The goal of most every sound Search Engine Optimization campaign is to attract more quality traffic to their website. In business it is truly a numbers game so attracting only visitors who are actively seeking what you provide ensures the greater likelihood these ‘window shoppers’ will convert to customers. So what truly attracts a potential buyer to your site? The possibility of your site delivering a quality customer experience. Okay…what is that and how is it measured?
What search engine gurus say about quality is that it must be measurable. Some of its key factors have long been the bounce rate, number of site pages viewed and ultimately, sales, opt-ins generated and conversions. More recently particularly for eCommerce sites, is the visitors’ immediate use of the site search feature. Using it may mean these visitors are looking to buy, that your site content’s relevancy appealed to them and encouraged them to dig deeper to find what they wanted.
By collecting the number of site search terms and the number of times these have been utilized over a given period, this data can be used to benefit the user experience as well as to define which areas of the site are well optimized and which may need additional work. For example, if your business sells sewing machines and a large number of site visitors are looking to have their machines repaired, your site content may need adjustment so you attract only those who want to buy a machine. Of course if you see the silver lining, you may have a form on your site to capture user data such as emails and contact them about buying a new machine over repairing an outdated older model.
Additional Site Search Benefits
Lastly a great takeaway for improving rankings is to use site search to identify keywords/pages that are ‘stuck’ on the second and third pages of search engines that are ripe to be optimized onto the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). You may even discover, via the number of searches for a non-primary term, a page ready for the opportunity to rank well for your site and ultimately increase your ROI.
