Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers
Louis Rosenfeld
Copyright © 2011
Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers
By Louis Rosenfeld
Rosenfeld Media, LLC
457 Third Street, #4R
Brooklyn, New York
11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com Please send errors to: [email protected]
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld
Developmental Editor: Stephanie Zhong
Managing Editor: Marta Justak
Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster
Cover Design: The Heads of State
Indexer: Nancy Guenther
Proofreader: Chuck Hutchinson
All Rights Reserved
ISBN: 1-933820-04-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-04-0
LCCN: 2011907226
Dedication
To Mary Jean, Iris, and Nate, who generously gave me the time to write this book.
And to my mother and father, whose talents at cheating time I hope to emulate.
How to Use This Book
Who Should Read This Book?
I wrote this book primarily for user experience practitioners—the people who are responsible for a Web site or intranet’s information architecture, content strategy, design, usability, and just about anything else that impacts a site’s users. I especially wanted to help those practitioners see how analyzing searchers’ behaviors is just another critical tool, like task analysis, personas, and field studies, that belongs in their user research toolkits.
There are also many people in the web analytics community who haven’t turned their attention toward analyzing and improving site search. SSA belongs in their toolkit, so this book is for web analytics practitioners as well.
Honestly, if your Web site or intranet has its own search engine, then you should find something here that’s worth at least the price of the book.
What’s in This Book?
If you’re new to SSA, read the first two chapters: they consist of a case study that demonstrates how SSA made a difference at The Vanguard Group and a quick one-chapter introduction to get you up and running.
If you’re ready to jump right in, the second section is full of tools and approaches to help you get the most out of analyzing your query data. Chapter 3–Chapter 6 will be especially helpful if you want to gain new insights from your data. Chapter 7 will help you use the data to measure how well your site is performing against the goals you’ve already determined for it.
The third section introduces some of the very practical ways to improve your search system’s performance, as well as your site’s navigation, metadata, and content. You can start trying—and benefiting from—many of these tips right away.
The last chapter takes a step back from site search analytics and looks at how its parent disciplines—user experience and web analytics—differ and ultimately complement each other in a surprisingly elegant way. If you’re looking to bridge these disciplines within your own organization, this chapter provides advice, and I hope some inspiration. Spoiler alert: SSA might be just the thing to bring the two of them together.
Section Four: Coda
What Comes with this Book?
This book’s companion Web site (
Frequently Asked Questions
What is site search analytics (SSA)?
If your Web site or intranet has a search engine, then you can log what users are searching for, tally queries to see what’s most important to your users, find out if they’re succeeding, and if they’re not, determine what might be getting in their way. Chapter 2 provides a short introduction to SSA (which is often also known as search log analysis).
Isn’t SSA the same as SEO?
Not at all. Search engine optimization looks for ways to make Web-wide searches (for example, via Google and Bing) more likely to find your site. SSA looks for ways to improve how searching works on your site, using your site’s own search engine. That said, SSA and SEO share much in common, and can influence each other; for example, How Granular Are Your Terms?-Figure 5-10 shows how SSA may help you determine better keywords to bid on.