Search Keyword Analysis – A simple technique for improving online customer experience by Hurol Inan
Analysis of the keywords that your customers use to search your website may reveal its shortcomings that could be difficult to uncover with other analysis techniques. And these shortcomings adversely affect the online customer experience but fixing them is often simple. In this article, simple techniques for analysing search keywords are provided. An advance warning that you do require some database skills.
To start with, two examples are provided below to give you a sense of the sort of discoveries that you should expect to make as a result of search keyword analysis.
On an Australian Federal Government website, we have discovered that one of the most frequently searched terms was not even in this department’s portfolio, hence the website offered no relevant content. Many visitors faced with unsuccessful search results have sent emails to the customer service department to deal with irrelevant enquiries. Our solution was simple - a new page to inform the users that the department did not deal with this matter providing a link for the correct department.
On a major professional services firm’s website, the analysis revealed that a great majority of people searched for office details. The fix was simple, including office phone numbers on the page footers.
Without the aid of a commercial product, I perform the search keyword analysis by uploading the search log files into a database (such as MS Access).
For analysis to be effective you would need search log files for at least a week, preferably longer period of times. Most commercial search engine products such as ISYS, Verity K2, Ultraseek, Autonomy produce log files in a similar fashion to web servers. They log the user’s IP address, timestamp of the search, search term used and the number of hits in search results.
After uploading the search log files into a table created in your choice of database with the same field definitions, you can analyse them in the following ways:
*Analysis of Top Search Terms
Using query capabilities of your database, create a report that lists top 50 terms that have been most frequently searched for along with the number of hits in their search results. Although it is advisable to go through each one of these terms by repeating the searches by yourself on your website to see how satisfied you are with the results, you should focus on very high and very low hit search terms first. Very low hit search terms may indicate shortage or even the lack of relevant content while very high hit search terms bringing far too many search results than that might be desirable by the user.
*Analysis of Lowest Hit Search Terms
To pick up the low hit search terms that were frequently used but missed by the top search terms analysis, query your database table by grouping search terms in terms of occurrence and sorting it to identify the lowest 20 hit search terms out of a larger group of top search terms such as 200. Again go through these search terms individually what your visitors are looking for and how well your website is responding. You will notice that you won’t need to do anything about many of the terms but there will be terms that you will want to improve their search results. Various problems may present themselves here. For example, an important page that should be displayed is not picked up by your search engine due to the lack of or infrequent of use of the search keyword on the page content.
*Single Keyword Analysis
You will notice that many of terms used to search your website are composite words or phrases. With the reports discussed above, we looked at how well your search engine respond to exact terms. And these analysis may be skewed due to slight differences in terms. So it may be useful to decompose search terms into single words and analyse frequently occurring words. To decompose the search terms, I simply upload the log files into a temporary table with space as a field delimiter for the search terms – eliminating the need for writing a script program to do this.
*Search Context Analysis
For more advanced analysis, you may want to understand the context of the searches through classification of search terms. This analysis would reveal the concentration of searches by relevant segments of the website and may assist you in determining where to focus your new content development. Considering the size of log files, it could be a major undertaking to map each search term to a context area. But remember website analysis is not an exact science. A simple approach with relatively high degree of accuracy would suffice in most instances. Going back to the classification discussion, visually examine the search terms to see if you can spot frequent occurrence of keywords used, create a new field in your table for context, and make global updates to your database table. For instance, words such as careers, hr, human resources, employment, positions, vacancies, appointments, etc can all be grouped under employment.
*Analysis of Search Term Errors
As part of the classification exercise described in Search Context Analysis, it is also advisable to classify errors so that you can device techniques to minimise them. The nature of errors might be various but common types are hitting the search button without entering a keyword, misspellings, mistakes in using notations such as + and -. After examination of frequently occurring errors you may figure out some ways of dealing with them. For instance, modifying the search help text, associating frequently misspelled words to their content items, etc.
*Analysis of Search Terms by User Segments
Another analysis may involve examining search terms by major user segments. For instance, the searches conducted by internal users, business partners, major customers due to their familiarity with your services and website may differ significantly from that of a prospect, a job seeker or a researcher. Based on their IP addresses, well known user segments might be easily isolated to conduct this analysis. Service priorities placed on user segments may make you favour certain ones such as your customers or business partners, and you may want to optimise your search engine performance for these segments first.
As you would have gathered, the search term analysis would require a reasonable amount of effort to perform. First three techniques mentioned can be done relatively quickly but you should allow more time for the last three. In most cases, a few days would be enough for a comprehensive analysis.
The frequency in which you may want to repeat the same analysis depends on the outcomes of your first analysis and the importance of the role your website plays for your business. If you have discovered shortcomings and actioned them, you would want to repeat the analysis to determine how effective the changes you have introduced have been. Although for most businesses a bi-monthly or quarterly analysis would suffice, you would want to perform it more frequently if you are interested in trends in search usage and if your website is an integral part of your business and integrates with your core processes such as sales and fulfilment.
