Online Marketing Blog

Here on Online Marketing Blog, we post a tremendous amount of insight on organic  search optimization and content marketing related topics each month. But how about the site search tool on our own blog? Who’s searching for what, and why? And what are they finding?

Mining the site search report from Google Analytics can be very useful since it’s an indication of what our visitors want to read more of. Here are the six most popular site search terms for Online Marketing Blog including our favorite, “pirates”.

1. Facebook

With Facebook taking off as a top channel for social media marketing, it’s no wonder that them comes up as our leading search query. Just consider the recent numbers:

• Facebook boasts more than 400 million active users

Nitin Mangtani, Lead Product Manager at Google presented a sponsored session on converting your visitors to customers, specifically through the use of internal site searches.

Businesses spend a tremendous amount of time, resources, and capital on website development and online marketing initiatives.  Getting people to a site is a challenge in itself, but another key aspect is retaining those visitors and converting them into buyers or subscribers.

Google search has set a high bar for relevance, speed, and ease of use. Unfortunately most site searches don’t meet these high expectations: 85 percent don’t return what the user sought, and 80 percent of visitors will abandon a site if search functionality is poor (Jupiter Research).

One interesting service that I learned about today was a site search service called Collarity. They offer a site based search service that can display community-clustered search results based on previous users actions. The service can also deliver optimized ads with the search results allowing publishers another way to monetize content.

An example of an implementation can be found at the My Fox LA site. I think there are multiple stories to tell about this service, both from a user perspective and the site monetization angle. The results are different enough that I think it may take users some getting used to, but it certainly invokes interest as an alternative to the ineffective site search that exists on most web sites.

A group blog I write for on occassion is hosting a carnival of customer service and invited the group to contribute. This is a business blog directed towards small and medium sized businesses on issues ranging from legal considerations to SEO. The invite made me think about how SEO can affect a customer’s experience with a site and it’s brand.

The first thing that comes to mind is the persistent numbers of people that use search engines as a means of site navigation. I am still surprised when I look at client referrer logs and see how often domain names are used in the search box at the major search engines. For the most part, most on-site search functions are horrible and Google for example, does a much better job at helping users find specific content on a particular site.