does it really well. It's easy to setup – all you need do is plug in the name of the parameter that is used by your site search and get the Google Analytics script deployed in the site search HTML. Here's how you get it done:

1. Put the Google Analytics JavaScript code into the search results page. Chances are your search box appears on every page of the site, but it's actually the results page you need to be careful of. Many site developers forget this page because it doesn't live within the main content directories.
   
   It's also possible your site search is actually hosted by someone else entirely. Google, for example, offers Google Site Search (www.google.com/sitesearch/) that they host for you. In this case, insert the JavaScript into the custom template field in Google Site Search that permits you to customize the look and feel of the search pages.
    

2. Configure Google Analytics to look for the specific variable name your site search uses. In some site search systems you'll find a large number of variables that do all kinds of different things, so it's not obvious which one to configure within Google Analytics. The trick is to try a search yourself, using a distinctive keyword (I often search for "rhubarb."). Look carefully at the results page URL and you're likely to find the variable "keywords=rhubarb," or something similar.
   
   In Google Analytics at the "analytics settings" page, and click "edit" on the settings for the profile. Scroll down and you'll see the site search configuration dialog:
   

   For many sites, that's all you need to do. Wait a day or two and start looking at the site search keywords people are entering.

Warning: sometimes the keywords you see in the reports are obviously wrong or very surprising. This can happen when the site search is being used for something other than search or the configuration has been done incorrectly. For more on fixing site search see a companion article: "How to Fix Problems with Google Analytics Site Search Data"

As you begin to mine your site search for these keywords, you'll being to get better results with your Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. It's free keyword research that your customers do for you.

John Marshall is co-founder of MarketMotive.com, a company that uses top experts to train clients in Internet marketing best practices and provides consulting for strategy and implementation.